My honest advice on how to raise your team’s bar
In a Nutshell
High-performance culture is defined horizontally by who gets removed, not vertically by who gets promoted. The biggest limiter of team quality is the mediocre middle, whose slow work and low standards drag everyone down more than true underperformers. Leaders must act quickly on known issues—removing B-players to keep A-players—because the tolerance for mediocrity directly determines the quality of talent attracted and the company's growth trajectory.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Culture is the rules that govern reinforcement, aka reward and punishment, in a business. These rules are often spoken and unspoken, with most being unspoken. People learn them through action firsthand and observation secondhand. If someone shows up to a meeting late and no one says anything, they learn through observation that showing up late is acceptable. If they then show up and get scolded, they learn an additive rule: if that person shows up late, nothing happens, but if I do, I get in trouble.
A latticework of understanding develops about where rewards and punishments occur, and behavior orients around that. When this happens systemically, the systemic behavior is described as the culture of the business. These are the spoken and unspoken rules of what gets rewarded and what gets punished.
To create a culture, leaders must model the behavior they want and reward as chief reinforcement officers. The challenge is that culture happens 24/7 365 and occurs in teams the leader isn't involved with, requiring cascading of behaviors through leadership.
The biggest signal for creating a high-performance team, even more than promotions, is who gets fired. Culture is defined horizontally, not vertically. The goal is not to make all employees like the executive team, which would be ridiculous given different career stages and roles. The focus is raising the bar horizontally within each department or function.
In a customer service team, one of the easiest ways to improve culture is removing people who underperform. Culture is built from the bottom up, meaning the worst person on the team becomes the bar that has been signed off on as acceptable. Every time mediocre people are let go, the team responds positively, expressing relief that leadership saw the issue.
Nothing is more demotivating to a winner than being forced to work with a loser. Great teams like SEAL teams versus the general army achieve elite status through elimination, taking large groups and removing people who don't meet standards.
True losers get removed because they're painful, but the people limiting business are the mediocre middle who clog operations through slow work, mediocre output requiring rework, and clock-in-clock-out behavior. This creates mediocre organizations, which represents the vast majority of businesses.
Rewards need to be created for letting go of bad people. With 200+ people at acquisition.com, the leader can't meet everyone, so consistent reinforcement is needed to raise the bar. Raising the bar means lowering tolerance for mediocre work, not giving nine chances but a few before action is taken.
The Harvard model has high acceptance barriers but once admitted, people don't get kicked out. A better approach is slightly easier entry with rigorous output-based judgment, since ability to judge humans from conversations and documents is limited, but ability to judge output is much better.
Good salespeople can sell their excuses. Napoleon preferred lucky generals because even with two generals, one unlucky and one lucky, the lucky one was preferred. When someone always has things go wrong, it's usually not luck against them but their inability to create conditions for success and maximize likelihoods.
Exceptional salespeople are identified within 14 days, often within 7 days. If only A's are wanted, not B's, then B's must be removed. This may seem heartless, but assuming training has occurred, output can be seen clearly.
The most important lesson learned from wealthy entrepreneurs is that the tolerance of the entrepreneur for mediocrity and the quality of the team they surround themselves with is 100% correlated with the directional growth of the company. These factors are directly correlated: high-quality people result from not tolerating mediocre people, since nothing turns off high-quality people like low-quality people.
As success increases, better people can be attracted, which means what was once good becomes mediocre. People need to grow with the organization or leave. The biggest difference between current self and 15 years ago is who gets labeled as good enough. Earlier on, the bar had to be lower due to inability to attract better talent, but as track record improves, recalibration is necessary.
The question to ask is whether team quality has improved since starting. If yes and the business has grown, consider how high the bar will be in 5 years and how quickly current standards can be pulled from that future state into the present.
Better teams are built through elimination. Getting out everybody who underperforms leaves only awesome people. To increase IQ per square foot, remove everything that is not high IQ. One person at 80 IQ draws the average down more than adding another 140 IQ person raises it. With three 140s and one 80, hiring another 140 improves the average less than removing the 80.
The frame for making hard decisions is choosing between local and global empathy. Local empathy means having empathy for the individual person, while global empathy means having empathy for the business and everyone else on the team. Shifting from local to global means dealing with local pain while everyone else gets global benefit. The reverse gives local benefit while everyone else suffers global pain.
Leaders must be willing to take the emotional pain of doing what's required to protect and preserve the culture of high performance. Use the frame that taking on guilt and pain prevents everyone else from having to suffer. Even with AI, most businesses will still deal with people, and the messiness of emotions makes decisions difficult.
The delay between knowing what needs to be done and actually doing it is what delays success, growth, and the desired team and culture. The best entrepreneurs act almost immediately when they know what needs to be done. This immediate action is why some high-level entrepreneurs get reputations as sociopaths, but they honor the individual while also honoring the rest of the team.
Building SEAL Team Six or high-performance teams comes from cutting the bottom more than finding people at the top. The more concentrated high performers are at the top, the more they will attract other high performers.
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