Your Peak of the Week
Hey Reader,
Welcome back to Peak of the Week — where we talk about what it really takes to perform at your best. As a person. As a leader. And increasingly, as an organization.
This Week →
- What happens to high performers when the standard is invisible
- Why unclear expectations are one of the most demoralizing things you can do to someone who cares
- The difference between a skills problem and a standards problem
Read Time 4-5 minutes
She Was Trying So Hard. For What?
A few weeks ago I met with a good friend of mine who is talented, driven, genuinely invested in her work. And she got quiet for a second.
"I don't actually know if I'm doing a good job. I just keep working and hoping nobody flags anything."
She'd been in her role for almost two years.
Two years of showing up, working hard, and genuinely not knowing if any of it was landing right. Nobody pulled her aside, so she assumed she was okay. Nobody flagged anything, so she kept going. She built her entire sense of her own performance out of what wasn't being said.
Working hard in the dark is its own kind of exhausting.
And what she was missing had nothing to do with her effort, her care, her commitment. Excellent was simply never defined.
The Standard Lives In Someone's Head
In 30,000 conversations, this pattern came up on repeat.
High performers, the ones who care the most, who are most invested in doing good work, are often the most quietly demoralized by unclear standards. Because they're paying attention. They feel the ambiguity. They know something is undefined and they exhaust themselves trying to fill that gap through effort alone.
And I see this get missed, every single time…
Most organizations have standards. The leader knows what excellent looks like. The senior team has a shared picture of what good output, good process, good leadership actually means. Built up over years of working together, making judgment calls, seeing what works.
It just lives in their heads.
It never got named. Never got written down. Never got shared in a way that someone new, or someone who wasn't in the room when those mental models formed, could actually access and calibrate to.
So people guess.
And guessing is exhausting. And demoralizing. And wildly inefficient, because you end up doing the rework and the redirection and the "not quite what I was looking for" conversations over and over, for months, when what was needed was clarity once.
What Feedback Looks Like Without Standards
I see this play out in a very specific way inside organizations.
Feedback becomes a surprise.
Someone works on something for weeks, genuinely invested, genuinely trying, and then gets feedback that lands sideways. The expectation behind it was never shared before the work began. So the feedback arrives without context, without warning. Like getting graded on a test nobody told you was happening.
And over time, that pattern does something to people.
They stop investing fully upfront. Why pour everything in when the standard might shift? Why take the creative risk when you can't see what you're actually being measured against? Why stretch, really stretch, when you can't see what getting it right even looks like?
So they produce safely. Predictably. Within the narrow lane of what they're fairly certain won't get flagged.
And leaders look at that and wonder why their team has stopped being innovative.
A standards problem wears an innovation problem's face every single time.
People disengage faster from stagnation than from hard work. And they don't choose stagnation, they drift into it when the path to mastery is invisible and the cost of getting it wrong keeps arriving as surprise.
What I Know About Seeing Your Own Greatness
This is where my coaching world and the organizational work I’m doing now collapse into the same thing.
One of the things I’ve dedicated my life to is helping people see their own greatness, the gifts they carry that are so natural to them they’ve stopped recognizing them as gifts at all. The capabilities that others see clearly while the person themselves is still questioning whether they’re enough.
And what I’ve seen, in hundreds of coaching conversations, is that people cannot see their own greatness in a vacuum.
They need a mirror.
Someone, or something, that reflects back clearly: this is what you do well, this is what it looks like when you’re at your best, this is the specific thing you bring that nobody else does.
A mirror means specificity. Someone naming the thing the person themselves has stopped seeing.
The same is true inside organizations. When standards go unnamed, people default to uncertainty. And uncertainty, sustained long enough, becomes disengagement.
The most demoralizing thing you can do to someone who genuinely cares about their work…
Leaving them to guess.
That’s it. Just that.
What Mastery Requires
Mastery requires talent AND design. Hiring capable people is the beginning. What happens after determines whether that capability ever fully surfaces.
Mastery is what happens when three things are true simultaneously.
People know what excellent actually looks like, specifically, concretely. "High quality work" and "client-focused" and "strategic thinking" are values. Standards answer a different question: how would I know excellent if I saw it? How would someone new to this role know what they're actually aiming for?
People have real support for getting there, genuine enablement. Tools that match the expectations. Coaching that addresses judgment, alongside tasks. The ability to ask for help without that request being read as a sign they're struggling.
And people can see themselves getting better. Growth feels visible. You can feel it. You have a sense of what's next and some real confidence you can get there.
When all three exist, something happens that leaders often describe as "finally having a high performance culture."
Mastery is design. Consistently applied.
And when mastery is missing, when standards are invisible, support is thin, and growth feels accidental, organizations don't fail loudly.
They grind.
People stay busy. Work keeps moving. Metrics look passable. And underneath all of it, the people who care the most are exhausted, doubting themselves, recalibrating their investment downward because they cannot see a credible path to getting better at something nobody has ever clearly defined.
My friend who got quiet for a second and said she was hoping nobody flagged anything?
She deserved better than that. So does your team.
Now It's Your Turn:
Question #1: Pick one role on your team. If that person asked you today, specifically, concretely, what excellent looks like in their role, could you answer them in a way that would truly help them calibrate? Or does the standard live mostly in your head?
Question #2: Think about the last piece of feedback you gave someone that landed as a surprise to them. What does it tell you about what they had access to before they did the work? Be honest.
Feedback that lands as surprise is a signal. And the signal always points to the same place, someone was working toward a standard they had no way to see.
Standards problems are always fixable, once you decide to name the thing that’s been living in your head and make it available to the people who need it most.
Know a leader who keeps having the same performance conversations with the same people? Forward this their way. Sometimes the issue is simple. Nobody ever showed them what excellent looked like. When we know better, we do better.
Does this resonate for you today? Reply back and let me know your thoughts, I reply to every email.
Next week, pulling all of this together. Belonging. Authority. Mastery. And what it looks like when you stop fixing people and start redesigning the environment they’re working inside.
With belief in our collective rise, one person at a time,
Laura
P.S. — If your team is working hard but something feels stuck or flat, I'd love to talk about where the standard might be missing. book time here.
P.P.S. — Check out my latest podcast appearance on Reclaiming Your Hue with Kelly Kirk, where we have an honest conversation about what it really costs high-achieving women to "hold it all together". If you're looking for more support, I'd love to talk - book an Activation Session