The Program

9Determining Standards

PARENTS, TEACHERS, COACHES, and business leaders all have goals for their children, students, athletes, and employees, respectively. Championship- caliber families, schools, athletic teams, and business organizations also have standards.

A “standard” is a set level of acceptable behavior that reinforces an organization’s Core Values. Goals are performance based. They reinforce what we want to achieve. Failure to meet it means reattacking it tomorrow. Standards are behavior based. They reinforce who we are (our Core Values). Failure to meet a standard carries a consequence.

Some teams don’t perform well because they don’t have the talent to compete. That isn’t “underperforming.” Underperforming is when a team performs at a level below what their talent should allow them. In these cases, it is almost always due to poor culture. A culture’s foundation is its Core Values, which define what it means to be a member of that team. Those values are the behaviors that every member of the team is expected to embody, but a t-shirt or a lobby poster reading “Discipline” does not make that team disciplined. An adherence to standards that reinforce Discipline does.

Once we determine our Core Values and how we define them within our organization, we must then figure out the standards needed to reinforce them daily. It is easy to say that our culture is based on the Core Values of honesty, commitment, and passion, but are we proving it every day? Adhering to our standards ...