In a recent workshop, a CEO asked me a question I hear more and more often.
“Should I lower my standards?”
She wasn’t asking about dress codes or office perks. She was talking about output. Quality of work. Meeting deadlines. The things that keep an organisation moving forward.
Her team was pushing back. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But persistently.
The quiet friction of missed deadlines explained away, average work submitted as “good enough,” and expectations slowly being renegotiated downward without anyone signing off on the change.
I didn’t give her an answer.
Instead, I asked her a series of questions.
“If you lower the standard on deadlines, what happens to your delivery commitments?”
She paused. “They slip.”
“And if delivery slips consistently, what happens to client trust?”
“It erodes.”
“And if client trust erodes, what happens to revenue?”
Longer pause. “It drops.”
“And if revenue drops while costs stay the same, what happens to the organisation?”
The room went quiet.
She didn’t need me to answer her original question. She had just answered it herself.
Lowering standards wasn’t a kindness. It was a slow demolition.
The reason leaders ask this question is rarely about standards themselves. It is about avoiding the discomfort that comes with holding them.
Holding standards means giving feedback.
Feedback risks conflict.
And conflict feels like a threat to the relationship, the culture, or the leader’s own likability.
So instead of addressing the gap between expectation and performance, many leaders quietly absorb it.
They rework the deliverable themselves at 10pm. They rephrase “this isn’t good enough” into “maybe we can iterate on this.”
They lower the bar one centimetre at a time until they barely recognise where it sits.
This is not leadership. This is people pleasing in a leadership costume.
And here is what makes it worse: research from the London School of Economics found that people consistently underestimate how much others actually want feedback. The more consequential the situation, the bigger the gap between what givers assume and what receivers need.
Leaders avoid the conversation thinking it will hurt. The data says the opposite. People want to know where they stand.
What hurts is the silence.
And here is what I find telling: the number one training request I am receiving from managers right now is conflict management. Not strategy. Not innovation. Conflict.
I am not surprised.
Workplace conflict has doubled since 2008, according to the Myers Briggs Company. A DDI study of over 70,000 manager candidates globally found that nearly half fail to demonstrate effective conflict management skills, with only 12% showing high proficiency. Most managers were simply never trained for this.
And the pressures feeding it are only growing.
Generational differences in how people view work, authority, and feedback. Cost of living pressures making everyone more stressed and reactive. The “do more with less” mandate squeezing teams to their limits. Personalities clashing under conditions that leave no margin for patience. Egos that have never been challenged now being tested by tighter budgets and higher expectations.
Conflict isn’t the disease. It is the symptom of all those pressures colliding with years of avoided feedback.
In football, every moment demands a choice: pass or shoot?
Pass the ball, and you buy yourself time. You keep things safe. You avoid the risk of missing. But the clock keeps running. And eventually, time runs out.
Shoot, and you might miss. But you also might score.
Leadership works the same way.
Every time you avoid a difficult conversation about standards, you are passing.
And every pass feels responsible in the moment. But stack enough of them together and you are left standing in front of an empty net with no time on the clock.
The CEO in my workshop didn’t need permission to lower her standards. She needed the courage to hold them.
And that courage starts with one honest conversation, delivered with respect, but without apology.
So here are some questions for you this week.
Where in your team have standards quietly slipped? Not because anyone decided they should, but because nobody decided they shouldn’t?
And what is the cost of that silence to your organisation?
You might not like the answer 🙂
To your success,
Lison xX
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If this sparks something for you, here’s how we can work together:
- Discover the secrets to skyrocketing your team’s performance in my free Masterclass! Join me on the 12th of March to talk high-performance strategies and walk away with actionable tools to inspire and empower your team. Register here.
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- Book one of my workshops or keynotes for your team to elevate energy and performance. More information here.
- With my first book Act Before You overThink to learn how to make better decisions faster and liberate your mind from the constant chatter that hinders your potential. You can buy it here.
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