When Excellence Becomes Expected: The Leadership Trait of Setting High Standards

What happens when high standards drive excellence or create frustration?

In this episode of Leadership Traits Decoded, Cynthia Kyriazis and Drea Martin explore the leadership trait Setting High Standards and why it plays such a critical role in team performance, accountability, and organizational success.

High standards are often viewed as a positive leadership quality, but they only create value when expectations are clearly communicated and understood. Without clarity, teams can become confused about priorities, quality expectations, and what success actually looks like.

Cynthia shares her own experiences as a self-described recovering perfectionist, discussing how leaders can avoid imposing their personal standards on others by focusing on outcomes, communication, and shared understanding. 

Together, Cynthia and Drea examine how leaders can balance excellence with practicality, helping teams pursue high-quality work without creating unnecessary pressure or frustration.

The discussion also explores how leaders can develop this trait in others through coaching, thoughtful questioning, and ongoing dialogue rather than criticism or rigid demands. Ultimately, setting high standards is less about perfection and more about creating clarity that enables people to perform at their best.

You'll Learn:

• Why setting high standards is about clarity, not perfection
•  How unclear expectations create confusion and inconsistent results
•  The difference between excellence and perfectionism in leadership
•  How managers can develop higher standards through coaching and questions
•  Why communication is the foundation of accountability and quality. 

The best leaders don't demand perfection—they create clarity, establish expectations, and help their teams consistently achieve excellence.

Ready to explore your leadership traits? Connect with us on LinkedIn or visit www.plllab.com to see how we transform leadership intelligence into return-driven action.

Transcript

Copy

Welcome And Why Traits Matter

Cynthia Kyriazis 0:00

Welcome to Leadership Traits Decoded. I'm Cynthia Kyriazis, the Chief Experience Officer at the Culture Think Tank.

Andrea Martin 0:07

And I'm Drea Martin, Chief Operating Officer of the Crucible. We are collaborative partners at Performance Leadership Learning Lab, where we transform leadership intelligence into return-driven action.

Cynthia Kyriazis 0:20

Today we're unpacking the leadership traits essential for building, investing in, and scaling successful companies. Our insights come directly from data-driven metrics within our platform's solution. So let's dive in. Hello, Andrea. Hello, how are you doing today? I'm good, I'm good. I think that maybe it would be appropriate if we let our listeners know that this is the first recording of our leadership traits decoded that we have done in person.

Andrea Martin 0:47

Yes, we're here in one room.

Cynthia Kyriazis 0:49

Yes, it's very exciting that we're looking at each other face to face. We hope it goes well, but we just wanted you, you that you, our audience, to know. So today we're going to do our leadership traits decoded, and I think what we had a discussion on was to review the leadership trait that we call setting high standards. When an individual sets high standards or not high enough, depending on what's going on, we need to know what is the upside and what is the not upside of something like that, and what anybody who feels they can have this trait themselves knows how to do in order to move forward. And as I said to you before we started the recording, this is something that I have in fact been accused of more than once. Um so I am very curious to hear about setting high standards and the the traits around that that are good and some that may be

What Setting High Standards Means

Cynthia Kyriazis 1:40

a little challenging.

Andrea Martin 1:40

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, well, I think the first thing though sets high standards kind of defines itself. Happy to kind of define quickly. So setting high standards is consistently demanding a high level of quality or achievement, which is kind of inherent in what the name of the trade is. But it's an interesting one where I think the place where we run into this the most is really in somebody who's in a leadership role where they have a team or people who report to them where there is that expectation that has to be set. And then it means they either have more of the ability to naturally set kind of higher standards, have clear expectations, make sure the quality of work being produced is as it needs to be, or if this is something that they're not as strong in, it might mean that sometimes expectations aren't as clear, or the kind of quality of work that's created isn't expected to be as high, maybe as it needs to be, for the final product to really be what the team needs it to be.

Cynthia Kyriazis 2:36

Mm-hmm. Well, that makes sense, you know, because when I think about myself and I drive myself, I don't really drive anybody crazy but myself, right? But when I supervise individuals, it can be the downside of their experience and we wouldn't want it to be that. So what kinds of things, what kinds of things happen when someone is extreme on this end of the scale when it comes maybe to themselves, but uh certainly to others on a leadership team?

High Versus Low Standards In Teams

Andrea Martin 3:02

Yeah, well, the higher extreme is probably the more positive of this, especially if the person is in a position where this is a necessary aspect of their role in order for things to get done the way that they need to get done. So the kind of higher extreme there is ideally in tandem with some other traits that would allow the expectations that are being set. So these high standards to be well understood, kind of unanimously agreed upon in the team as the kind of the necessary quality that everyone's striving to achieve. And if that's the case, then this is a very healthy trait. It's great that this exists because it means that people are not only striving to achieve this, but also understand, collaborate, and have kind of the necessary environment to achieve the high standards that are being set. On the other extreme, if this is very, very low, the potential problems that can occur are, I mean, overall lack of clarity, lack of maybe somebody comes forward and they say something is done, but there's a lack of agreement about whether it is done or what needs to happen, or maybe even kind of a disconnect between the expectation, then. So somebody's either not finishing things the way they need to be because they didn't know it had to be better, or the actual final quality of the product is not as high as it needs to be, kind of that work product.

Cynthia Kyriazis 4:18

So so what's interesting in what you said there to me is sometimes it is there in within their own mind, but sometimes if somebody doesn't get clear, isn't delegated too clearly or doesn't understand the the outcome, uh that could cause the same kind of uh issue if you will.

Andrea Martin 4:33

Aaron Powell Right. And I think that's kind of an a nuance of this trait is that it's not just about how this impacts the leader themselves, but also how it impacts the entire team around them. Because if they're not setting high standards, not only is this something where like overall quality work product on their team is going to be lower than it needs to be, therefore there will be issues likely with clients, with kind of whatever market they're working with. But on the other hand, there's probably going to be some disconnect, some lack of kind of understanding within the overall group that then makes it so that it's hard to, where do you put the blame, where do you put the kind of the responsibility of the expectation setting there? So that's kind of where the leader not having high sets, high standards and needing to, especially when high standards are a necessity of the role or of the environment that the individual's in, becomes a bigger problem.

Cynthia Kyriazis 5:22

So as frequently it is with our discussions, it comes down to clarity of communication and understanding what it is that we need our behavior to do to support the communication we want to we will eventually have, yeah.

Andrea Martin 5:36

Definitely. Okay. Yeah.

Delegation Clarity Beats Perfectionism

Andrea Martin 5:38

I'm curious because you mentioned you have very high set standards. Um how do you navigate maybe some of the nuance? Because I think a big piece of this is not just how does this leader set the expectations for their team on the whole, but also how does this leader then work with other people that maybe don't have sets high standards? Or how do you decide then what is worth pursuing and what is maybe kind of getting caught up in this trait?

Cynthia Kyriazis 6:01

Well, I've learned over the years to trade to train myself in terms of if I was doing this, how would I do it in my own head. That in turn takes it something away from my behavior and moves me into thinking it really doesn't matter how I would do it. What I need to know is what are the items that need to happen. So I have to climb into my own head and get clear about these are the three things that must happen and these are the four things that would be nice if they happened.

Andrea Martin 6:27

Okay.

Cynthia Kyriazis 6:28

So when I get really clear on the top three things that if this person doesn't know what I need from them or the organization needs from them, if I don't communicate that, then they don't have they're not, they don't know what they're shooting for. Right. So I have have accepted the fact that that's how I am with my own thing. Try not to drive people crazy with my own thing. But when it comes to supervision, I do make sure that I'm clear and I open the dialogue in terms of going back and forth around what did you hear, you know, how can I help and so on and so forth. Right. One of the classes that I taught that was quite popular was something called the delegate rule of eight.

Andrea Martin 7:03

Oh, interesting.

Cynthia Kyriazis 7:04

And that entire those entire eight steps had to do with gaining clarity about what you want, what was expected, what was needed, what they heard, how to do it, and have that dialogue. Okay. It was just these eight steps. And that is part of what it's a large part of when I outlined that for a training mechanism. It was a large part of how I settled myself and saying, if you want to drive yourself crazy, that's all right. But this person doesn't care if it and they don't need to care, and it doesn't need to be perfect. There's very few things that need to be perfect, except maybe getting people on the moon. I don't know. We're not engineers, we're here as leaders to help help build through a team to make things better for everyone. So that's how I do it. I just learn to self-regulate.

Andrea Martin 7:43

Yeah. No, great. I mean, that's a helpful kind of frame, especially for someone maybe listening who experiences that maybe they set higher standards than people around them might expect or maybe like sometimes. Um making sure it doesn't fall in kind of that perfectionism trap. Yes, for sure. Letting things be a high quality, kind of high level of quality without it kind of derailing or kind of things that are close enough to complete not being enough.

Cynthia Kyriazis 8:09

Well said, Andrea. Well said. You spoke to my perfectionism that I'm recovering a perfectionist. I am recovering. So thank you so much for sharing the upside and the downside and really what's involved in moving forward with that trait because there is an upside to it. It's all in how we do it.

Andrea Martin 8:25

Right. I'm curious, kind of one last area for actually developing this

Coaching Low Standards With Questions

Andrea Martin 8:30

trait. If somebody wants to, for example, I recently was working with a fund that was placing a CEO candidate and we were evaluating, and one of their finalists had lower sets high standards. And it was something that I raised just as a point for them to dig into a little bit, because if somebody is, let's say, below median in this area, so we're not talking average levels, skills, abilities, set high standards, but truly a little bit lower in this space, not something they prioritize. What can that individual do to make sure that they're either focusing their development energy there or kind of mitigating this potentially with some other areas they can focus on? I know we talked about communication already, so alignment there, communication helps, but what else could they do?

Cynthia Kyriazis 9:11

Well, for me, the individual trying to resolve for themselves it can be a difficult road, especially if they didn't see it before. It would seem to me that the supervisor or the manager over this person be very adept at asking questions to uncover the level and depth of how this person is thinking about that issue or the resolution of that issue. It's about asking more than telling. So that if there is this gray area, or if there is something that seems to be not quite as important as I think they feel about it, you continue to ask questions to drill down, and hopefully that person will get an aha light, and if they don't, then it's the manager's responsibility to develop that person by asking the questions, not forcing it, not pushing it over, not demanding it, any of the rest. It's trying to understand how they're thinking, and which gives you the opportunity to not only answer, ask the question, but to share knowledge, to have that person think about something they haven't. Because that person is in, I wouldn't say a rut, I would not say that, but that person is in a habit of thinking the same way. And unless there is a challenge with an understanding of why the challenge is there, very little will change. And so the manager will consistently have to do over and over and over again the same thing. Just take your hat on and dig a little leap little deeper. Just dig a little deeper as what is causing that or what what the constraint is in the mind of the individual that needs to be discussed or overcome or unaware or whatever, whatever it is. It goes back, I'm sorry, it goes back to the communication thing.

Andrea Martin 10:43

No, definitely. And that that completely makes sense. And that's interesting. I think sometimes that's this notion of like traits in particular and the way that we measure them is really a this is the kind of state of time. This is a snapshot of what's going on for the person right now. So looking at like whether or not someone just doesn't have experience in this area right now or it hasn't been a priority historically in the roles that they've been in, doesn't mean that they aren't able to or able to kind of hear the questions, dive into it, and realize that it needs to be a priority, priority for this space or something that is prioritized. That makes sense too, of like the can you guide them there? And if you can't, the nice thing at least about kind of the investor model is that if your CEO of a Porco is not going to be setting high standards themselves, you can set them as the fund if that's the way you function. So there's nuance there of it could still be a great fit, just kind of understanding a little bit more about who you're working with and what that means for the responsibilities you have to set.

Cynthia Kyriazis 11:39

So yeah, thank you. Interesting. Well, thanks for that. That was fun. Awesome. Yeah, all right. See you next time.

Resources And Closing

Cynthia Kyriazis 11:45

Thanks for listening to this episode of Leadership Traits Decoded. You'll be able to find all our episodes on the Performance Leadership Learning Lab website at www.plab.com. Or you can listen on your favorite streaming platform.

Andrea Martin 12:02

We'll be back soon to explore the next essential trait. Until then, feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn if you have any questions or ideas.