What Tenure Really Says About Leadership
January 22, 2026
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There’s no winning and losing in most jobs.
No final buzzer. No trophy. No one clapping when you finish an email, make a hard call, or shut it down at the end of a day. Most professionals recognize this, so they find themselves asking themselves questions in their mind:
“No one notices the extra effort, so why bother?”
“I hit my numbers, what more do you want?”
“This is just how we’ve always done it.”
“Everything’s fine. Good enough is enough.”
Comments and thoughts like these are rarely said out loud. But over time, they reveal something dangerous: the quiet erosion of excellence. Which is precisely why high performance and sustaining excellence are hard to define and even harder to sustain.
Which begs the question: How do you measure excellence as a leader when there’s no scoreboard? You measure it by your standard. Said differently,
Excellence isn’t measured by outcomes. It’s measured by your standard
A standard by definition is what good looks like. But the good leaders define what good looks like, great leaders define what great looks like. Now isn’t the time to wait for someone else to define winning or what excellence looks like. You must define it for yourself and your team. Then continually raise the bar.
Take Amanda, a department lead at a growing tech company. She wasn’t missing targets or massively underperforming. But something felt off. Her team was meeting expectations, yet no one was pushing beyond them. They were just coasting and checking the proverbial box. She admitted in a coaching call, “I feel like we’re in neutral, and I can’t figure out how to shift us to higher gear.”
That was the moment she realized: her team wasn’t failing, they just weren’t ascending. The standard had been lowered without her even realizing it.
Let’s break this down. Because if you’re trying to raise performance on a team without a scoreboard, you need a new way to define excellence.
Excellence doesn’t mean flawless, it means being set apart. It’s the result of deliberate progress, not perfection. In Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara wrote, “Excellence is the culmination of thousands of details perfectly executed.”
In Building the Best, I highlighted the story of British cycling coach David Brailsford. He took over the British Cycling team and to say their results were bad would be an understatement. He brought with him a mindset called the aggregation of marginal gains. Which is a philosophy which focused on getting 1% better each day. His team embraced this small change change and over time it led to big changes in results.
What Brailsford, Guidara, and now you need to know about excellence is that it’s iterative. Excellence isn’t about perfection, it’s about iteration and making consistent progress.
Excellence is iterative.
When your team embraces this kind of mindset, excellence becomes less about results and more about the behavior of meeting or exceeding a standard.
The moment you say, “That’s good enough,” it becomes your new normal. And normal, over time, tends to become average.
On a recent episode of Quarterback on Netflix, Cincinnati Bengals Quarterback Joe Burrow showed what this is to a tee. During a game late in the season versus the Tennessee Titans, the team won the game but jumped offside eight times during the game. However, instead of being happy about winning, he was upset by the level of excellence the team executed against. He told his head coach, “I don’t care that we won; that wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t up to our standard.”
Burrow’s example reminded me of a quote from Author Rick Rubin. He wrote, “Doubting yourself can lead to a sense of hopelessness. Doubting the work can help improve it.” Burrow wasn’t doubting himself or his teammates; he was doubting their actions and their focus to help improve. It’s a good reminder to never settle for less than excellence.
Once you lower your standard, it becomes the new normal.
Great teams and leaders don’t settle for average. They revisit, refine, and raise the bar, even when no one’s watching.
In The Big Leap, Gay Hendricks discusses three zones in which people exist.
Most people stay in the “zone of competence” because it’s safe. But excellence lives where it’s uncomfortable. It’s getting outside of your comfort zone so you can expand what you or your team is capable of achieving.
To lead at a high level, you must choose to bring as many team members as possible into the zone of excellence. To do that requires being committed to excellence instead of being interested in it. Author David Brooks says commitment is “Putting structure around something for when you no longer feel like doing it.” If you or your team is going to be excellent, it requires commitment.
Excellence requires commitment
This means holding the standard, even when it’s tiring. It means modeling the behavior, not just preaching it. It means doing what’s right, not what’s easy.
You won’t always get recognized for choosing excellence. That’s not the point. Leading with excellence is about who you’re becoming and what you’re inviting others to become.
There may not be a scoreboard. But your team is always watching. Keep raising the standard for yourself or others. It’s what high performance and great leadership looks like.
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About the Author: John Eades is the CEO of LearnLoft and The Sales Infrastructure. He was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices. John is also the author of Building the Best: 8 Proven Leadership Principles to Elevate Others to Success. You can follow him on Instagram @johngeades.
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