High Standards are Teachable

Wouldn’t it be great to always be on the same page in the pursuit of quality and excellence with your team and your organization? Those shared high standards would help keep you on track to shipping the best work possible every day. You’d be staying ahead, as Jeff Bezos put it, of “ever-rising customer expectations” because those high standards are “certainly a big part” of getting there.

How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There’s no single way to do it – it’s a combination of many things. But high standards are certainly a big part of it.

Jeff Bezos in a 2017 Amazon shareholder letter

That’s great but the question is how do you recognize those high standards consistently and get on the same page with everyone so you’re all heading in the same direction? That might seem like a tall order some days but luckily Bezos thinks high standards are teachable.

Here are some further thoughts from the same letter, lightly edited for clarity, on how to get better at recognizing the best work possible:

• High standards are teachable and people are pretty good at learning high standards simply through exposure.
• You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots. It’s critical to be open to that likelihood.
• “Most people,” he said, “think that if they work hard, they should be able to master a handstand in about two weeks. The reality is that it takes about six months of daily practice. If you think you should be able to do it in two weeks, you’re just going to end up quitting.” Unrealistic beliefs on scope – often hidden and undiscussed – kill high standards. You need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be.
• Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.
• The football coach doesn’t need to be able to throw, and a film director doesn’t need to be able to act. But they both do need to recognize high standards for those things and teach realistic expectations on scope. Even in the example of writing a six-page memo, that’s teamwork. Someone on the team needs to have the skill, but it doesn’t have to be you.

I think that can be boiled down into three pieces of advice.

• Understand that you can consider yourself someone with high standards and yet still miss things.
• Find people who have the skill of recognizing high standards and seek feedback from them.
• Set realistic expectations on reaching high standards and don’t give up.

It’s a good list.