Are "High Standards" Teachable?

Jeff Bezos in his annual shareholder letter has touched upon this topic very persuasively. He argues that "high standards" are both teachable and contagious. The four elements of high standards as he sees it: they are teachable, they are domain specific, you must recognize them, and you must explicitly coach realistic scope. Here are some highlights:

• High standards are teachable and contagious. People can learn high standards simply through exposure (the opposite is also true - if low standards prevail, those too will quickly spread.
• High standards are domain specific. You have to learn high standards separately in each domain of your interest (He warns that if you consider yourself to be a person of high standards in general, you might still have debilitating blindspots!)
• To achieve high standards you have to be able to recognize what good looks like in that domain. Second, you must have realistic expectations for how hard it should be (how much work it will take) to achieve that result – the scope.
• Someone on the team needs to have the skill, but it doesn’t have to be you. The football coach doesn’t need to be able to throw, and a film director doesn’t need to be able to act. But they both do need to recognize high standards for those things and teach realistic expectations on scope.

Insist on the Highest Standards

Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many people may think these standards are unreasonably high.

-- from the Amazon Leadership Principles

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