Setting High Standards

In his 2017 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote about setting high standards at Amazon. Is setting high standards coachable or in-born? It is very much coachable and should be ingrained in the culture. If we see people around us do great things with high standards, we are motivated to do the same.?

What if no-one is watching us do the work? Most of the time, in fully remote and distributed environments, no one watches what we do. We are responsible for our own work. We work with high standards not because someone else is watching over us, but because we get great satisfaction from doing it that way.?

How long does it take to acquire this skill? It does take a lot of effort. Oftentimes, we underestimate the amount of time it takes to be a great player. For example, if you play chess or tennis at the national level, you can’t just practice for a couple of weeks and say you are going to win a game. You need to work hard, practice and set high standards for yourself.?

Jeff also shares another great example of meeting notes (memo). If you just write for an hour or two and think you will have a great meeting, it does not work that way. You have to write, reiterate, share it with your teammates, get inputs and keep refining the content. This is what leads to a great meeting. This is setting high standards.

I might be great at marketing, however if I need to set high standards in writing code, I need to practice. Just because I am good at something, it does not mean that I will set high standards? in everything I do. Do not underestimate the time it takes and effort you need to put in to set high standards. When you work with your team, insist on high standards. This will improve your quality of work and the overall quality of the team.

Half of your problems will be solved when you bring on the right people to the team. When I interview candidates, I make it a point to take notes. I also tell the candidate that I am taking notes so they don’t think that I am doing something else instead of focusing on the interview. Today, even if we are in a dire need to close a position, we do not hire in a rush. However, in the past, I have made the mistake of compromising on the quality of the people we bring on board. A person we were interviewing might have been referred by someone I know and I? did not want to disappoint them by not hiring the candidate. Even if they were not great, we made the offer. This cost us dearly. With experience, we changed and set a high bar for recruiting. We keep raising the bar. This helps in setting high standards for us.

How do you set high standards within your team?

Karthik Chidambaram.