The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 18. Calibrating Your Standards

Managing teams has taught me a lot about my own behaviors and motivations. For example, I overworked for a long time. This left me continually teetering on the brink of burnout and I had no energy left to absorb the sorts of organizational changes that happen at any company. Despite doing good work, I handled change poorly, and I picked up the reputation for being difficult to manage.

I’d like to say that I learned from my mistakes directly, but a more honest version is that I came to understand this dynamic mostly through working with folks struggling with the same issue. After seeing it in others several times, I came to notice it in myself. This culminated in joining Stripe with the explicit goal of pacing myself to be more valuable after four years, rather than getting exhausted after two years like I had at Uber.

In this chapter, we’ll dig into:

• How high standards, generally considered an obviously good thing, frequently cause friction for executives

• Why it’s important to match your standards with the standards that your organization upholds, rather than assuming that high standards are obviously right

• How escalating in regard to perceived low standards can get you in conflict with your CEO

• Why role modeling is an effective tool for shifting an organization’s standards

• What to do when your standards are not serving you well in your current situation

By the end, you will start to recognize when your colleagues’ standards exceed your ...