Rigid standards like mandatory weekly reporting and supervisor sign-offs can backfire, signaling distrust and eroding the relational fabric teams need. Leaders think they're enforcing compliance, but they're actually suffocating autonomy and failing to address the real behavioral problems underneath.
It always feels a little bit suffocating because if it hasn't been done with the team before, now all of a sudden you're setting some standards, which all of us should be doing for ourselves and for the organization. Most leaders don't do that for themselves or for the organization. But if I took that one step further and said, every week I want you to fill out who you went and visited and I want you to get it signed by your boss to make sure it was okay and then it comes to me for approval. Now we could have taken that thing And we're not solving the behavior problem. We're creating an institutional situation that says, I know you're not going to do it. I don't trust you to do it. So I'm going to have you fill this thing out and get it signed. Or I'm going to have you sign— have the client sign off. You know, simple stupid things like that take it to the next level of that institutional thing that's sucking away trust. So it's easy to cross the line.
