My Origin Story with Standards

The when, why, and how

After I published my last article, I received the following email from a friend named Adam.

In my response to him, I mentioned that I briefly addressed these questions on my Substack about page. Here’s an excerpt:

In my experience, I’ve discovered that having expectations in life and work were the biggest obstacle to my joy, happiness, fulfillment, meaning, and however I defined “success.”

Over time, I learned that this obstacle could be removed entirely by having a standards mindset, both in life and at work.

My passion for this idea began in 2013 when I started my company. It has been the single biggest driver of our survival, growth, effectiveness, productivity, and profitability.

In 2016, I began applying standards to my life. It has since become the single biggest driver of my happiness, meaning, and fulfillment.

I then realized that, since my plan is to write a book someday on the standards mindset, it would help to think through my entire journey with standards for the book’s eventual opening. These two colliding forces - Adam’s email and the book - inspired me to write this article on my origin story.

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WHEN IT ALL BEGAN

In 2012, I founded The Junto Institute, a company that would help startup founders rapidly build their leadership skills through a nine-month program. Junto’s curriculum integrated deep mentorship, personal tutoring, emotional intelligence training, and twelve classes (today, our service offering focuses exclusively on emotional intelligence coaching and training).

Along with my co-founder, Catherine, we launched the inaugural Junto program in early 2013, and on March 1, held the second of those 12 classes. The session was titled “Recruiting, Hiring and Managing,” and the instructor was Jay Goltz, a well-known and successful small business owner in Chicago.

I had watched Jay’s entrepreneurial journey from a distance for many years and had gotten to know him casually. While he was - and remains - charmingly opinionated and steadfast in his beliefs, I was confident Jay’s shared experiences would be highly valuable for our clients. In our prep meetings, my confidence was rewarded by the many stories and principles Jay said he wanted to share.

Jay Goltz (standing) during his Junto class in 2013

Much of what took place at that time is easy to recall: I still have the emails we exchanged, his outline for the class, and our team’s notes from the session itself. Furthermore, the class is etched in my memory for the emotional resonance it had, both personally and professionally. One part of that resonance was how Jay opened the section on “managing people.”

He shared his belief that a company’s culture is based on expectations and standards. As he relayed the many dimensions of leading an organization - how far you go for customers, what you expect from employees, how they treat each other, how much money you want to make, etc. - he emphasized that it was all based on the expectations and standards the leaders have.

He then returned to his own experience and said in what could be referred to as a mic-drop moment, “I learned to lower my expectations and raise my standards.”

As a result, Jay said his job as owner and CEO got easier, and that “the business runs itself, the payoff is worth it, and the joy of success will far outweigh the bitterness of the nasty things we have to do as bosses.”

STANDARDS AND MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE

As Jay finished that portion of the class, my mind was blown. I started thinking about my own roles as a leader, partner, parent, and friend. I started realizing that so many of my frustrations and disappointments were because of expectations I had in those relationships. And I started imagining how different that might be if I lowered my expectations and raised my standards.

After the class, Catherine and I went to lunch to debrief. One of the points I kept bringing up was Jay talking about expectations and standards, and how I wanted to use the idea for Junto’s operation. From what I recall, it got to the point where I said, “Forget about lowering expectations and raising standards. I want us to have only standards and no expectations.”

Fortunately, Catherine bought into the idea, and from that day forward, we started setting standards across our operation and using the language consistently in our conversations. Over time, I’m confident that it was the reason why The Junto Institute became so efficient, consistent, and predictable, especially for a small business that had just been launched.

Within a couple years, the word “standards” was in our core values. The idea influenced our recruiting and hiring. All the documentation Catherine created for our systems and processes were based on standards. And the language became central to Junto’s culture. Over time, people new to our community started telling me that we seemed to be a much bigger business than we really were. Looking back, I believe it was because we adopted this remarkable idea.

STANDARDS AND MY PERSONAL LIFE

For the purposes of this article, I dug into my journal entries from 2013 on. Fortunately, most of my journal is in digital form so I could do a keyword search. The earliest mention of the word “standards” is from September 16, 2014 when I wrote that I have “changed personal standards of people in my life.”

The next mentions of “standards” come in 2016 when I was experiencing significant personal growth and wrote about how I wanted to start setting standards across other parts of my life such as my daily routine, my physical and mental and emotional health, and my time outside of work.

Over the next few years, I implemented standards related to all these areas and started noticing that I was feeling happier despite two significant challenges: the decline of my marriage and the departure of my co-founder. Based on journal entries and my memory, I did feel negative emotions such as frustration, sadness, disappointment, annoyance, and anger.

But during that period from 2016-2019, I started experiencing greater fulfillment, meaning, and joy (I even began saying what became a daily mantra - “I’m happier today than I was yesterday”). That’s because I used the experiences of losing my life and work partners as springboards to replace my expectations with standards.

THE ACCELERATION

In early 2021, I made a decision that rapidly made standards a bigger and bigger part of my life. Up to that point, virtually all my conversations on the topic were with individuals or in small groups. And in almost every case, the response was positive.

With that trend came increasing confidence that there was something worth sharing more widely. So I decided to start presenting on the topic of expectations and standards to Junto clients. At the time, our service offering was live e-learning sessions for our client’s employees, usually with speakers who were seasoned executives and subject-matter experts. We called these sessions “roundtables.”

I decided to lead a roundtable myself on “Lowering Expectations and Raising Standards,” and 15 people signed up for the first one on May 25, 2021. The poll results were positive enough to repeat the session, and for the next two-plus years, I held the same roundtable on a quarterly basis for our clients.

Since I was not only thinking and speaking on the topic of standards during this period but getting positive feedback from those who attended the roundtables, I began to implement standards across every part of my life and work. I started talking about them with anyone who would listen. I started using the word when I discussed restaurant menus, traffic patterns, generational differences, political parties and candidates, sports teams, and so on.

And in late 2021, I decided that I would someday write a book on the topic.

AN INSPIRING CONVERSATION

I had been toying with the idea for some time, and realized there was someone in my life whose opinion would give me the clarity I was seeking. I scheduled a call for December 2, 2021 with a dear friend of mine named Jeff with whom I have had a decades-long mutual mentoring relationship.

I wanted to get his thoughts on the idea of standards and the idea of writing a book, especially since he himself has published one and knows many authors as well. During our conversation, Jeff uttered two simple things that deeply inspired me.

The first was, “This is original thought leadership.” And the second was, “There’s a gospel to it.”

Those lines gave me the confidence that the idea of standards needed to be shared. Those lines gave me the motivation to take Jay Goltz’s experience to an entirely different level. And those lines gave me the inspiration to start this very newsletter…which someday is going to turn into a book.