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Welcome to Leading With Force โ a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
โHow well we did is actually open to interpretation and normally your team will respond when it comes to expectations by how annoyed or upset or frustrated you get as a leader. The more frustrated you get, the more they know they didn't live up to expectations, but they're still confused for the most part.
Because there was no clearly defined standard standards are non-negotiable. ๐ Expectations, on the other hand, are entirely negotiable because we all have a different ideology on how well we're doing in any given time, and if we don't have a clearly defined sense of normal. How well we operate is relatively open to interpretation Hey everybody. Welcome back to the show. I really appreciate you being here for another episode. Before we dive in, if you please could like, share, subscribe to this podcast. If you're getting value from it, send it to somebody that could use this message. It really helps me with my mission to reach as many people as possible.
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That is enough of the PSAs. I appreciate you being here. Let's get back to the ๐ episode.โ โ
Let's start โoff today with a really simple question. What are the standards that define your business? Think about that one more time. What are the standards that define your business now? The answer doesn't come to you immediately. We've got a little work to do.
This is where so many entrepreneurs have a massive growth opportunity in their business. Normally, one of two things are true about most businesses. Either they lack standards entirely or the leadership is confusing. Standards with expectations, standards and expectations are actually two entirely different things, and the confusion between the two sets people up for a ton of ongoing frustration and lackluster results in their business.
So we're gonna talk about standards today, about how to define them in your business, what they should be, how to relay them, communicate them, how to enforce them, and how to create a culture of standards in your business. Truly creating a culture of standards in your business is what helps you graduate from operator to owner.
The biggest difference between an operator of a business who eventually creates a prison for themselves, so they can't leave.
They have a lifelong job. They can't step out of the business or the business will stop in its tracks and owners, people that can truly own the business and manage it from afar. And when they're not there, the business continues to move forward. Without them, is the defining, communicating, and reinforcing of standards.
When you have clearly defined, clearly enforced standards in your business, then your people will either show up and they will operate by those standards, or they won't, and then you realize you have a breakdown.
You either have a breakdown in the definition or communication of those standards, or you have the wrong people for the wrong rules. Either way, those are fixable when you have no standards, then you have a job because without standards, you don't have any simple way for your team to know whether or not they are showing up adequately and achieving the correct results.
Now, a lot of entrepreneurs think they have standards, but what they really have are expectations, which are not the same thing, and it becomes very frustrating over time to watch your team fall short of expectations. So let's dive in to what standards are, what expectations are, how to define your standards, how to communicate them properly, and how to reinforce them as a business owner.
So let's start off really simply by defining what a standard is. What is a standard?
Well, the literal definition of a standard is an idea or thing used to measure norm or model in comparative evaluations, and that sounds like a bunch of word salad. All it means is that it's a thing that is used to define what is average or normal.
And so in your business, a clearly defined standard is a definition of the normal way of doing things. This is how things should be. By this measure, so you're gonna have all kinds of standards in your business. You'll have operational standards for your operations team. You'll have standards for your sales team.
What are your standard quotas? For example, you'll have customer service standards. How do we define what is normal or average for how our client service and customer service interactions should be, and then how do we measure that?
So standards are a definition of normal.
Now, I can give you a million examples of what standards look like in any of our organizations because we're so maniacal about them, but I'll keep it very simple. I'll give you two examples of standards in different areas of businesses. So one of our businesses is a home maintenance and remodeling company
and our maintenance company has a lot of big recurring clients that own a lot of different properties, and so they have large portfolios with us, and so we have to define standards around certain things. One of the standards that we define in our home maintenance company is the standard around owner approval limits. So a lot of our big clients that have many, many, many properties with us, when we do home maintenance for them, they want to approve work orders that are over a certain limit.
If the job is going to cost less than a certain amount, they don't want to hear about it. They just want us to do the work. They hired us for a reason to reduce the noise in their world. They just want us to get it done. If it's a cheap enough fix, for those same clients there is a limit, if it is beyond that limit, then we do not do the work until they approve it.
That gives them the opportunity to discuss the project with us, make any changes, make any decisions on their own. At the end of the day, they have their money and their investors' money on the line, and they wanna make sure that they're keeping their eyes on their books
and discussing repairs and maintenance with us over a certain threshold. So when our maintenance technicians go out to a property and they know that there is an approval limit, and they're going to have to charge over that approval limit to get this fixed done, they will not start work until we have an approved work order, so they will send our main office the estimate. We will reach out to the owner to discuss it
if they approve it, they will do that digitally. Our techs will wait at the property. When they get the green light, they will go forward with the work. If they get a red light, they will not go forward with the work. We have a standard that says over a certain limit, you wait for approval.
That is a clearly defined standard in our business.
It keeps our maintenance technicians from going out to the property and just beginning work on large ticket items without our clients being in the know. That would be very bad for our business if we just went and started spending a whole bunch of our clients' money without their agreement and without that conversation.
That allows them to understand what the value of the work we're doing is. So we have that standard. The standard is a certain approval limit over that. You do this under that. You do that. that is a very simple intersystem kind of standard. There are other kinds of standards as well.
We have, for example, performance standards in one of our organizations, we have a standard for processes completed on time. Our whole business runs on processes, and those processes are very time sensitive
and so we have a standard and a scoreboard that measures this, that we look at every day, and it measures the amount of our processes that are completed. On time, on schedule, our standard in that business is 95% processes completed on time. That is an a plus score in our world. What that does is it creates a very clear definition of what normal is supposed to look like.
What that means is that when we dip below 95% processes completed on time, there is no ambiguity around what we need to do. The team understands, we've gotta figure out what processes are moving slowly. And figure out how to make them move more quickly and accurately to get back up to 95%. . It removes any of the noise surrounding what's important and what needs to happen right now for us to start winning again. When you define a standard and everyone on your team understands that standard, then they know what to do When that standard is not being hit, they know how to start investigating, okay, we're falling short in this area.
We're not moving quickly enough. How do we support each other in moving more quickly on these processes? When you can get your team to clearly understand that and reinforce that standard, now you give yourself the opportunity to move a little step further from operator to owner.
So really simple. A standard is a clear definition of what is normal in your business in any given area, and clearly defined is the most important part there because a clear, non-negotiable definition is the biggest difference between a standard and an expectation, and your business must be based on standards or you're setting yourself up for a world of ongoing frustration. So let's break down the differences.
What are expectations as opposed to standards? And let's look at some examples. The first key difference between standards and expectations are standards are clear, as we mentioned, and expectations are not. So how does this show up every day in your business?
When you have a clearly defined standard, it's very easy to tell whether or not we've hit that standard in any given area. When you don't have standards, you have expectations. How they usually show up in your business is in the form of you getting onto your team around the things they need to be doing right now.
For example, when you run your morning calls and you check in on whether or not we're hitting our standards in any given area, when we have clearly defined standards, we just know are we hitting the standard or are we not? And when we are not, we are asking the team what do we need to do to get to the standard?
To get back to where normal is where we're supposed to be, and we allow the team to take ownership and accountability for the action steps that they need to own to get back to the standard. When we set expectations, they usually come across in the form of us, the operator saying, I need you to do this, this, this, and this Today.
If you've ever caught yourself on a morning call going, I need you to do this and this and this, it may be because you don't have a clearly defined standard, and now what you're doing is you're setting expectations for what you need your team to do, and what you're doing is you're removing the ownership that your team needs to have around a clearly defined standard. What you're doing is you're getting in the habit of continuing to reset expectations day in and day out, because your team doesn't have a clearly defined standard, and so the cadence becomes, let's show up on the morning call.
Let's listen to what the owner slash operator tells us we need to do that day. And then let's go out and do our best to do it. That's an expectation. Expectations aren't nothing, but they're not as good as standards. The difference in clarity between a standard and an expectation is a standard is a result we need to achieve, and you go and take ownership of how we're going to achieve that result.
An expectation is here's a series of actions I expect you to take today. And when you continue to do that and you never clearly define a standard, you really build yourself a prison as a manager because you are always the one resetting expectations.
Expectations are temporary. The things we need to do today are temporary, the things that we need to do to hit the standard. Are permanent. Whatever you as a team need to take ownership of action wise in order to get us to the standard. That's always gonna be the case, even if the actions are different every single day.
So when you're setting expectations with no standard, you're having to redo those expectations day in and day out because your team doesn't have a clearly defined sense of where normal is.
The second key difference between standards and expectations is that standards are factual and expectations are fictional. What I mean by that is standards are set in stone. We either achieved the standard, which is our normal default operating mode.
We either hit it or we don't. Expectations, on the other hand, are open to interpretation as to how well we did, because we don't have a clearly defined end result. Here is the standard. So when we fall short of expectations.
How well we did is actually open to interpretation and normally your team will respond when it comes to expectations by how annoyed or upset or frustrated you get as a leader. The more frustrated you get, the more they know they didn't live up to expectations, but they're still confused for the most part.
Because there was no clearly defined standard standards are non-negotiable. Expectations, on the other hand, are entirely negotiable because we all have a different ideology on how well we're doing in any given time, and if we don't have a clearly defined sense of normal. How well we operate is relatively open to interpretation when it comes to customer service, for example, if we don't have a clearly defined standard of how well we're interacting with our customers, say based on survey feedback or ratings and reviews, then we're really open to interpretation as to how well we're doing on the customer service side.
The only way to really investigate your expectations would be to listen to a whole bunch of call recordings and decide for yourself whether or not you agree with your customer service reps that they're doing an amazing job. Or you could set a standard that says, we need this percentage of feedback surveys to be at this level, or we need to maintain a minimum standard of ratings on our Google reviews. Those things are clearly defined. They're clearly measurable, and they're not open to interpretation. That is the difference between an expectation, which is we need to have really good customer service
and a standard, which is we need to maintain no less than a 4.5 star rating on Google at all times. You can see the difference between fact and fiction there. It is a fact that I have a certain rating. It is open to interpretation my opinion of how well I'm doing on the customer service side.
The next way that standards differ from expectations is standards are aligned with the vision and goals that you have for your company, and expectations are not directly correlated, for example, standards for your salespeople are very easy to create when you have a vision for where the company is going.
We want to be at a certain level of revenue, profitability, client served, whatever it is, at whatever timeline, and we can boil that down to here's what we need to do week in, week out, month in, month out from a sales and a new revenue perspective.
And so I can take our company's vision where we are going, and then I can align it with the standards that we have. We need our salespeople to hit this quota on a monthly basis. Because it directly aligns with the vision that we have for where we're going as an organization, whereas an expectation, we need to do better, we need to sell more.
We need to grow the company, we need to bring in more clients. That is vague and it is unaligned with our company's vision. There's no direct correlation there, so it's very hard to understand how much better do we need to do? What needs to be the standard? What, when you say the expectation is we need to improve on the sales side, what does that mean and how do we know if we're winning and getting there?
And how do you as an operator, who wants to be an owner. Hold your people accountable to improvement. How do we guide them on a path to hitting a standard? If we don't have a standard defined, we only have the expectation that we need to improve. So standards are aligned, expectations are unaligned. And lastly, and this is a big one, standards are emotionless.
Expectations are emotional. When I set a standard and I give my team the resources to hit that standard, and I allow my team the autonomy to take ownership of hitting that standard. Then when we are not hitting the standard, we remove the emotion from the conversation. Here is what normal is. We are not there. How do we get there and what do you need from me? What resources do you need? What piece of the puzzle are we missing? What is the plan of action to get back to the standard?
And I allow my team to take ownership of that. When we don't have a clearly defined standard, everything becomes emotional. Our team thinks they're operating at a higher level than they really are. They will blame you as the leader for your own frustration. You'll create tension in your culture, and you will, by the way, lose talented people because talented people want standards.
Whenever you don't have a clearly defined standard, every single person on your team has a different interpretation of whether or not we are winning or losing. And they have a different level of ownership around whether or not we're winning or losing.
When we have clearly defined standards. Everybody has a higher level of ownership because you can be absolutely crushing it in your role, but if your team as a whole is not hitting the standard, you're going to be much more motivated to pick your teammates up. To go the extra mile to help them, to give them constructive feedback and help them grow.
When the expectation is just do better and you feel like you're doing great, you're way less motivated to help the rest of your team because you have no real definition of whether or not you're winning or losing. And so people start to operate and echo chambers. You start to have people that think that they're doing very well, and that's really all that matters.
But what really is all that matters is whether or not we are hitting the standard
Very simply, when you don't have standards and you're only operating off expectations, you become frustrated. Your team becomes frustrated because you are frustrated. Your team, your individual role players will start to play the blame game, and you will see a lot of turnover in your business, even of highly talented people because without a clearly defined standard, even your most talented people don't know what the score on the field is, and they don't know how it aligns with the ultimate vision for the company.
And so they will eventually leave you for a place that offers them a better growth opportunity. And that growth opportunity is a lot more clear because they have clearly defined standards in whatever business that they're going to leave you for.
So let's talk about a couple really simple ways to know if your operating off of standards or expectations right now in your business and what adjustments you can make. Example number one, if you find yourself often saying or thinking, I shouldn't have to tell you this.
That means you have expectations and not standards. If you're constantly feeling like your team is just not getting it when they should, it may mean that you have the wrong people in the wrong roles, but it most likely means that you don't have a clearly defined standard.
When you have a clearly defined standard, you have to tell your team a heck of a lot less as to how to reach that standard. If you've got the right role players and they understand their jobs, then all that matters is them achieving and maintaining standards, and then you allow them to take ownership of how they do that, and then you guide them, coach them, and give them the resources that they need to succeed.
When you only have expectations, you are required to continue to reinforce those expectations over and over and over. And that absorption takes a long time because people don't understand why they're doing what they're doing. 'cause you haven't defined what normal is, what winning is. And so if you find yourself saying, I shouldn't have to tell you this, you need to check whether or not your people truly understand what the standard is.
And one of the ways to check to see if your team really does understand what the standard is, is do they all define it the same way? Meaning if you ask every single member of your team what the standard is, they're going to give you the same answer for their department.
You'll likely have different standards for different departments, but if you ask every single member on your team, are they going to give the same answer as everyone else who has that same standard? For example, in our management business where we're very process oriented, like I talk about a lot, every single member on our team, if I ask them what the standard is, they will tell you it's 95% processes completed on time.
And there are a couple of others for different departments, but that is the major one. And then there's no other conversation if we're falling short of that, they go investigate. They tell me what action steps they're going to take to get us back to the standard, and then they also tell me what resources we need if we don't currently have them.
So that's a very easy way to tell right now, whether or not you're operating off of standards or off of expectations. And if you find that you're operating off of expectations, you need to implement standards as quickly and as clearly as possible. So how do we implement standards in our business efficiently and clearly?
Well, first things first, I would always implement standards around things that are customer facing before anything else. This is going to be a process.
If you've been operating off of expectations for a long time, it's going to take a little while for you to start to enforce standards across the board in your business. So it's important to start with the things that matter most, and that is normally customer facing processes.
How do you implement a standard when it comes to a customer facing process where you define what does the perfect customer facing process look like? What does an adequate customer facing process look like? And what are you as an owner, not as an operator? What are you satisfied with your business regularly achieving? If you were to be hands off, if you were to step back and allow the business to run itself as an owner, what would you be comfortable with your clients experiencing on a very regular basis?
What would be the normal standard that would be adequate for you? That might not be an A plus level. It might be an A level, and you can live with that because that allows you to take a step into the background and truly transition as an owner.
And then you've gotta put in place the measurement mechanism to understand how you know that you're scoring in a, is that going to be feedback surveys from your clients?
Is that going to be, like I mentioned before, a certain level rating on Google or whatever? The most important platform for you is you've gotta decide what the result is of maintaining that a level customer service interaction. Then you have to clearly. Define it to your team. That is going to take some repetitions and some practice, especially if you've been traveling down the expectation path for a long time.
Your team is going to need an adjustment period to you giving them more ownership around the standard. And that adjustment period needs to start with all of your team interactions, your morning call. You need to clearly define the new standard, and you need to make it completely clear that this is what your team's performance is going to be measured based on from here forward.
And if they're not hitting the standard, then beginning immediately, you need to start to allow them to take ownership of what they're going to do to achieve the standard rather than the other way around where it's, we are not hitting the standard.
I need you to do this, this, this, and this. We are not hitting the standard. What action steps are you going to take, what do we need to do as a team to move towards the standard? And who is going to take ownership of what your morning calls? Should 95% be your team talking 5%? You asking good questions when you ask good questions and empower your people to take ownership. You'd be amazed at the responses that they come up with. And when you have a clearly defined standard, it's a lot easier to ask the right questions.
So this is going to take a little bit of time, but you need to start with clearly defining the standard for every different aspect of your business. For a little bit smaller businesses with smaller teams, the standards could be very easy to define. There could be one or two KPIs that matter most in your business.
For managers of larger businesses or teams, there could be several departments, and you need to define what does winning look like? What does normal look like? What does the standard look like for each one of those departments, and how do we clearly define it? With no vagaries whatsoever, the no vagaries part is incredibly important because when there's no vagueness, when it's crystal clear, then you remove the emotion from your coaching conversations as well.
We didn't hit the standard. What do we need to do moving forward to achieve that standard and allow your team to take ownership when there are nothing but expectations set.
There is an infinite amount of different variations and interpretations of whether or not those expectations have been lived up to, and you will drive yourself crazy trying to get on the same page with your people. So allow yourself to remove that emotion. Allow yourself to remove that situation where you're the bad guy because you're saying expectations weren't met.
When your team disagrees and simply set the standard, make it crystal clear,
and my last piece of guidance as we start to wrap things up here is don't over standardize everything. And what I mean by that is do not create too many things that you are measuring truly one or two things for your entire business or each department that is a meaningful component in your business.
If you over standardize, meaning if you try to create one metric for every tiny little aspect of the business, you will kill creativity. You'll kill flexibility and somebody will be violating some standard all the time. You've gotta create the most meaningful metrics to measure. Create standards around those and give your people the freedom and autonomy to go achieve those numbers at whatever cost they need to.
That allows them to be creative. It allows them to grow. It allows them to give you the right feedback on the resources that you need to innovate, to be better, to find better ways. It allows the business to grow and evolve on its own without your direct input. The fewer standards the better. The more meaningful they need to be.
You need to boil down your standard to the most meaningful one or two metrics by which when those metrics are achieved, you know the business is running and operating smoothly and according to your plan for the future. So please do not over standardize. Keep it simple, make it crystal clear and continue to reinforce the standard.
That's all I've got for you today. People, I would really love to hear what kind of ๐ standards you're implementing in your business right now. Are you shifting from expectations to standards
and what has that done for the way that you and your people show up every day? Drop a comment, get in contact with me. I appreciate you being here for another episode, and I'll see you next time.