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"You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards."
- Brian Tracy

By Michael Masterson

If you read everything in the mainstream media about management or leadership, you'll see a lot of advice about making your employees happy.

Listen to their problems and concerns.

Create a positive atmosphere.

Give them the resources they need and leave them alone.

Inspire them.

Cheer for them.

Be their best friend.

I like it when people who work for me like me. But I don't encourage it.

It seems the whole point of running a business is to focus your energies and attention on some worthy, profitable goal and get your employees to do the same. If you diffuse that objective things are likely to go wrong.

A good thing to do in business that'll make you almost immediately unpopular is to set high standards.

Most people don't like high standards, because they create a lot of work.
Especially the kind of work that nobody likes: The do-it-over-again kind.

Let's say you're the publisher of a sports magazine. You've to put together 70 pages of editorial every month by a very definite date. To get that accomplished, you create a schedule of a dozen deadlines. You give every writer of every essay ample time to submit his drafts, have them edited, revise them and then make final submissions.

Now, what do you do if 24 hours before the deadline, half of the articles are good but not great? Do you accept it as "good enough for now" and send out a memo suggesting ways to make things go better next time? Or do you call everybody in at 4:30 p.m. and tell them if they want to keep their jobs they have to work till midnight?

Setting high standards will make you a somewhat disliked boss/leader.
Enforcing high standards will make you positively despised.

Don't tell me that good management means creating a system in which crisis intervention is unnecessary. If you believe that kind of thing, you are either a teacher, a consultant or unemployed.

In the real world, getting from good to great requires extraordinary effort. It demands more time than you want, more energy than you have, and more cooperation than any normal person can be expected to contribute.

If you ever hope to achieve anything great you're going to have to establish and maintain high standards for your employees. And when you do, you're going to have to live with the fact that some of them won't like you.

They say that Thomas Edison redid his most-famous experiment something like 6,000 times before he could get the electric light to glow. I can only imagine how unpopular he must have been with the men who worked for him. If paying attention to them and their needs had been a top priority for him, I think it's fair to say that someone else - sometime later - would have given the world electrical illumination.