What You Tolerate Becomes the Culture

There's a standard that you haven't enforced yet. You know exactly which one it is. Something happened and you saw it. You felt it. You knew what it meant. And then you made the quiet decision to just let it go. The behavior continued. Your standard softened. And every person who was in the room when it happened, they registered it. Even if no one said a word. And in that moment, the standard changed. Not the one you talk about, the one that actually governs your organization. And every person who witnessed it in that moment took note.

That quiet moment is more powerful than most leaders understand because in it the culture did not stay the same. It moved not towards the standard that you talk about. It moved away from it. And the distance between what you stand for and what you say and what you actually enforce is the most important measurement in your organization. You know, last episode we talked about communications and we ended with the question once you have had that conversation, what does it anchor to? What gives it weight after you leave the room?

This episode answers that it's the anchor to your standard. And whether your standard is real or just a statement, that's what today is about. Our host believes the greatest leadership principles ever written were never meant to stay on the pages of books. They were meant to be applied in real decisions, real conversations, and real moments of pressure. Because leadership isn't learned in theory, it's built in practice. This is where timeless leadership frameworks are broken down, translated, and executed in the real world. This is the leadership series.

Welcome back to the Jeffrey Scott Stanton podcast. This is the leadership series. Some of you are already leading. Some of you carry the title and everything that comes with that leadership title. Some of you may be stepping into leadership right now. And some of you may not have the title yet, but you're already the ones that people come to. You're the ones that the other agents watch. You're the ones that people measure themselves against whether you ask for it or not, whether you like it or not.

And this series is built for all three. If we haven't met yet, I am Jeffrey Scott Stanton, your coach, your consultant, and your adviser. Former executive vice president of learning development for Douglas Element Real Estate. I've spent my entire career building teams, developing leaders, helping salespeople, and working at scale in real estate and brokerage. My work focuses on behavioral strategy, learning design, and performance enablement, especially in high-paced, high stress, high stakes sales environments. The leadership series builds episode by episode. Each one sits on top of the episode that came before it.

If you're new here, I suggest you go back and start with episode one and listen from there. The journey we were on together is designed to be traveled in order. Before we go any further, I want to sincerely thank our founding partners, Wise Agent, The CE Shop, and Subi. These are companies built for professionals like you who are serious about growth and serious about building something that holds up over time. Now, into today's episode. Today's episode is inspired by the book Good to Great by Jim Collins.

One of the most fundamental books ever written on leadership and on greatness. Collins and his team spent five years studying what separated organizations that made the leap from good performance to genuinely great performance. And what they found out is not what most people expected. It wasn't a strategy. It's not charisma or timing or market conditions. It was discipline. Disciplined people making disciplined choices in a consistent direction over time. As always, this is not a book review. That's not what this podcast is about. This podcast is about applying those ideas from these fundamental books on leadership and what those applications look like in the real world

when you're leading real people and the standard you have to set is being tested on a daily basis. I want to start with something that's a little uncomfortable to look at directly because most leaders prefer not to look at it directly. In every organization, in every team, in every group of people being led, there are always two sets of standards operating at the same time. And they are the stated ones and they are the real ones. And almost always, almost always, they're never the same thing.

The stated standards are the ones that you can point to. They're what you say at your kickoff meetings. It's what's on your onboarding material. It's what's written on the wall. What have you communicated about how things work here, how things work in your organization, and what's expected, what matters. Those standards exist in language and they live in what gets written down and what gets talked about. The real standard exists somewhere else entirely. These standards exist in behavior and what actually gets tolerated and who gets held accountable and who does not.

And what happens or more importantly what does not happen when someone falls short of that. You know, here's a truth most leaders will never fully reckon with. The real standards always win. Always. No matter how clearly and no matter how often the stated standards are said, no matter how big they're written on the wall, the real ones always win. People are not reading your mission statement. They're reading you. Every day in small moments, they're updating their understanding of what the actual rules are and what the standards are.

We take our cues about what's acceptable, not from what we're told, but from what we observe and what we observe happening around us. what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, what gets addressed, and what gets quietly passed by. Your team and your people are doing this constantly, whether they are conscious of it or not, and they're adjusting their own behavior based upon what they observe, not what you're telling them, not what you're being told, not what's written on the wall. Now, here's what it looks like in practice.

A leader sets expectations. They're clear. These are the expectations. Respond to clients inquiries within two hours. It's communicated. It's documented. It's in the manual. Three of the biggest performers on this team, three of the biggest agents routinely take five or six hours to respond to a phone call. Nothing happens. No conversation, no follow-up, no consequences from the leader. Within a month or two, the entire team has silently renegotiated that standard to whatever feels reasonable for each person individually because they watched the gap between what you said and what actually was enforced.

and they drew the only rational conclusion available to them at the time. The standard does not actually mean what it says. The standard means nothing. Now, the discipline, the discipline of refusing to look away from that gap, the gap of what you say you stand for and what your behavior actually demonstrates is the real work of leadership. Most leaders believe in their standards sincerely. They communicate them clearly and then they look away when that behavior doesn't match those standards because closing a gap requires a real conversation that's usually quite uncomfortable.

When you choose comfort consistently over clarity is exactly what keeps organizations from becoming what they're capable of becoming. And what fills that gap almost every time is tolerance. And that's where we're going to go next. Tolerance. There's a phrase that I keep coming back to and it appeared in episode one. It appeared in episode two and that's for a reason. What you tolerate becomes the culture. What you tolerate becomes the standard. Not what you write down, not what you announce, but what you tolerate. This is called culture drift.

And what makes it so difficult to see in real time is that culture drift almost never feels dramatic when it's happening. It feels small. It feels reasonable. One exception was made because the timing was bad. one moment you told yourself you'll address it later, you never did. That one situation where the relationship felt more important than the standard you set. Each one of those decisions feels defensible on its own at its own time. But compounded over time, they are quietly rewriting the culture of the organization.

And one day you look up and the organization you're leading no longer reflects what you thought you were building. That moment, and I've watched it happen to leaders who generally cared. I've watched that happen to leaders who worked hard, who believed deeply in what they were doing. That realization is one of the loneliest realizations in leadership. And the problem is you cannot point to the one decision that caused it because it was hundreds of smaller ones, each of which felt like the right call, like the right decision at that time.

There's a wellstudied psychological mechanism behind why this happens, and it's called status quo bias. There's a natural tendency to prefer the current state of things over the discomfort of changing it. As leaders, this shows as a pull towards an action when standards are violated. You don't do anything. The situation is uncomfortable. The confrontation feels risky. And the mind looking for a way to reduce tension lands on this. Let it go this time. But the cost of that decision is invisible at the moment. The relief of avoiding that discomfort is immediate.

So we choose. And then we choose again and then we choose it again until the pattern becomes the culture because it's comfortable. Now culture is not built in kickoff speeches. It's not built in vision statements or the team names or the language you use in recruiting conversations. Culture is built in moments when something happens that should not and everyone waits to see what you, the leader, does. In those moments, the team is not learning what your standard is. They already know what you say it is.

They're learning whether it is real or not. Let me make this concrete. Every Monday morning, there's a team meeting. The expectation is clear. Everyone shows up on time, prepared, and present. One of the most respected, longten people on your team, high producer. They start to arrive 10 minutes late every week. You notice, everyone in the room notices, but nothing's ever said to this person. Here is what just happened to every person who showed up on time. They received a message, not in words, but in what they observed.

standards don't apply equally in this company and that message travels. It shapes how people think about every other expectation in the organization, about every other standard in the organization. Because if that standard doesn't apply equally, if that standard doesn't matter to one person, why should they apply to any of them? Why should it apply to anyone? The psychology behind why this matters so deeply is straightforward. We as humans look to others. We look to others in the group, especially people with high status in a group to determine what the acceptable behavior is, what normal behavior is or isn't.

When a respected person, when a senior person, when that top producer violates the standard without consequences, the group unconsciously updates its understanding of what the actual norm is. This is how we're wired. This is how we're wired to read the environment. A leader who does not understand us will keep setting standards that are going to erode not because people don't care, but because the signals around them are communicating something totally different than what the leaders say. The most expensive version of this is what I call performance exemption or performance exception.

Most leaders know this is a problem. What most leaders don't fully understand, why it's so structurally destructive and why it's so psychologically difficult to address. Performance exemption. The performance exemption is the unspoken belief that high performers operate under a different set of rules. That standards apply to everyone except them. Except for the people whose output makes them too valuable to confront, too valuable for you to say anything. And here's the psychology behind this. Leaders are not creating this exemption out of laziness or indifference. They are holding two competing values in tension at the same time.

The standard on one side and the relationship or the revenue or the stability that person represents on the other. Two different values in tension together. The mind under that kind of pressure looks for resolution. Looks for something to do. And that exception, that exemption is the resolution. It removes tension immediately. It's not weak. It is human, but it is still wrong. This operates on three levels simultaneously, none of which are visible in the moment you make that decision. The first is what it does to the person being exempted.

When a high performer learns through your behavior that their output protects them from the standard you're setting, something shifts in how they experience the organization. They stop seeing it as somewhere they belong and start seeing it as a platform that they can perform on. The relationship becomes transactional and a transactional relationship ends the moment a better transaction appears. The person you protected from accountability is often the first to leave when a better opportunity shows up because you never built anything with them that was bigger than their numbers.

That was all it was ever about was their numbers. The second is what it does to everyone else around them. People watch how you treat your high performers. They watch when they see that that output, when that production creates that exemption. They draw two conclusions simultaneously. First, these standards aren't real. The second, and this one is more personal, they start quietly calculating whether their own performance level, whether their production makes them matter enough to be protected here, to be protected underneath your organization for you to protect them.

That's not the internal conversation you want running through your team, through your people. That is a retention crisis developing in plain sight. The third is what it does to people outside your organization that you have not recruited yet. The high performers you want, the performers you want, the ones that are building something intentional, the ones who care about the environment they're in as much as they care about the opportunity. They feel the culture before you ever explain it to them. They feel it in how people talk to each other in the room, in the stories that get told outside the room, and what gets tolerated

in meetings. They hear it from your current people. High character performers, high character producers are drawn to environments where standards are genuinely real. If yours aren't, you will keep attracting people who need that exemption, who need that exception, and lose the ones who do not. Every exception teaches the room something. Not just about that person that's being exempted that the exception is being made for. It's about where the leadership means what it says. And once that belief erodess once people decide that the standard is really only some people for some of the time, you can't restore it through it speech.

You can't reset it in a conversation. You can't reset it in initiative. You can only restore it through behavior. consistent uncomfortable behavior over time is exactly what that exception, what that exemption was designed to avoid in the first place. But that's what it brought. There's an idea that I want to bring to this conversation because I think it reframes something leaders often get backwards. Great organizations do not start by finding out where they're going and then finding people to take them there. They start by getting the right people in the right seats and then they figure out the direction together with those people because with

the right people almost any direction can work. With the wrong people even the best strategy will fail every time. You know standards are not just about managing behavior after the fact. They are the mechanism through which you determine whether someone is the right person for where you are going. If you cannot hold that standard consistently, you cannot make that determination honestly. You're working with distorted information. You're making decisions about people based upon a version of them that your own tolerance has created. Here's what it looks like from the inside.

The leader has someone on their team who produces well, but they create problems everywhere around them. The leader knows this. The team knows this. And a leader tells themselves, I can manage this. I know how to work for this person. I know how to work with these type of people. I understand what they need. And for a while, that feels true. But what is actually happening is that leader has slowly reorganized the entire team around just one person's behavior. Conversations start happening differently because of that person.

Decisions get made differently. People get self-centered in your meetings because of that person. The organization has bent itself to accommodate someone who is never fully aligned in what the organization was trying to be or trying to build or trying to go. And the leader who thought they were managing it were actually being managed by it. You're listening to the leadership series on the Jeffrey Scott Stan podcast where leadership principles are broken down and applied in the real world in real time. I want to take a moment to recognize and thank one of our founding partners, Subi.

One of the biggest leadership lessons I've learned is that the best operators don't do everything themselves. They build systems that handle the details so they can focus on what matters. And that's exactly what Subi does for real estate professionals. is an AI transaction genie that keeps everything organized from contacts to closing to timelines to details. Nothing falls through the cracks. Your work is my command is their promise and they deliver on it. Please v link is in the show notes. Tell them Jqued podcast productions sent you.

Here's a situation I've seen play out across many different organizations. A leader that they bring in someone impressive, strong track record, experience, confident, like everyone knows them. Six months in, it becomes clear that the person does not operate the way the organization operates. They don't have that vision that the organization has. They're not collaborative. They create friction. They go around processes instead of working through the process. They produce, but that production comes at a cost that's paid by everyone around them. And because they produce, the leader adapts.

The leader adapts to them. They work around that person's behavior. They make those exceptions. They tell themselves that this is just peace of having to deal with a top producer and strong talent. That's the way it works. It's not. What the leader is doing through every one of those changes, through every one of those exceptions, is answering a fundamental question for the rest of the organization. They're communicating through their behavior, what kind of people belong here and what kind of people do not belong in your organization.

Then the answer they're giving is this. what someone does matters less than how much they produce. And that becomes part of the culture. That becomes the culture regardless of anything written down anywhere. You know, the right people for your organization are not just the people with the strongest numbers. They're the people who can produce and operate within the standard that you're committing to building. Those two things have to coexist. When they consistently do not coexist, when production wins over standards, you eventually build something full of high performers who don't trust each other, who don't respect the organization, who don't respect you, and who will leave

at the moment something better comes along because you never gave them a reason to stay that was bigger than what they were producing individually. Deciding who belongs in an organization based upon their character, based upon their conduct, not just their capability, not just their production is one of the hardest calls to make in a leadership. Why? The data is not going to make it for you. A strong performance record does not tell you whether someone is right for what you're building. That requires judgment. Judgment under pressure.

When relationships are involved and revenue is at stake, this is where the leaders feel alone the most. At some point you have to decide what you are actually building and protect what you're building even when that protection may be expensive. And that decision made consistently over time is what separates organizations who build something real who build something great from those organizations that say stuck at good or just okay. Let let us get into what this actually takes because understanding why standards matter is one thing. Building ones that hold up when they're challenged is a totally another thing.

There are three things that a standard needs to stay real. Most leaders invest heavily in the first, inconsistently in the second, and almost never in the third. The first is behavioral clarity, not conceptual clarity. And there's a meaningful difference between them. Saying you expect professionalism is a conceptual standard. Everyone nods and everyone defines it differently. which means when it's violated, there's nothing specific to point to because it's defined differently by different people compared to something like, "We return phone calls within two hours. We arrive prepared and on time for every meeting." Those are behavioral standards.

They describe what the expectation looks like in action. And when someone falls short, everyone in the room, including the person who fell short, knows it. You don't need a debate about interpretation. You need to look at whether the behavior matched the description or not. Most leaders operate at a conceptual level and then they wonder why standards never stick. They don't stick because vague expectations produce vague behaviors. If you want a standard to hold, it has to be specific enough that you can point to it clearly when someone's not following it.

That conversation, here's what's said, here's what happened, here's the gap. It's very difficult around a conceptual standard and it's very straightforward around a behavioral one. The second is consistency. And this is where most leaders do more damage than they realize. Research on behavior shows that inconsistent reinforcement is actually the hardest pattern to correct. It's the hardest thing to change. It's more resistant to change than behavior that's never been reinforced at all. The reason is inconsistency creates unpredictability. And unpredictability makes people test the boundaries more, not less.

People are always going to try to find out where that line is when it's inconsistent. But it's unpredictable. Which means every time you enforce a standard one week and let it go the next, depending upon the relationship, depending upon the timing, depending upon what else is going on, you're not giving yourself a pass. You're actively making the standard harder to hold in the future. The standard is tested when it's not easy to hold. It's tested when holding it cost you something. when it's someone you like, when the timing could not be any worse, when you're already managing six other things and this feels like one

more thrown on top of it. Those are the moments that define whether your standards are real or not. Not because they're dramatic, not because they're dramatic at all, because most of them are not. They are when people are watching you most closely. And what they see in those moments, they either see a leader who means what they say or a leader who means nothing by what they say. That distinction compounded across dozens of small moments becomes your leadership reputation. The third is recognition. Most leaders only engage with standards only say something when they're viol.

But a standard that only surfaces when something goes wrong eventually becomes associated with punishment rather than identity. The leader who builds the strongest culture are the ones who name the standard when it's lived up to specifically and indirectly. They acknowledge the person who's living up to their standards. So the organization knows not just what's unacceptable, but what's acceptable and what it actually looks like. A standard that's clear, consistent, reinforced, and connected to something people believe in stops being a rule. It becomes a true standard. It becomes part of how the organization understands itself, how the organization defines itself.

And that shift from rule to identity is where culture actually lives. But this only happens when the standard is connected to something bigger than just compliance. It needs to be connected to what you're building and why it matters and the vision of what you have. Let me explain what I mean by this. Most leaders think about standards as rules. Things to maintain order, to prevent problems, to keep people in line. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete. And when that is the only frame you as the leader has, holding a standard always feels like enforcement.

It feels like a burden and friction. It becomes something you do reluctantly, not something you do because you believe in it. There's a different way to think about this. The great organizations studied in the research all found the intersection of these three things, what they could be genuinely excellent at, what drove their success, and what they cared about deeply. Everything they did, every decision, every standard, every expectation existed in service of that intersection of those three things. They said no to everything that fell outside of that.

No matter how attractive those things look to them in the short term, they said no. Apply that frame to standards and something shifts. Standards are not about control. They are the expression of what the organization, what your company has decided to be excellent at. Those standards are protecting the thing you're actually building. And when a leader understands that, holding a standard stops feeling like enforcement and starts feeling like an act of clarity. This is what we are. This is what we do here. This is who we are.

Think about it this way. If what you are building is an environment where clients are served at the highest level and people grow professionally, then every standard you set should be in direct service of those two things. How people communicate, how they show up, how they handle situations, how they treat each other in the room. These aren't arbitrary rules. They're specific behaviors that define what excellent looks like in your environment, in your brokerage. When someone consistently operates outside their standards, even when they are producing, they are pulling the organization away from what the organization has decided to be.

They're pulling it away from your vision. And every day that misalignment continues without being named, without being said, the organization drifts further from its own identity. No culture. It's gone. The cost of this is not one person's behavior. It's a slow erosion of the culture you're trying to build. And it's paid for in the trust of the people who are watching and wondering whether what you say you stand for is actually what you stand for. Every standard you set will be tested. Not might be will be.

Someone will push against it consciously or not. A situation will arise where the exception feels justified. And in that moment you will make a cultural decision that extends far beyond that individual situation in front of you. The most common version of this test is what I call the performance shield. High performers violate a standard. Maybe they missed a commitment the team had made. Maybe they walked in late to a meeting. Maybe they handled a situation in a way that did not reflect the values of the organization have been defined.

Maybe they said something in a meeting that undermined a colleague and the room saw it happen. And the thought arrives, they're one of our best people. They're one of our best producers. Is this really worth the friction? That question is what's called the fool's choice from the last episode. It's reappearing now in the context of standards. And the cost of getting it wrong is not just the relationship with one person. It's the signal sent to everyone in that room and everyone in that organization about what performance buys in your organization.

The real decision is not whether to address the one situation. The real decision is whether to confirm to your entire team that the standard has a price and that price is a person's production. I want to tell you about a leader that I worked closely with. I'll call her Maya. Maya ran a high-erforming sales team. She was sharp, experienced, and genuinely committed to building a strong culture. She had one person on her team whose results were consistently strongest in the group, strong numbers, visible in the market, respected externally by the other companies, by their peers outside the company.

But internally, this person operated alone. They made decisions by themselves. They bypass process regularly. They move fast, letting the team find out after the fact, after what happened. They created friction and more work for everyone around them. Maya knew exactly what was happening. She was not in the dark. She would sit in her office after a difficult weekend and say to herself, "I need to have a real conversation with this person." She would draft it in her head. She knew what she wanted to say. And then Monday would arrive and they would come in with a listing or two and a different voice would surface.

One that said, "Hey, look at what they produced. Look what they just brought in. Is now really the right time to have this conversation. The team is in good rhythm. I don't want to disrupt that." Ma said to herself, "I'll address it when things slow down." Things never slow down. There's always a reason you're going to come up in your head why timing is just not quite right. Every week she waited. She told herself she was being thoughtful. What she was actually doing was choosing the comfort of not having the conversation over her responsibility as a leader and a responsibility for leading the person in

front of her. She had conversations about it, quiet ones, gentle ones. The kind where enough was said to feel like she sort of said something and something happened, but not enough to actually change anything in anyone. And every time it came to holding the line to saying this has to change and here's what it looks like going forward with real consequences attached she found herself with reasons not to do it because the relationship was good because the numbers were there. She had convinced herself over months of small decisions that managing around this person is just what smart leadership looked like in this complex situation.

What Maya couldn't see from inside that situation is what the rest of her team saw clearly. They saw a process applied to everyone except for the person who produced the most. They saw that the standard bent. They saw that the standard bent when it was expensive to hold. And quietly, without announcing it, three of her strongest developing team members all left within months. Not for more compensation, not for a better title, for environment. In their exit conversations, they told her this. They wanted to be somewhere where expectations actually meant something equally for everyone, not where top producers were awarded and everybody else was cast to

the side. Maya eventually had the real conversation. Direct, clear, and specific expectations and real consequences attached for this person. And here's the part of the story that almost never gets told. That high performer, they didn't leave. They adjusted. And within six months, they have become even more consistent, higher producer, and culturally aligned with the people that are on their team and culturally aligned with the organization because someone finally had cared enough to be honest with them about what was not working. And that's the thing about holding people accountable that most leaders forget when they're avoiding doing it.

People do not leave leaders who hold them to a standard. They leave when the leader holds different standards to different people because that exception does not feel like protection, does not feel like safety. It feels like the leader does not believe them enough to actually lead them. When a standard gets tested and you hold it, even when it's uncomfortable, even when the person is valuable, even when letting it go would be easier, something happens in the room. People feel it. They may not say a word.

They may not thank you, but they register it. And that registration is this. The standard is real. Leadership is real. Leadership means what it says. And that's trust. That's trust built in those moments. And that's the foundation everything else rests upon. There's an image from the book Good to Great I keep coming back to when I think about how culture gets built. Picture this. A massive heavy wheel. The kind that takes real effort just to get it moving at all. You push it, it barely moves.

You keep pushing it, it moves a little bit more. So you keep pushing. You keep pushing. You keep pushing. At some point, a point you cannot really name exactly, that wheel develops its own momentum and it turns underneath its own weight and starts rolling by itself. Now, every push you give produces more momentum than the one before it. That image describes almost perfectly how a standard-based culture gets built. Not through one big moment, not through initiatives or a reset meeting or a powerful speech. through consistent effort in a consistent direction compounded over time.

In the beginning, holding a standard is hard. It is. The first time you address a behavior directly when you would normally let it go, there's friction there. It's going to be there. The first time you hold that commitment that someone expected you to bend, there's going to be resistance. That wheel is heavy. It's going to barely move. Most leaders feel that resistance and say, "Eh, enforcing the standards not really worth the cost." They stop pushing the wheel. The wheel stops. But the leader who keeps going, the one who holds the standard every time it matters, who recognize when it is lived and addresses it when

it is not, starts to notice something shift. The resistance decreases not because the standard got easier to hold, but because the culture had started to own it. People stop testing the line because they know it will be held. People begin self-correcting before anything needs to be said. People who join the organization absorb the standard through the environment itself, through what they observe every day, not through the document, not through training, not through what's written on the wall. That's the flywheel moving. And once you start moving it, once it reaches a point where the standard is not only being held by the leader, it's being held

by the organization by people who have internalized it, who hold each other to it because it become part of who they are and what they stand for. That's when culture becomes genuine. That's when culture becomes a genuine competitive advantage. Not because of what's written anywhere, but because of what happens in the room when no one's watching. There's something worth talking here about psychological safety. Because most people hear that term and they feel it means soft, low accountability environments. Research shows the exact opposite. High performing teams combine high psychological safety with high accountability standards.

People feel safe to take risks, safe to speak up, and to bring their full ability to work precisely because the standards are clear and real. The safety comes from clarity. When people know what is expected and know that the expectations actually mean something, they stop spending energy on reading the room and they start spending energy on the work. That's the flywheel. That's what you're building every time you hold a standard when it would have been easier just not to do it. You push, it moves. You push, it moves.

It starts moving by itself. Let me bring this someplace before we close. Start with the diagnostic. Walk through your team in your mind right now. And for each person on your team, ask one question. Does the standard apply to them the same way it applies to everyone else? Not should it, does it? Where the answer is no. That is your most significant leadership challenge right now. Not the market, not the competition. that gap because that gap is communicating something to every person in your organization every single day and that communication is not what you intended.

Ask yourself this question. If you were to walk away, if you stepped away from your team, your organization for two weeks, no check-ins, no oversightes, no emails, what would happen to your standards? What would happen to the standards of the organization? What would happen to the standards of your team? Would they hold? Would certain behaviors surface that you've been managing quietly in the background? The answer to that question tells you whether you have a culture or a supervision system. A real culture, real culture holds up when the leader is not in the room.

Supervision requires someone always watching. Most organizations are closer to the second, closer to that supervision than their leader wants that belief. Look at recognition. In the last 30 days, how many times did you specifically name a behavior you observed and connected it directly to a standard, not a generic compliment, an actual direct connection, what the person did, how they showed up, how they handled it. That's who we are. That's who you are as an organization. If you can't remember doing that, if you can't remember the last time you did that, you're reinforcing the standard only when it's been violated.

If you're not telling people when they're doing things right, you're probably telling people only when they're doing things wrong. A culture that only hears about the standard when things go wrong will eventually start associating the standard with punishment rather than identity rather than the vision. That distinction matters more than what you'll ever realize. And finally, ask yourself this last question. Think about the last time holding a standard cost you something. When it was genuinely genuinely uncomfortable and when the relationship maybe was at stake. when letting it go would have been the easiest thing to do.

Or so you thought. What did you actually do? Not what you intended to do. What did you actually do? What happened? That answer, honest and specific, tells you more about where your culture is right now and where it's going than anything else in this episode. Standards are not about control. They're about identity. They're about the daily expression of what the organization has decided to be and the ongoing test of whether you actually mean it or not. Building a culture where the standard is real is not glamorous work.

It doesn't happen in a single conversation or a reset or an initiative or a values meeting. It happens again in those small repeated often invisible moments when a line is crossed and you address it as a true leader where behavior reflected the standard and you named it and when the easy choice was to let it go and you didn't. The research on what separates organizations that become truly great from those that just stay good is consistent on this point. It is disciplined people making disciplined choices in a consistent direction over time.

That's how a standard becomes culture. And that's how culture becomes a thing that makes everything else possible. In a future episode, we're going to be talking about trust. Standards create accountability, but accountability without trust creates compliance, not commitment. And commitment is what you need from the people that you lead. Trust is how you earn it. And that's where we'll go. If you want to stay connected, please follow me on social media for updates, future episodes, and additional insights. If this episode was of value to you, I would really appreciate it if you left a comment, a review, or shared it with someone who's been tolerating

something that they know they should not be tolerating. Because the right standard held at the right moment does not just change behavior. It can change the entire organization. Thank you to our founding partners, Subi, the CE Shop, and Wise Agent. Their information is in the show notes. I am Jeffrey Scott. I am a coach. I am a consultant. I'm adviser. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Lead with clarity, lead with vision, lead with clear standards, and lead with intention. I'll see you on the next one.

Leadership isn't learned in pages. It's built through repetition. What you apply becomes your standard, and what you reinforce becomes who you are as a leader. Leadership is built in practice and proven in performance. This has been the leadership series hosted by Jeffrey Scott Stanton and produced by Jqued podcast productions.