Standards for Nobody

I have said some version of this sentence more times than I’d like to admit: “I don’t know why they can’t just get it right.” The project comes back wrong. The copy misses the brief. The deliverable is in the right format, but it says the wrong thing.

The deeply human, ego-protecting temptation is to diagnose the team. Their skills. Their attention. Their commitment to quality.

I learned that most of the time, the work comes back wrong because I didn’t make it clear what the right looked like. The standard I was expecting was sitting entirely in my head, undocumented and uncommunicated, and I was holding people accountable to a brief they had never received. That is a briefing failure dressed as a performance failure.

The data is not kind about this. Gallup research found that only about half of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work. Half. In organisations that presumably have managers, job descriptions, and meetings specifically designed to communicate direction.

If half your team cannot clearly articulate what they are supposed to produce, the gap is between your intention and what you actually communicated.

When the Standard Lives Only in Your Head

Every manager I have spoken to who struggles with delegation has the same underlying problem: the standard for good work lives entirely inside them.

They know what excellent looks like. They have spent years developing the taste, the instinct, the ability to look at something and immediately sense whether it lands.

The problem is that taste is not transferable unless it is documented. And most of it never gets documented, because documenting it would take time, and it feels faster to do the work yourself.

This is where the cycle begins. You delegate the task. The output arrives and misses the mark. You fix it quietly and resolve, somewhere in the back of your mind, that the team cannot be trusted with this kind of work.

What you have actually resolved is that you will not write a brief. And so the next delegation attempt is built on the same absent foundation, and it produces the same disappointing result, and the diagnosis of your team hardens into fact when it was never about the team at all.

Research by the Project Management Institute found that poor communication is a contributing factor in 56 per cent of project failures, and that companies risk losing $75 million of every $1 billion spent on a project as a direct result.

These are failures of communication infrastructure: the brief wasn’t written, the standard wasn’t stated, and the definition of done was only in the manager’s head.

The Three Documents That Change Everything

The fix is not complicated, but it does require you to sit down and do something most managers skip: write it down before you hand it off. There are three documents that, in my experience, eliminate the majority of delegation failures.

The first is a definition of done. A short, specific description of what the finished output must include, how it should feel, and what it absolutely cannot do. Not a vague aspiration. A standard.

The second is a process brief. List the sequence of steps, the resources available, and the constraints in play.

The third is an example. This is a reference point, a precedent, something that worked, against which the person can orient themselves.

None of these documents needs to be long. A definition of done can be expressed in 5 bullet points. A process brief can be a single page. An example can be a link. The point is that it exists.

A study found that 31 per cent of employees identify unclear expectations from managers as the single most stressful factor in their working lives, leading to anxiety, decision fatigue, and the kind of second-guessing that slows everything down.

The absence of a written standard is an active source of friction that compounds across every project.

The shift I would encourage is this: before the next time you hand something off, spend twenty minutes writing the brief. Not after the work starts. Before.
Ask yourself: could someone who has never worked with me read this and know exactly what good looks like? If the answer is no, the brief is not finished.

And if you find yourself unable to answer that question on paper, it means you have not yet clarified what you actually want, and no amount of talent on your team will compensate for that.