The Bar Is Yours

By every number that mattered, the business was a success.

I owned a staffing firm, and it made good money. From the outside, there was very little to fix. I was winning awards, appearing in business publications, mentoring entrepreneurs, and checking every box that most people associate with success.

But the scoreboard everyone else could see was not the one I was keeping.

The firm was profitable, but it was not my passion. It was not the work I wanted to do, the way I wanted to do it, or the standard I would have set if the standard itself had been the point. So, I left it.

I walked away from a company that was already making money and started over from nothing to build the firm I actually believed in. Brite Hire had no partner, no book of business, and no floor beneath it, only the conviction that it was the firm I was supposed to build.

I start there because it is the clearest proof I have of something I only later learned to say plainly.

The number I have always cared about was never how I stacked up against anyone else. It was how I measured against what I was capable of. The bar was mine. I set it high, and most of the time I was the only one who knew whether I had cleared it. I have spent much of my life a little dissatisfied for that reason, and much of my best work has come from the same place.

A recent conversation on The Curiosity Shop between Brené Brown, Adam Grant, and their guest, Simon Sinek, put language to something I had felt for years. As the conversation turned to competition, Sinek explained that he hates losing because he is always asking whether he could have done better. If someone else genuinely outplays him, he believes there is something to learn. I recognized that instinct immediately because it is how I have always operated.

In the first edition of The Brite Brief, I argued that accountability is an act of care. What I failed to say clearly is where that accountability begins. It begins with the standards we set for ourselves.

That is the part most conversations about accountability skip.

We treat accountability as something a leader does to other people, a thing administered downward. But a standard you only enforce on others, and quietly exempt yourself from, is not a standard. It is leverage.

The leaders people actually follow are the ones who visibly expect the most of themselves, and that is what earns them the standing to ask anything of anyone else.

It also changes what you are competing for.

For two decades, Jack Welch was the template for executive leadership, and one of his most famous management practices was ranking employees against one another and removing those at the bottom. Performance through competition. Colleague against colleague. A generation of executives learned to lead that way, and business schools taught them how.

But forcing people to compete against one another does not raise the standard. It relocates the contest to the worst possible place: between the people who are supposed to be on the same side.

You get information hoarding. Defensiveness. Internal politics. And eventually, the departure of the very people talented enough to have other options.

The alternative is not to lower the bar. It is to move the contest inward.

I am not leading to do better than you. I am leading to do better than the version of myself that showed up yesterday.

When the competition is internal, the standard stays high and the threat between people falls away. I am not measuring my team against one another. I am measuring myself first, and then all of us together, against what we are capable of becoming.

There is an important caution here.

Being your own toughest critic can easily become a form of self-punishment. Left unchecked, dissatisfaction becomes identity. And leaders who run on self-punishment eventually export it to everyone around them.

The distinction from the first edition matters here too.

The purpose of a high internal standard is not punishment. It is direction.

The standard exists to pull you and your people toward what is possible, not to remind anyone of where they fall short.

Held that way, competing with yourself is one of the most generous things a leader can model. It gives everyone around you permission to pursue excellence without having to defeat someone else to achieve it.

The leaders worth following are not keeping score of you against the person beside you. They are measuring themselves against the standard they ask everyone else to meet, and they are doing that work where people can see it.

That was the missing piece in the first edition of The Brite Brief.

Accountability is not credible because you hold other people responsible. It becomes credible when people watch you hold yourself to the same standard first.

The standard was never something I was doing to my team. It was the commitment to keep raising my own bar, to acknowledge when I missed it, and to keep working toward it anyway. My team simply had a front-row seat.

Because in the end, the bar is yours.

The scoreboard that matters most is usually the one nobody else can see.