Nearly two decades leading teams taught me something.
Great leaders are not born.
They follow standards.
I have built ten non-negotiable standards I work to uphold every day.
Ownership. Decisiveness. Accountability. Clarity. The list goes on.
Today I want to talk about one that will make your team significantly more effective.
Leaders set deadlines.
Early in my career, I avoided hard deadlines because I did not want to pressure my team. That was a mistake.
Without deadlines, everything felt urgent and nothing got done. People spun waiting for me to tell them what mattered most. I got frustrated wondering why the important work was not getting done.
I was not communicating. I was assuming.
Now I set two types of deadlines.
Hard deadlines. Non-negotiable. Communicated early and often.
Soft deadlines. Flexible — but only if you tell me why before the date.
And I follow up. Every time.
Not because I do not trust my team. They are excellent. I follow up because deadlines without follow-up are not deadlines. They are suggestions.
Teams that work to real deadlines move at a different speed than teams that do not.
That is one standard out of ten.
The other nine cover ownership, decisiveness, accountability, growth, and how to build teams that execute when you are not in the room.
