Picture a new hire at Chick-fil-A on their first solo shift.
Two weeks earlier, someone in the interview looked them in the eye and said, “Every time a guest thanks us, we say ‘my pleasure.’ Every single time. We take it seriously enough that we will let someone go over it. Are you comfortable with that?” They wanted the job. They said yes. Expectation set.
Then came training, where they agreed to all of it. Commitment made.
Now they are on the floor. A guest says thank you to a coworker, and three feet away, that coworker who has been there four years says, “No problem,” and keeps working.
In that single moment, that new hire learns everything they need to know about the company. Not what was said in training. What is tolerated in the day-to-day.
That moment is probably happening inside your business right now, and almost nobody is watching it.
The Big Idea
Most owners believe they have a people problem. What they usually have is a phase problem. There are three phases in every employee journey: the expectation phase, the commitment phase, and the execution phase. The first two are easy. The third is where standards go to die, because execution is not a moment. It is a daily choice made by people you are not watching. Get the third phase right and the first two finally start to matter.
Phase 1: Expectation Happens in the Interview, Not the Handbook
Most interviews are vetting exercises. You are trying to find out whether the person can do the work and whether you like them.
Elite organizations do something different. They use the interview to state the standards out loud, name the consequences of not meeting them, and ask the candidate to accept both before an offer is ever extended.
Read that Chick-fil-A question again. “We say my pleasure, every single time, and we will let someone go over it. Are you okay with that?” That is not a screening question. That is a contract, agreed to before day one.
Almost every frustration you have with your people traces back to unclear expectations. Not bad attitudes. Not a bad labor market. Unclear expectations.
When was the last time a candidate walked out of one of your interviews knowing exactly what would get them fired?
If you are not sure, that is worth thinking about, because it tells you how clear the expectation actually was on the day they started.
This is why the Next Level Accountability Chart® defines every seat by its Mission, its Most Critical Outcome®, and its Obsessions rather than by a list of duties. When a seat is defined by the outcome it produces, the expectation is no longer a matter of interpretation.
Phase 2: Commitment Is Easy, Which Is Exactly Why It Fools You
Training is the commitment phase. Here is the uncomfortable truth about it: during training, you can get almost anyone to commit to almost anything.
Tell a new server they will say “my pleasure” to guests 200 times in a shift. They might think it is insane. And they will still say, “Well, if that is how you do it here, then that is what I will do.”
“Nobody argues during training. That is why a yes in the commitment phase is not proof of anything.”
That yes feels like buy-in. It is not. It is compliance under supervision, and the two look identical right up until the supervision goes away.
How would you know, right now, whether the commitments your team made during training are still being kept today? Not whether you believe they are. How would you actually know?
This is where Optimized Playbooks earn their keep. Not binders nobody opens, but short Process Playbooks that map the steps that must happen every time, backed by short video work instructions recorded by the people already doing the work. When the standard is documented, visible, and easy to reach, holding it stops being a personality contest between a manager and an employee.
Then close the loop. A fifteen to thirty minute conversation at the end of the first week, the second week, the fourth week, the sixth week, the eighth week. Start with core values and then move into performance, asking three specific questions before you wrap up:
- Is there anything you need that you are not getting?
- Is anything frustrating you or making it hard to work here?
- Is there anything I am doing that makes it difficult to work for me?
Phase 3: Execution Is Where You Find Out What You Actually Tolerate
Execution starts the first time someone works unsupervised. And it is decided almost entirely by what they observe, not by what they were told.
They look across the room and see someone skipping the step. They hear somebody deviating from the “my pleasure” response. And they draw the only rational conclusion available: all of that stuff they had me commit to was theater. Once I am comfortable here, I can do what I want.
“Every standard you let slip becomes the new standard.”
That is not a training failure. It is a leadership failure, and it compounds silently. I use the Chick-fil-A analogy because they do this better than just about any organization I have seen, and it shows in their results.
What got skipped in your company last week that nobody said anything about, and who was watching when it happened?
Most owners can name the moment. Very few can name what they did about it.
The fix is to make performance visible and to keep it visible. When I was CEO of Erath Veneer, we had eight production teams across four production lines on two shifts. Every morning we tallied the prior day’s output by line and shift and printed a bar graph for each team with a heavy black line at their goal. Red bar if they missed. Green bar if they hit it. A rolling week of those graphs hung on the wall by the break room door where every single employee walked past them.
Quality samples were reviewed each morning by the production manager and the sales manager together, so operations could never police itself. Any mis-manufactured product came off that team’s totals, which killed the incentive to trade quality for speed.
Nobody had to be the enforcer. The standard enforced itself, every day, in public. That is what Scoreboards are for, and it is the operational heart of a Culture of Performance.
The Part Most Owners Will Not Say Out Loud
I need to be honest about why standards actually slip, because it is usually not the employee.
In the early years of my executive career, I was far too slow to move on people who were underperforming or who were clearly not a fit. I held on to them because I could not see clearly how I would replace them. I told myself I was being patient. I was actually afraid of the gap.
You will get what you tolerate, and what you tolerate you endorse.
The real irony is that your high performers are the ones paying for it. As Nick Saban says, “Mediocre people do not like high achievers, and high achievers do not like mediocre people.” Every day you let a standard slide, you are not being kind to the under-performer. You are taxing your A-Players to subsidize someone who never really accepted the deal in the first place.
Who on your team is operating below the standard you say you have, and which of your best people have already noticed?
When coaching conversations are not producing movement, you need a defined path rather than a slow drift: Quarterly Calibrations to keep everyone honest about where they stand, and Coaching (Corrective Action) Plans to either coach someone up or coach them out, with the emotion and the storytelling removed.
What Does This Cost You If Nothing Changes?
This is the question most owners skip, so I want to ask it directly.
If nothing changes about the third phase, who is teaching your standards three years from now? Because it will not be you. It will be whoever nobody corrected.
If you had to run this company for another three years exactly the way it ran last week, with the same tolerances, the same quiet slips, and the same people watching you decide not to say anything, would you be okay with that?
And whose choice is it, really, whether you settle for that or not?
Why a One Size Fits All Approach Will Not Fix This
Before the obvious answer, one honest question.
If you have already put a framework or an operating system in place at some point, and your standards still slipped anyway, what do you think actually caused that?
Most owners who answer that honestly discover that nobody was willing to be the first person to hold the line in public. And a prescriptive operating system cannot solve that for you, because it hands you a template and tells you to run it.
Your standards are not generic. What happens in the moment your new hire first looks across the room at their peers is specific and unique to your business, your culture, and the people already in it.
Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations® is a principles-based, flexible framework you follow, not a rigid system you implement. Working through Great People, an Inspiring Purpose, Optimized Playbooks, a Culture of Performance, and Growing Profits and Cash Flow, you build a custom business operating system that is tailored to your company, based on principles, not prescriptions. The framework adapts to your business. Not the other way around.
“Standards are not what you set. Standards are what you hold.”
What This Means for You Starting Now
Three phases. Three very different jobs.
- Expectation. Set the standard and the consequence in the interview, before the offer. Define every seat by outcomes, not activity. Ask the applicant if they are comfortable working under these expectations.
- Commitment. Treat training as the place where standards get documented and agreed to, and remember that a yes under supervision is not evidence of anything.
- Execution. Make performance visible daily, hold the line publicly, and address the first slip immediately, because the first slip, if not immediately corrected, is the one that sets the new standard.
Most companies are competent at the first two and quietly negligent about the third. That gap is the entire distance between average and elite, and the third phase is the one most within your control.
The only real question is whether you know what is actually being tolerated inside your company right now.
