Most organizations love values. Values are clean. They look good on walls. They feel aspirational.
Standards are less popular. Standards are specific. They feel enforceable. They force someone to disappoint someone else.
Yet when I walk into organizations struggling with performance, the problem is rarely a lack of values. It’s a lack of shared standards.
People can recite the values and still tolerate sloppy execution. Leaders can praise integrity and still accept chronic missed deadlines. Teams can claim “excellence” and still ship work that everyone knows isn’t ready.
That gap is where cynicism gets born.
I’ve started thinking of standards as the operational form of values. Values are what you claim matters. Standards are what you refuse to normalize.
When standards are unclear, coaching becomes personal. Every correction feels like opinion. Every request feels negotiable. Every feedback conversation becomes emotionally charged because the employee isn’t sure whether they’re being evaluated against a real benchmark or a manager’s mood.
When standards are clear, coaching becomes lighter. Conversations get less dramatic because the leader is pointing to something shared, not inventing rules in the moment.
This matters in change work, too. Change fails when people sense that “this will blow over.” The fastest way to signal seriousness isn’t a speech. It’s a standard that holds.
I once asked a leadership team a simple question: “What are you currently tolerating that your future strategy cannot survive?”
The room got quiet. Not because they didn’t know. Because they did.
That question is a CoIQChange question. It’s competence intelligence applied to organizational reality. It takes performance coaching beyond individual development and into the terrain of culture.
If your organization wants a coaching culture that drives execution, not just engagement, start with standards. Not a hundred of them. A few that truly matter, and that leaders are willing to uphold.
That’s difficult work. It’s also where results start to show up.
