Building Teams That Refuse Mediocrity
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
In this episode, I dive into the five essential pillars that separate great teams from mediocre ones. From creating a powerful vision to relentlessly investing in your best people, I share a practical roadmap for building a culture of excellence, accountability, and growth.
The Need for High-Performing Teams
Success begins with teams that reject mediocrity and embrace high standards.
Growth isn’t just about getting bigger—it fuels what I call the Profit-Talent Cycle, the engine that connects profitability and talent.
A lack of growth weakens your ability to attract and retain great people, leading to a vicious cycle of declining productivity and morale.
Strong, profitable growth attracts top talent and creates a virtuous cycle of continued success.
Pillar 1: Create a Powerful Vision
A powerful vision inspires effort and attracts talent that shares your values.
Vision has three timeframes:
Core Purpose: The enduring “why” behind your company.
Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG): A 10–15-year challenge that excites and unites your team.
Three-Year Vivid Vision: A tangible picture of what success looks, sounds, and feels like.
The team must co-create and embody the vision—not just hear it once.
Communicate it often, keep it vivid and memorable, and ensure every project and decision ties back to it.
Use the vision as a North Star to evaluate priorities and guide choices.
Pillar 2: Set High Expectations
“Good enough” is not good enough.
Expectations must go beyond financial results—they should also include values, culture fit, and behavioral standards.
Unclear expectations don’t just cause confusion; they lead to unacceptable results.
Use Job Scorecards to clarify:
The mission for each role.
2–4 measurable outcomes that define success.
Communicate expectations consistently and integrate them into hiring, reviews, and coaching.
Pillar 3: Relentless Accountability
Accountability must become part of your team’s DNA.
Replace “status meetings” with accountability meetings focused on commitments, results, and actions.
Excuses—like being “too busy” or “off target for a week”—undermine progress and culture.
Build rhythms of accountability:
Annual and quarterly planning
Monthly check-ins
Weekly accountability meetings
One-on-ones
Encourage peer accountability—team members holding each other responsible.
When performance doesn’t improve despite coaching, leaders must coach out low performers.
Pillar 4: Focus on Talent Density
Talent Density = % of high performers – % of low performers.
Increasing this metric each quarter should be a leadership priority.
Hire slow, fire fast: Keeping low performers hurts the team and prevents those individuals from finding better-fit roles elsewhere.
Evaluate medium performers carefully:
On the senior leadership team or in core competencies, “medium” isn’t enough.
For support roles, solid performance may suffice.
Continuously raise the bar—each new hire and promotion should elevate the team’s average.
Build a virtual bench of future superstars before you need them.
Pillar 5: Invest in Your Best People
Most leaders overinvest in low performers and underinvest in high performers.
“High Performer Math”: a 20% productivity boost from a top performer yields far greater ROI than the same improvement in a low performer.
Avoid “polished mediocrity,” where weak performers slightly improve while stars stagnate.
Ways to invest in your best:
Challenge them with ambitious goals and new opportunities.
Recognize and reward their impact.
Coach and mentor them.
Give them exposure internally and externally.
Career plan with them—understand their aspirations and help them grow.
Stay interviews reveal what motivates and frustrates them before they consider leaving.
Conclusion: Choosing Greatness Over Mediocrity
Greatness requires high standards, clear expectations, and consistent accountability.
Mediocrity is a choice—and so is excellence.
Ask yourself: where are you tolerating “good enough,” and which of the five pillars needs your attention most?
High standards don’t mean being unkind—they mean caring enough to expect the best.
Both mediocrity and greatness take work—one just happens to be far more fulfilling.
Thanks for listening!
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We need to build teams that refuse mediocrity. Teams that have high standards with no excuses, we need to do that because those teams grow. Now, why is growth important? Growth is not important. just so we could be bigger and bigger and bigger.
Growth is important because it drives something that I call the profit talent cycle.
The profit talent cycle could either be a,a virtuous cycle going up or a vicious cycle going down.
The vicious cycle going down says you are not growing or barely growing, not profitable, or barely profitable. Well, if that's where you are, it becomes really, really difficult to attract and retain great talent.
Great people want opportunity. They wanna go somewhere that's growing, where [00:01:00] they're g gonna be challenged, where they can grow themselves. If we have a difficult time attracting and retaining great people, what happens to our productivity goes down. If our productivity goes down, our profitability and our growth go down.
If our profitability and growth go down, then our ability to attract and retain great talent goes down. We have a vicious cycle, but if we're growing significantly profitably, we have a better ability to attract and retain great people. Our productivity goes up, our growth and profitability goes up, and so the virtuous cycle.
Goes.
I was with a client two weeks ago and there was a brand new member of the team, and we happened to be in the process of setting financial targets and targets for [00:02:00] everyone's KPIs. All of the senior leaders KPIs around the table, and there was a specific target we were talking about that the team was worried they couldn't reach, they had never reached that target before.
What were they gonna do different to reach them, to reach that target now? And this new gentleman in the meeting just kind of blew it off and said, well, you know, I've been working 15 years since I've got here and you know, I know we create targets, but. I'll be honest, I haven't met a target in 15 years.
They're typically just stretch goals that's toxic to the organization. A feeling that targets are there as stretch goals and we don't really need to meet them. We're setting targets because somebody wants us to set targets and they're, you know, they're nice dreams, but we don't act, actually expect to meet those [00:03:00] targets.
That's a recipe for mediocrity and mediocre is at best a recipe for frustration and overwhelm, right? If you've got a whole bunch of mediocre folks around you, and you are the leader, man, it's tough to sleep at night. You feel like you have to get everything done. So at best, mediocrity is a recipe for frustration and overwhelm At worst, but very likely it's death to your company.
So what I wanna talk about on this episode is five pillars for rooting out mediocrity in your company, on your team.
Pillar one. Create a [00:04:00] powerful vision. Now, what do I mean by that? When I work with my clients, the vision is really made up of three different timeframes. The first one is an almost never changing timeframe, and it's what's your core purpose as a company?
What's your reason why as a company, not some BS mission statement? That means everything to everyone, but why do you exist as an organization? Number two is your big, hairy, audacious goal, that 10 to 15 year flag on top of the mountain, the man on the moon kind of vision. Something that challenges your team to greatness that you could rally around.
So we've got the almost never changing party of vision, your purpose, your 10 or 15 year big, hairy, [00:05:00] audacious goal. And then third, you've got the three year vivid vision in three years. What do you, what are you committed to having your team look like? Sound like, feel like, smell, like I'm missing a one of the five senses there.
Look like, you know, really get a sense on what the organization is that you want to create, not just the financial targets, although that's part of it. And with that vision, it's not enough to have a vision. Everyone on your team needs to be an evangelist of that vision. And if they're not an evangelist to the vision, that doesn't mean they're a bad person, but it does mean they're a bad fit for your team.
And you know, it's interesting. I was, with a team and the CEO it was an executive leadership team. The [00:06:00] CEO really believed that the vision was clear and everybody on the team knew what that vision was. But using something I call my breakthrough leadership team assessment. We found out that the team was not aligned on that.
While the CEO believed there was a strong vision and everyone was aligned around it and an evangelist of it, what we found out is most of the leadership team had no idea what the vision was because the CEO had communicated that vision around, you know, during a, dinner, after a meeting, half the group was on their third drink.
So they didn't remember the vision. And by the way, half the team that existed today are new folks that were never at that dinner that happened three years ago. A strong vision inspires real effort. It attracts talent, it attracts people who believe what you believe, who are attracted to your vision. [00:07:00] It makes mediocrity stick out like a sore thumb.
So what actions could you take to make sure you've got that clear, inspiring vision? And everyone's an evangelist on that vision. Number one, don't do what that CEO did and communicate your vision to everyone else. Craft that vision together, involve the team. And keep challenging. Is this bold enough to scare us a little bit or is this a mediocre vision?
So craft it together. Number two, make it tangible. Use, sticky, vivid language. If a new hire can't recite it, then refine it. If you could say something in a phrase verses three paragraphs, say it in a phrase. Cascade that vision down through your organization. Revisit it in meetings. Make sure every [00:08:00] priority people are working on ties back to what that vision is.
Use the vision as a compass to make sure you're heading in the right direction. When questions come up, should we go with option A or should we go with option B? Ask the question, which one of these options is it will help us or is consistent with living our purpose? Which one of these options is gonna get us closer to our three year vision?
Get us closer to our big, hairy, audacious goal. Use it as a compass or use it as a North star. Give permission to challenge the vision or give permission for folks to challenge actions, encourage anyone to flag if there's an action that doesn't serve the vision, a priority you're focused on, that doesn't serve [00:09:00] the vision.
So pillar one is all about having a clear, inspiring, powerful vision.
Pillar two.
Set high expectations good enough is not good enough. And when I say set expectations, it's not just expectations on the financials or expectations on productivity, it's also expectations around culture fit, expectations around people living and breathing.
Your non-negotiable. Core values, but quick little anecdote about expectations. And this one does have to do with productivity. So I was working with a client and their head of innovation was spearheading the development of a new piece [00:10:00] of technology that they hope to sell to their clients. That head of innovation believed that.
His measure of success was implementing that technology on time and on budget. Well, he missed that a number of times, but they invested a lot of money and put a new, team in place and some new project management in place, and they finally got to the point that they were consistently delivering the phases of this technology.
On time and on budget. There was only one problem with it. They weren't selling any of it. The whole point of it was to sell this new technology to their clients, adding value to their clients, making them sticky, or obviously bringing a whole lot of profitable revenue and making them more scalable as a company, and the [00:11:00] revenue coming in was zero.
Now, as simple as that sounds, of course they needed a revenue target. Remember the head of innovation believe success was delivering it on time and on budget? Unclear expectations lead to unacceptable results. Make sure you heard what I just said. Unclear expectations don't lead to unclear results. They lead to unacceptable results.
So let's talk about some actions. first action is creating what I call job scorecards. Job scorecard is like a job description on steroids. It's not just, here are your roles and responsibilities and your competencies, but it's got a clear mission for the job and most importantly. Two to four measures of [00:12:00] success.
We need to make sure that we have job scorecards, that the individuals on our team have job scorecards because it's within those job scorecards that we can align on what success really looks like. We need to not only set high expectations, but make sure all of our folks are aligned. On those expectations.
We need to set targets for each expectation. It's not enough to say, Hey, VP of marketing, you are accountable for marketing qualified leads. How many marketing qualified leads? It's not just about marketing qualified leads. It's 10 marketing qualified leads per week. We need to keep communicating those expectations and repeat them 17 different times.
We need to integrate those scorecards [00:13:00] into hiring. We need to hire people that have the ability to live those values, to hit those measures of success.
Pillar three, which is very related to pillar two, is relentless accountability against those expectations. Accountability is bringing both the numbers, the measures of success and the values culture fit to life consistently. Every week, every meeting, every check-in. It's killing a, a, a. Most cultures I see that are around excuses.
We need to kill excuses and I've seen that. I listen in every once in a while to. Weekly meetings that my clients are having weekly meetings of the leadership team, and I very purposefully suggest that they don't call them weekly status [00:14:00] meetings. If I'm in one more status meeting, shoot me. I have more important things to do.
I like to call them weekly accountability meetings where they go around the room and hold people accountable. For the quarterly priorities that they are committed to achieving, and are they making the progress consistent with their plan to their KPIs, to the actions they committed to take as well. So, priorities, actions, KPIs, and what I see over and over again is leaders going around the room and accepting excuses.
Oh, you know, last week was a tough week, so I'm off target, you know, but you know, last week was a real fire drill. Yeah, I know. It was a tough week. Well, you know, I was on vacation and I'm just getting back into the swing of swinging things. I'm off target. you know, don't worry about it.
Like, at some point I'll get back on Target and they just go around the room accepting [00:15:00] excuse after excuse. As leaders, excuses are not acceptable. We need to make sure people understand that they've committed to these things and the team will hold them accountable. So how do we do that? We need to establish rhythms, what I call planning and communication rhythms, meeting rhythms of annual.
Retreats and quarterly planning sessions, and monthly check-in sessions and weekly accountability meetings and weekly one-on-one meetings with each of your folks. In those meetings, especially the weekly meetings, it's our job as leaders to hold people accountable for their productivity measures of success.
And their behaviors, their core [00:16:00] values, things that define whether they're a culture fit or not. And when people say, ah, you know, I had a rough week, or I'm behind, I'm not on target, of course that could happen. Accountability doesn't mean everybody is hitting their goals every time, but if one of your team members is not hitting a goal, they need to come to that discussion prepared to talk about their plan.
Ask them, what's your plan to get back on track? What help do you need from the rest of us? And if they're not prepared to answer those questions, man, they need to understand they're not doing their job. No more excuses. It's a great exercise I like to do around accountability and it's called the peer accountability exercise, and it's all about building muscles, not so that.
CEO or the leader could [00:17:00] hold their team accountable, but so each member of the team could hold each other accountable. And I have a whole other podcast on this called the Peer Accountability Exercise. Go find it. I don't know the date offhand, but very quickly it's about going around the room and having each member of the team.
Give everyone else on the team feedback. Two types of feedback. One is what do they wanna thank them for? That really helps the team. And then the second thing is letting each individual know what they do. That sometimes hurts the team that you'd like them to fix or to work on, including giving the CEO or the leader of the team feedback.
And then lastly around accountability, follow through with consequences. If someone consistently is not meeting their commitments, if they're not meeting their expectations, don't [00:18:00] just talk about it. Act someone is consistently not meeting at their expectations and you're trying to coach them up and it's not working.
You need to coach them out. Speaking of that, let's go to pillar four.
Pillar four is focusing and maximizing something I call talent density. Talent density means filling the team. With high performing team members, it means more high performing folks and less low performing folks. It's in my book called The Strength of Talent, How to Grow Your People To Grow Your Profit, and I've talked about it on another podcast.
Talent Density is a very simple but very important calculation, which is the percent of your folks that are high performing. Minus the percent of your folks that are low performing, and that number goes anywhere from negative 100 to positive 100 or negative [00:19:00] 100% and positive 100%. And that number becomes a benchmark, and we need to hold each other accountable for improving that number every quarter
when we don't have the right talent density. When we are, when we have more low performing, either low producing or low culture fit team members, we end up with drama client I worked with a number of years ago, really talented leadership team, but every time I get together with them for our quarterly planning exercise, and I know in their monthly meetings they spent half that meeting talking about the drama going on, talking about low performing folks, talking about folks who weren't living their culture and therefore they were making the people around them worse and not better. [00:20:00] When you don't focus on talent density. It's hard to focus on growth when you just focus on managing the drama of the moment. So what do we do? Well, number one is we need to assess the performance of our team members. Measure talent density, and hold leaders accountable for improving talent density quarterly. Again, I talk more about that in the strength of talent.
I go deeper into that in a number of different podcasts. We need to follow a philosophy, which is hire slow and fire fast. Fire fast is not heartless. I believe with every fiber of my being, that everyone has the ability to be a superstar somewhere. And if you are holding [00:21:00] on to low performing folks low, either low in productivity or low in culture fit, not only are you hurting the team, but you're actually hurting their ability to go somewhere where they will be a better fit, where they have a chance to be a superstar.
When we talk about maximizing and focusing on talent density, we also have to focus on the medium performers. Is it okay to have folks that are performing at a solid, medium level within our organization, or does everyone need to be high performing? The answer is nuanced because. It depends what their role is.
Now, I do believe we should be striving to coach and develop everyone to get them to a high performing level. Modeling the culture every single day hit at least hitting, maybe beating their [00:22:00] productivity measures every week. Absolutely. But whether we actually fire someone who's performing at a media medium level depends on that role.
First type of role where good enough is not good enough, where medium is not good enough. Is anyone on the senior leadership team?
I have never seen high performing folks work for medium performing folks very long. They either go somewhere else or they become medium performing themselves. Given the sheer impact that a senior leader has cascading down and out through the organization, we cannot have mediocre on that senior leadership team.
The other place me performing is not good enough is for any part of your organization that is, is all about your core competency. for [00:23:00] whatever roles in your organization are strategic differentiators for you, what does that mean? Let's use Netflix as an example. What makes Netflix? Netflix, it's probably not their accounts payable department.
It's probably okay to have a good, solid, medium performing accounts payable clerk. But what about. Their content creation and content selection. What about whoever is driving their recommendation engine and their UI?
I've gotta believe for Netflix good enough is not good enough there. What is it that strategically differentiates you? What's your core competency? And in those areas, good enough is not good enough with. Every one you hire with every one you promote, [00:24:00] you've gotta be raising the par. You've gotta be raising the average on your team.
That also means keeping a virtual bench, a potential superstars. Don't wait until you have a need to go post a job on LinkedIn. Use your relationships to build a virtual bench of potential superstars. And maintain those relationships over time.
Let's go to the last pillar, the fifth pillar, and it's all about investing in your best people.
I've said over and over again on this podcast that every stage I can get on is that I feel like most leaders, including me for many years, most leaders overinvest in their low performing folks and underinvest in their high performing folks. We need to flip that. If your high performers can't grow with you, [00:25:00] they will grow with someone else.
We need to focus. Most of our efforts, most of our time working with our high performing folks there, there's something I call high performer math. High performer Math is pretty simple. Imagine you have one of your top salespeople that's bringing in a hundred thousand dollars in revenue per month by working with them, coaching them, challenging them.
Let's say you could improve. Their productivity by 20%. Well, what's 20% of a hundred thousand dollars? It's $20,000. Now, you could spend that same amount of time, not with the high performing person, but with your low performing person that's bringing in $50,000 and improve that same [00:26:00] 20%. 20% of $50,000 is $10,000.
Simple math, would you rather improve by 20,000 or 10,000? If I work with a high performing person, I can improve by 20,000. That's where your ROI is sometimes the reason why. We were, we spend so much time working with our low performing folks. It's 'cause we're not holding them accountable and we've just got too many damn low performing folks.
If we focus our time as leaders, fixing weaknesses in ourselves and our others, we wind up with mediocre because if we work on weaknesses, can we improve them? Sure. Maybe we can take a low performing person and get them to approach mediocrity, get them to an acceptable level maybe. [00:27:00] But while we're ignoring our high performing folks, what's happening to them?
They're getting stale. Their performance is decreasing. Or they may say, if I can't grow with you, I'll grow with someone else. So we wind up with. Higher performing low performers and lower performing high performers. And if you can picture that on a little chart, you'd wind up with something I call polished mediocrity.
So what do we do to invest in our best people? We need to challenge them. I've seen more high performing folks leave out of boredom than anything else. We need to challenge them. We need to raise the bar on their goals. We need to challenge them to, to learn something new, be something new. We need to recognize them.
Give them recognition formally or an informal pat on the back. We need to reward them, maybe promote them. We need to invest in them. Coaching, mentoring, training. Invest [00:28:00] money, invest time. We need to give them exposure. Most leaders miss this one. External exposure means more exposure to clients, more exposure to vendors.
Maybe getting them out there with and getting more industry exposure, getting them to a, an industry conference. Maybe they getting them on stage at an industry conference. Internal exposure. Inviting someone not on your senior leadership team into the senior leadership team to talk about some of the great stuff they're doing.
Another way to invest in your best people is to career plan with them with, when's the last time you sat down with you, one of your top performing folks to find out where they want to go in their career and how you could help them get there. You wanna re-recruit them? Do not wait for an exit interview to find out why.
Why one of your high performing folks left? Have a stay interview [00:29:00] now. Let 'em know what a great job they're doing. You hope they never leave. Find out what they love about the job and talk to them about maybe how you could get them doing more of that. Find out what frustrates them about the job and find ways for them to do less of that or get rid of some of those frustrations.
I've had leaders ask the scary question, what would it take for you to leave? Let's say they come back to you and go, well, if someone offered me 20% more I'd leave. Does that mean you give them a 20% raise? I don't know, maybe. But wouldn't you wanna know that before they left and now you had to try to match the offer?
Invest in your best people, so. A powerful vision, clear and high expectations.
Relentless accountability, A laser focus on talent density [00:30:00] and an outsize investment in your best people. That's the formula for preventing mediocrity from ever taking hold. Where on your team are you tolerating? Good enough.
And which of those five pillars need your attention first? Remember, high standards don't mean being a jerk or forgetting what thank you sounds like, but if you're not making average uncomfortable,
you're gonna see mediocrity as a result. And remember, mediocrity is a choice and so is greatness. They both, take a lot of work. One is more fun. Let's choose greatness. [00:31:00] Go make it happen.