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The Consistency of Standards

Is there anything more difficult, in living or leading, than remaining consistent when times get tough? The only thing I can think of that rivals it is remaining consistent when times are fruitful. 

It’s the early 2000’s, my coaching career is just getting started, and I’m thinking I’m pretty good at this coaching thing. My first few years we had moderate success which I, of course, attributed to my brilliance on the sidelines. It felt pretty good being so smart. 

Year four is turning out to be a different story. To my surprise, I’m not quite as smart as I thought. Our five wins through twenty-one games was clear proof in case I needed it. I didn’t - I could feel it. Nothing I did worked to create the immediate result I was chasing. Yelling didn’t work. Patience didn’t work. The new plays didn’t work. The junk defense didn’t work. I was miserable so I did the one thing most of us coaches are experts at: I made our players miserable too. At least for the first half of the year.

About half way through the season I realized something I had been blind to: I’m comparing our team to teams of older, more talented players … with a better coach. The next opponent set the standard for us at that point. And, unfortunately, that standard was one we were not prepared to meet. That external comparison will never fully go away, but nothing says we have to prioritize it - especially if it’s not helping us become our best. 

This revelation led me to adjusting to an internal evaluation of our team’s performance. Instead of focusing on lag measures like the final score, we would prioritize lead measures like ball security, shot selection, rebounding and touches among teammates. These are things that will give us the best opportunity to win games now and in the future. Not to mention, they’re within our control. Winning the game was clearly not. 

While the disappointment of losing games never dissipated, the satisfaction of growth and forward movement could be felt. We established a new set of high standards. The objective of winning games never went away, and we continued to fail at it, but we began to see and feel progress through our standards. 

I was unaware of it at the time, but this was a significant transition for our program. We had gone from a program aiming for a moving target, our next opponent, to a program fixed on a stable mark: our own standards.

Consistency quickly followed.

Why Should We Care?
A few years later, we found the other side of the standard coin. Competing was no longer a problem, we were consistently winning games by large margins. Rather than allowing our performance to fluctuate with the talent of our opponents, we maintained our focus on performing to our standards. 

While standards are mentioned by many of the highest performing teams, it seems the real magic in them often goes unstated. Standards are so powerful because they are the golden pathway to consistency. See, contrary to what most think, it’s not the standards that make you great, it’s the consistency they offer.

Consistency is what the best have and what the good and average fail to fully value. It’s easy to become distracted by the external comparison and allure of momentary brilliance. We are flooded with opportunities to allow them to take the wheel of our focus. 

Elite leaders recognize the distinction between standards and comparison-based successes like winning games and corporate rankings: standards are controllable. To the best leaders it’s not a subtle difference. It’s a glaring one. And, we can only be consistent with the things we can control.

With our focus on our standards, where we are squarely in our circle of control, we tap into the consistency all great teams operate with.

REAL TALK - Action Steps
So, the obvious questions: how do we create standards and how do we operate by them? Good questions. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Standards are actions, not outcomes.
  
  • We control our actions. We influence our outcomes. There is a drastic difference in the level of consistency this distinction provides. Set your standards as actions that most often lead to the desired outcome. It may take some digging to determine the root behaviors to focus on, but the reflection is well worth it. Our actions lead us to our outcomes.
    

• It’s the 20% that matters, not the 80%.
  
  • Commit your time and efforts to the most important 20%. You probably can’t just forget about the rest of it, but you can come a lot closer than most people do. The elimination of the 80% brings clarity and certainty to the 20%. Find the actions that drive this 20%. Those are your standards.
    

• The standard is the goal.
  
  • All reflection, assessment, and evaluation should be done through the lens of the standards. The results should be secondary. If the desired results are not being achieved or progress isn’t being made towards them, then adjust the standards. The goal is always to fulfill the standards.
    

Our standards are actions that are fully within our control. This control fuels one of the most critical attributes of every great team: consistency. And, with most teams, it’s a daily fight.

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