FIELD GUIDE NO. 10
Performance
Standards, Gaps, and the Team You Actually Have.
Someone on your team is underperforming and you’ve been letting it slide. Or the middle of your team is coasting and nobody has said so. Or your best person is quietly being harvested instead of developed. In every case, the conversation you’re avoiding starts further back than you think: with a standard that was never written down. This guide gives you 9 practices, 6 for your team and 3 for you, and a diagnostic that tells you which kind of gap you’re actually looking at.
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Every practice, taken apart.
Each of the 9 practices follows the same anatomy: the pattern I see most in coaching, the tool you can run this week, a worked example, the trap that catches most leaders, the coaching questions that expose it, one experiment to run in 48 hours, and a 30-day build. Plus the real rooms where it shows up: the director failing a standard that only ever existed in your head, the coaster nobody has named, the star whose behavior has never carried a price.
THE STANDARD,
WRITTEN DOWN
THE GAP,
DIAGNOSED
THE MIRROR,
TURNED ON YOU
Most performance problems are standards problems wearing a person costume. The Standard Sheet puts what good looks like on 1 page per direct report, in terms a stranger could verify, and then turns it into a conversation. If they couldn’t write your sheet from memory a month later, you have a document, not a standard.
Every gap is clarity, capability or commitment, and a 4th belongs to you: structure. The treatments are opposites. Pressure fixes nothing but a commitment gap, and a hard conversation aimed at a clarity gap punishes someone for failing a test they were never shown. The Gap Read tells you which one you’re holding before you say a word.
Your team already runs performance management on you, without a system and without telling you the results. The last 3 practices give you the system they never will: your own standard, your own gaps given a real diagnosis, and the read on your performance at altitude, which is a different thing from your performance.
How to use it.
Take the Gap Read about 1 real person, on paper, from evidence in the last 90 days. It sends you to the practice your situation needs. Run that practice, run the experiment, use it somewhere real.
Start with the standard, because no other practice is fair to run without it.
One practice. 48 hours. Come back. Then find the next one.
Part of The Right Altitude Field Guides — see the full series or start with the flagship The Right Altitude