When "Good Work" Lowers the Bar

There was a moment running my business that I never talked about, but it happened almost every time we won a project.

A proposal would come in signed. A win! The kind of win that you work at for weeks or months. I’d open the email, read it, feel that quick hit of satisfaction… and then I’d mark it back to unread. The second I let myself fully take it in was the moment it was over. And whether I liked it or not, it was already time to move on to the next one.

I didn’t have language for it at the time, but I was feeling something that sits underneath how leaders operate.

The mistake is that we treat excellence like something you arrive at. Like there’s a level you reach where you can finally say, this is it. I’m excellent now! But it never feels that way, especially when you’re the one responsible for what comes next.

So I started to wonder about that tension. Why does it feel like the bar moves the second you get close to it? It reminds me of when my parents were teaching me to swim as a kid. Every time I got close, they’d move a little further away.

What I’ve come to believe is that excellence isn’t a destination or a fixed standard. It moves, whether you acknowledge it or not. The bar doesn’t stay where you last cleared it. It resets quietly and usually, the moment you get near it.

The best leaders know this, even if they’ve never said it out loud. They don’t anchor to what’s been done. They’re always orienting toward what’s next, which means their sense of “excellent” is constantly recalibrating, which can frustrate teams.

The challenge is that most teams aren’t wired that way. They’re trying to do good, thoughtful work. The kind that meets the brief and satisfies the ask. Over time, they get very good at hitting that bar consistently.

But that’s not the same thing as excellence.

I think many people are optimized for completion, not excellence. They know how to get work done that meets expectations, then move on.

But excellence doesn’t reward completion. It requires continuous recalibration. You have to keep raising the bar on yourself, even when no one is asking you to. It’s cognitively demanding and, if I’m being honest, not that enjoyable all the time.

Most people don’t operate there, so they don’t even recognize the gap.

In some cases, teams learn how to hit the bar efficiently, doing just enough to meet expectations without ever pushing past them. This is the worst kind. It’s hard to call because technically, the work is done. The standard has been met. But if you look closely, something is missing.

I felt this most clearly when I ran my company. Design excellence was one of our core values, but it was never something we could fully define. It wasn’t about delivering what the client asked for. We were trying to deliver something they couldn’t have seen on their own—something so thoughtful and aligned that once it existed, it felt obvious.

That’s a hard standard to operationalize. It lives more in instinct than instruction, making it incredibly easy for a team to drift away from it without realizing it.

Then to add on, the standard itself doesn’t hold still. It adjusts. What excellence looks like changes based on the client, the context, the moment. This makes it even harder to see when you’ve fallen behind it.

The moment you think you’ve achieved excellence is usually the moment you’re furthest from it.

What was exceptional six months ago becomes the baseline. If no one is actively adjusting the lens, the team keeps delivering to yesterday’s definition and calling it great work.

That’s how drift happens.

And this is where the Chief of Staff role becomes more important than it looks on paper.

A lot of the job is described in operational terms, but this is different. It’s about holding a standard that isn’t written down and can’t be fully explained.

It starts with awareness that excellence is a moving target. Then it’s about noticing nuance and details; when something is just slightly off but you can’t put your finger on it. Like when the work meets the brief but misses the point or when a detail doesn’t quite land. Or when a decision technically works but doesn’t reflect the nuance of where the leader is trying to go.

Individually, these are small things that are easy to let go. But collectively they get heavy and redefine what “good” looks like.

The work is to catch that early. To say something before it becomes the new normal. Not in a heavy-handed way, but with quiet consistency. Reinforce where the bar actually is, especially when it’s inconvenient or harder to articulate.

If no one is doing this, the standard doesn’t stay where it is.

It lowers.

Excellence sounds like a place you’re going. But in practice, it’s something you’re constantly chasing.

And the moment you think you’ve caught it is usually the moment you’ve misunderstood it.

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