Donald Burns argues that organizational standards work like gravity: culture falls to whatever level leadership tolerates. Letting low standards slide erodes consistency, drains team energy, and pushes out top performers. Leaders who choose popularity over enforcement sacrifice culture; respect comes from consistent enforcement of expectations, not from being liked.
Right? There is this gravity of standards. I want you to think of your culture like gravity. Whatever standard you set, everything else falls to it. It does not rise, it falls. Because here's the thing, under pressure, people don't perform at their best. They default to what's acceptable. And if your standard's loose, the performance is loose. If your standard's sharp, your performance will tighten up every single time. And you've probably heard me say this a thousand times. Your restaurant is a reflection of what you tolerate. And sadly, and I've, I'm guilty of this myself in my first restaurant, tolerance feels harmless in the moment. Come on, I'm busy and I don't want conflict. So I tell myself, I'll just deal with it later. But here's the thing you gotta understand. Tolerance is never neutral. It always costs you something. Always does. There is a cost of tolerance. What is that cost? What is that hidden cost? Well, when you tolerate one late employee, the others start pushing time because it's not enforced. You allow one sloppy plate, your consistency erodes. You allow, you tolerate one bad attitude, the energy drops across the team. And what happens to your best people? Well, your best people, they notice it first cuz they see the gap between what you say and what you allow. And eventually your best people stop caring, or worse, they leave. Because here's the thing. High performers don't stay in a low standard environment. Write that down. High performers do not stay in a low standard environment. That gap between what you say and what you allow, you know what the definition of that is? That means you're a hypocrite and no one follows a hypocrite. Nobody does. Right? Let's talk about a common thing that a lot of us deal with, and I've dealt with this too. Enforcement versus popularity. This is where leadership gets tested. And I'm, I'm, in the ProScan, I'm a high extrovert. High extroverts, we want to be liked. We want to be like, we want to be seen. We want to be acknowledged. That's high, high extroverts love that stuff. Right now, this is where your leadership is always going to get tested because when you enforce standards, Doesn't always feel good. Why? Because you might have to correct someone you like. You might have to correct a family member, right? A daughter, a spouse, right? A son, an uncle, a cousin. Sometimes you have to interrupt a busy moment because you see the violation, and instead of saying, I'll talk about it later, it means I got to, like, I got to do it now. Sometimes you get risk being seen as like, oh, Mark's really strict. Anytime anybody in my restaurants ever said you're too strict, I said, that's not true. I have high standards. That's what I like when they say you're too strict. No, I just have high standards and I won't lower my standards. And I always say it calm and coolly. Oh man, you're just, you're just too strict. No, I'm not too strict. I just have high standards. This is where a lot of people choose popularity over standards, and when they choose popularity over standards, they sacrifice their culture every single time. So let's talk about one of my favorite core values: respect. A lot of people, especially younger team members, they have a big misconception or a a, I guess, a bad definition of what respect is. Respect is not about being liked, right? It's built on being consistent. When your team knows what is expected, they know what's going to happen when it's not met, they know the standard, and they know that you're going to follow through every single time, they trust you. Right? Even if they don't always like the correction, because consistency creates safety and safety creates performance. This goes back to that thing about teamwork. I like when people love to use the word, like, and they tell me their core values, like, I want to put teamwork on the core values. Like, I would be careful about teamwork at first. Why? Because again, a lot of people have a misconception or a bad definition of what teamwork is. A lot of younger team members think teamwork is likability. Like, I like Marissa, I like Mark, I like Yankee, I like, I like Crosby. We work well together because I like them. Likability has nothing to do with teamwork. The only things you need for a team, a high performance team, you need 3 things. There's 3 things you need for a high performance team: respect, trust, and accountability. That's it. Likability has nothing to do with a high performance team.
If your restaurant only works because you work 80 hours a week, it doesn't work.
