Preface: This is much longer than my usual posts, but this is such an important issue–and success tends to hide it.
I was talking with a CEO recently. Her company was hitting plan. Customer retention was solid. The team seemed engaged. By every measure that matters, things were working.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
She paused. “I don’t know exactly. I just have this feeling we’re leaving a lot on the table. But I can’t prove it. And when I raise it, people look at me like I’m crazy. We’re making our numbers.”
This is the hardest kind of performance problem. Nothing, at least on the surface, is obvious. There are no fires! No obvious underperformer to coach. No metric screaming for attention. Just a nagging sense that the team could be doing more, should be doing more. But nothing concrete to point to.
Many leaders I work with have felt this at some point. They think there is something more, but they can’t put their fingers on it. But it’s a sense of discomfort.
While they never express it this way, the question they are really asking is: “What if we’re succeeding our way to mediocrity?”
Two dynamics create this decline. Both are dangerous precisely because they don’t trigger alarms.
The First Blind Spot: Success Masks Under-performance
Hitting your goals doesn’t mean you’re performing well. It might just mean your goals are too low.
I see this constantly. The rep who makes quota every quarter but could be at 150% with genuine effort. The team that delivers “acceptable” results while competitors quietly pull ahead. The organization that celebrates hitting plan when only 35% of their people are hitting quota.
Why is this invisible? Because we measure against targets, not against potential. Nobody complains about people who hit their numbers. “Success” provides cover for coasting.
This creates a real problem for leaders. You can’t coach what looks like success. Telling someone who’s making quota that they need to do better feels absurd. It sounds like you’re punishing them for doing their job.
Leaders, themselves, may not may not recognize the opportunity because all they see is “we’re making the numbers!? They seldom reflect, “But could we have done more?”.
Leaders and organizations keep doing the same thing, they keep coasting. And the gap between what they’re doing and what they could be doing grows wider every quarter.
For individuals, this shows up as that flat feeling you can’t quite name. You know you’re capable of more. But you’re hitting your numbers, getting your paycheck, your manager seems happy. So why push yourself?
Because settling for less than your capability isn’t success. It’s camouflaged under-performance.
The Second Blind Spot: Standards Quietly Lowering
Standards don’t collapse. They slip. One small acceptance at a time.
The proposal that used to take a day now takes an hour. Maybe it’s tools or AI that help us reduce the time. And, it’s probably OK. But you haven’t really tailored it in a way that makes it stand out to the customer. It looks good and complete, but doesn’t connect in the way it used to connect.
The preparation that used to be thorough is now adequate. You’ve done this before. You know what you’re doing, you do just enough. And with more experience and overconfidence, you wing it. “I’ve done these calla 1000 times before. I can manage anything that happens.”
The follow-up that used to be important is now occasional. You’re busy. You prioritize your busyness.
We don’t consciously lower our standards, but we take shortcuts, hacks. We’re so overloaded, anything that makes something easier seems reasonable. Efficiency. Experience. Being realistic about time constraints. We continually adjust. A little here, a little there, not recognizing the erosion.
But here’s the math that underlies this: A 1% daily decline compounds to nearly zero by year’s end. The same math that makes small improvements so powerful makes small declines devastating.
And you don’t see it happening. Because each day looks almost identical to the day before. The change is so gradual it’s invisible.
Then one day you lose a deal you shouldn’t have lost. A customer leaves unexpectedly. A competitor shows up in an account you thought was locked up.
Over time, the problems that were invisible suddenly smack you in the face.
But those problems didn’t happen that day. They have been accumulating over months of small acceptances. Small adjustments in expectations or standards that add up to something significant.
How These Two Dynamics Feed Each Other
Here’s what makes this particularly dangerous, these reinforce each other.
When you stop measuring against potential (Blind Spot 1), you lose the reference point that would reveal slipping standards (Blind Spot 2). If you’re only asking “Did we hit the number?” you’ll never notice that the effort behind the number has quietly declined.
When standards slide lower (Blind Spot 2), you keep “succeeding” against them, which reinforces the illusion that everything’s fine (back to Blind Spot 1). You’re still making quota. Still getting acceptable results. Still looking like a solid performer.
Each cycle causes erosion while maintaining the appearance of solid ground.
By the time it becomes obvious, you’ve been declining for a long time.
What We Need to Pay Attention to:
If you’re a leader, pay attention to these signals:
- Consistent “just good enough” performance. People hitting targets but rarely exceeding them. Quotas achieved but never crushed.
- Declining win rates that get explained away. There’s always a reason. The competition got aggressive. The customer had a relationship. Ou pricing is wrong. The timing was wrong. The more you and your people seek excuses, the greater the danger.
- Less preparation, less curiosity, less initiative. Even when results hold steady. The inputs are declining even if the outputs haven’t caught up yet. They will.
- Decreasing discipline in execution. Priorities get pushed in our react-respond mode. Focusing on the immediate versus that which has impact accelerates the decline.
- The best performers getting frustrated. Top performers have high standards. When they start complaining about the culture or looking for opportunities elsewhere, it’s because the metrics aren’t showing something.
- Your own reluctance to push. If you find yourself avoiding conversations with people who are “doing fine,” ask yourself why. Avoiding the tough conversations.
If you’re an individual contributor, watch for:
- That vague dissatisfaction you can’t quite name. The work feels routine. You’re going through the motions but not fully engaged. You are busy, but bored.
- Knowing you could do more but not feeling compelled to. You’ve got the capability. You just don’t have the drive. Or the reason.
- Comparing yourself to quota rather than to your capability. If your only question is “Am I hitting my number?” you’re asking the wrong question. I’ve always thought, “Quota is something I pass on the way to achieving my goals.
Breaking the Cycle
The required change is simple to describe and hard to execute: Measure against capability, not just targets.
For leaders, this means having conversations that feel awkward. Telling someone who’s hitting their numbers that you expect more. Not because you’re greedy, but because you can see what they’re capable of. Settling for less robs them of being what they could be.
These conversations require you to articulate what excellence and “potential” looks like. That’s hard. It’s much easier to point at a missed quota than to explain why meeting quota isn’t enough.
For individuals, it means honest self-assessment against potential, not against the minimum acceptable standard. Not “Am I doing enough to keep my job?” but “Am I doing what I’m capable of?”
And for everyone: Deliberately resetting standards before they slip to the point of no return. Not waiting for the crisis that makes the problem obvious. This thinking has been embodied in the concept of continuous improvement, or getting 1% better each day.
The performance problems that hurt most aren’t the obvious ones themselves. Frankly, these are easy to find and correct. The performance problems that hurt the most are the ones hiding behind acceptable results.
The question isn’t whether you’re succeeding against your current targets. It’s whether those targets reflect what you and your team are actually capable of.
If you’re a leader quietly asking yourself whether something’s off, trust that instinct. The absence of obvious problems doesn’t mean the absence of problems.
It might just mean they’re not obvious yet.
Afterword: I am shifting much of my writing to my Substack. I will continue to publish here, but in my Substack, I will do much deeper dives into the challenges in pursuing our goals, success, and excellence. Plus I will be posting a lot of videos and other tools at that site. Feel free to subscribe to my Substack site, so you can get access to all of these. https://substack.com/@davebrock/posts
Afterword: Below is the AI generated discussion of this article. It’s one of the most fascinating discussions I’ve listened to. One term rings true to me, “the arrogance of experience.” Their perspective is different, but arriving at the same conclusion. Enjoy!
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