A CULTURE OF EXCELLENCE

By Joe Newsum

Every transformation of performance I have ever been part of, whether I was advising it at McKinsey, running it from the operator’s seat, or coaching the CEO through it, started the same way: with the elevation of expectations. The rooms kept changing. The pattern never did. Someone raised the bar. The BHAGs were established, the goals got steeper, the standards came up, and everyone in the company felt the stretch. It always goes better when there is strategic clarity underneath the raise, a defined game to win and a reason the new bar matters. But the raise itself is the constant. I have never seen a real transformation start from comfortable targets.

And here is what separates the transformations that worked from the ones that stalled: raising the bar is an announcement. Achieving the raised bar is a culture. BHAGs, goals, expectations, anyone can elevate them in a planning cycle. They get achieved in companies with a culture of excellence, the state of mind that closes the distance between the bar you set and the performance you get. That is what this page is about: what that culture actually is, the two poles it comes in, and how to build the version that lasts.

Read the definition closely, because it is doing two jobs at once. It is selective: excellence in what matters, and explicit permission to be efficient everywhere else. Watch any genuinely excellent team and you see it immediately: merciless about the work that touches the customer, efficient about everything else. And it is absolute: on the things that matter, the bar does not bend, does not rest, and does not take a night off. Most companies that pursue excellence get it wrong in one of three ways. They are absolute about everything, which exhausts people. They are selective about nothing, which is just drift with a mission statement. Or they drive excellence through compliance, which works, at a cost, and only for a while. We will spend real time on that one, because it is the most common version of all. One more distinction before we go deeper: this page is about the standard you hold, not the results it produces. The results have their own page, what a high performance culture looks like. This is the page about how the standard gets built, because the standard comes first.

One more thing about the definition, because it decides how the whole build works: a state of mind cannot be installed with a process. There is no workflow, no policy, no quality gate that produces it. It gets built through communication, high expectations that make people stretch and stay on their toes, and it runs in two dimensions at once: the bar, and the tenacity in pursuit of the bar. And it decays. An expectation that goes unspoken stops being an expectation, and leaders communicate their expectations most loudly through what they accept. The worst work you let pass without comment is a broadcast, and it outshouts every speech about excellence you have ever given.

RAISE THE BAR, REALIZE THE POTENTIAL

Before the two poles and the build, start with my simplest picture of what excellence, and honestly what management, is for. Picture one person, and a bar. Their performance today sits at one height. Their potential sits higher, and almost always higher than they think it does. The job of a leader is two moves. Raise the bar, by helping the person see potential they did not know they had. Then help them realize it, through the expectations, the belief, the coaching, and the system on this page. The distance between today’s performance and the realized bar is excellence, one person at a time.

Now do it collectively. A whole company of people, every bar raised, every gap being closed at once. That is another way to define a transformation, and it is the honest reason this page exists. A culture of excellence is not about demanding more from people. It is about a company full of people discovering, together, that they were capable of more than anyone told them, and then proving it.

THE TWO CULTURES OF EXCELLENCE

Every so often I get the chance to eat at a Michelin star restaurant, and I go partly just to watch excellence. Everything the customer eats is driven by a culture you never see: the chef sets expectations on the things that are critical, then hires for it, develops people on the job, organizes the teams for it, and rewards through it. You are not eating food. You are eating a culture. And if you watch closely from the dining room, you notice there are two kinds of Michelin kitchens. In some, the food is fantastic and you can see the stress of expectations on the staff. In others, the food is just as fantastic and you feel like you are with friends. Same stars, same standards, same levers, couched in different emotions and words. Those are the two poles, and the difference between them decides whether excellence lasts, and whether anyone wants to be part of it.

The first is compliant excellence. The bar is real, and it is enforced. The leader sets it personally, inspects everything, refuses mediocre work, and the output gets genuinely good. Let me be honest about this version, because most culture content will not be: it works. Many CEOs drive compliant excellence and are really successful at driving the financials of the company. The screaming chef of television fame has real stars in the window. But it is the winning team that no one likes to be on. You can see the stress of expectations on the staff, because the bar arrives as something done to them, and it works right up until it doesn’t. The bar lives in one person’s attention, and attention is the scarcest resource a leader has. It sags in the departments the leader visits least. It bleeds the best people, who have options and use them. And it collapses at succession, because it was never the company’s bar. It was the leader’s, enforced.

The second is committed excellence. Same bar, but the team owns it. This is the kitchen where you feel like you are with friends, and here is the thing to understand: the warmth is not softness. The bar in that kitchen is just as ferocious. The difference is who holds it. The test is simple, and it is my favorite test in all of culture: what happens when the chef is away? In a compliant kitchen, the standards dip the moment the enforcer leaves the building. In a committed kitchen, the sous refuses the plate anyway, because the bar stopped being the chef’s opinion a long time ago and became who the team is. The two versions also run on two different fuels. Committed excellence is fueled by want to: the energy of people who want to pursue the bar and stretch for it. Compliant excellence is fueled by have to, which is the fuel of fear, and fear typically does not have a good long-term outcome for the person or for the team.

The tell, if you want a single one, is who names the bar. If the bar only exists when the leader names it, you have compliant excellence, and you also have an exhausted leader, because the whole standard is running on their voice. When the team names it, when the questions get asked of the work by the people doing the work, you have the committed version, and the leader finally gets to stop being the enforcer and go back to being the chef.

HOW TO CREATE A CULTURE OF EXCELLENCE

So how do you build the committed version? The good news is that the build is simpler than the theory. Creating a culture of excellence comes down to two moves and one accelerant. First, establish the commitment language of excellence: the words that set the bar and install the state of mind. Second, reinforce it through the system, so the bar gets reached and held without depending on your voice. And third, keep raising the bar, which gets easier with every other culture you build underneath it. That is the whole equation, and the rest of this page walks through it in language you can use tomorrow morning.

ESTABLISH THE COMMITMENT LANGUAGE OF EXCELLENCE

If excellence is a state of mind built through communication, then the language has an architecture, and it starts at the top. The language of the North Star comes first: what is our vision? That answer is the first bar your company sets, and it needs to be set high, a destination worth stretching for that makes the game and what winning means unmistakable. And the North Star language is more than a vision statement. It is the BHAGs that make the ambition concrete, and the big capabilities the organization will need to build to get there. Then it cascades. The BHAGs become raised goals at every level, the capability builds become team mandates, so that everyone’s goals in the organization are clear, connected, and higher than they were. This is the elevation of expectations that opens every transformation, made organizational: not one big number announced at a town hall, but every person able to see how their goals ladder up to the vision, and every set of goals raised on the way down.

From there, the language gets established in your commitments, at every altitude. A core commitment carries the company-wide bar, one standard held by everyone from the executive team down. We do not half-ass the things that matter. We fight for results together. We ship product that drives incredible value for customers. The words are yours to write; the job is the same: one excellence standard, spoken the same way in every room. Then each team’s operating commitments bring the bar down to the work, answering three questions: what is important, what we do, and what excellence looks like. That third clause is where the bar becomes concrete, written one team at a time. It is where standards get said out loud, where the 80/20 permission gets granted just as plainly, this part needs to be perfect, that part needs to be done, and where the top of the bar gets a name. McKinsey’s review ladder did not stop at “exceeds expectations.” It topped out at a word, distinctive, and the whole firm aimed at it, the way a kitchen aims at the star. When great work has a name, people aim at a target instead of a mood. And the permission is not a softening of the culture: excellent means fit to what matters, sometimes the excellent version of the work is the fast version, and excellence without selectivity is what is slow.

Then the activity commitments carry the bar into the moments where the work actually happens. The kickoff gets its question: what does excellent look like for this? The review gets its question: is this excellent, and what would make it excellent? The meeting gets its filter, the way the British national rowing team ran an entire Olympic campaign on one question, will it make the boat go faster. This is why the communication can be constant without the leader giving more speeches. The questions get wired into the activities themselves, so the bar gets named as often as the work happens.

That is the entire language, from the North Star down to Tuesday’s kickoff. Nothing in it requires a budget, a program, or permission. You could install it tomorrow morning, in the meetings you already have, and your team would feel the difference by Friday.

REINFORCE IT THROUGH THE SYSTEM

Language sets the bar. But if the language is all you have, you are back to compliant excellence, because someone has to keep saying it forever. What makes committed excellence durable is the second move: reinforce the language through the system, so the bar gets reached, and keeps getting reached, without depending on any one person. The chef builds the bar into everything around the food. Watch how a great kitchen actually works and you see five systems reinforcing one standard.

Hire for the bar. Nobody walks into a Michelin kitchen off the street. You stage, a trial shift where the kitchen watches you work, because the bar starts at the door. In a company, that means the standard shows up in the interview: work samples over talk, the bar described honestly so people can self-select, and the discipline to hold the hiring bar exactly when growth pressure is screaming to lower it.

Organize for the bar. The kitchen brigade is organization in service of a standard: every station owned, sauce, pastry, garde manger, one name per domain, and each station holding its own bar so the chef does not have to hold all of them. This is excellence’s own structural lever, and it is the system that separates the two excellences at scale. Compliant excellence scales through inspection, more checkers and more of the leader’s attention. Committed excellence scales through teams that own their outcomes, because a team that owns its outcomes holds its own bar.

Develop for the bar. A great kitchen is an apprenticeship machine. Commis to chef de partie to sous, coached plate by plate, on the job, every service. That is what development means in a culture of excellence: not a training budget, but constant on-the-job coaching and stretch assignments, work handed to people slightly beyond their current ability on purpose. You cannot hold people to a bar you have not equipped them to reach.

Review against the bar. The chef tastes everything. Every plate crosses the pass, which is the most concentrated review system in any industry, running hundreds of times a night, judging the work against a bar everyone knows. Your company’s version is every review, formal and informal: the performance review, and just as much the one-on-one, the work walked through in the meeting, the deliverable read before it goes out. If those moments ask about the bar, what did we deliver against what excellent looks like, the culture is real. If they ask about activity and likability, the wall says excellence and the reviews say otherwise, and people believe the reviews.

Reward the bar. Advancement through the brigade runs on demonstrated craft, and the star is the shared prize. Rewards are broader than compensation: pay, promotion, recognition, and celebration, every currency the company controls, all pointed at the same standard. If any of them points elsewhere, if the money rewards tenure or the celebrations praise the wrong work, people reconcile the contradiction by believing the promotions. The bar has to pay, in every currency at once.

The through line is simple: if you are creating a culture of excellence, reinforce the language with the system. The language sets the bar. The system keeps it, so the standard stops depending on your voice.

REACHING HIGHER: THE CULTURES THAT MAKE IT EASIER

The language and the system will stand up a real culture of excellence. Then comes the question of how high you can raise the bar, and this is where the other cultures come in. Excellence is the pinnacle of cultures: every culture you build underneath it makes the next notch of the bar easier to reach and easier to hold with want-to instead of have-to. And their absence is what pulls a rising bar toward the fear kitchen, because high expectations without candor, accountability, ownership, growth, and meritocracy have only compliance to run on.

A culture of candor is the bar’s truth supply. A bar is made of honest assessments. Without candor, “is this excellent?” gets answered politely, the review says great job about adequate work, and the bar quietly drops to wherever politeness sets it. And without candor running upward, the bar cannot be talked back to, so it drifts toward fear.

A culture of open accountability is the bar’s ledger. Expectations without visible follow-through are announcements. The bar is only real if commitments against it are made in the open and visibly kept or explained, which is exactly what open accountability builds, and it is what lets the bar be held by peers instead of enforced from above.

A culture of ownership decides who holds the bar. This is the hinge between the two excellences. In the compliant version, the leader holds the bar and everyone else complies with it. In the committed version, the team holds it on its own work, the standard keeps getting named when the leader is not in the room, and the culture compounds instead of depending. The sous refusing the plate is ownership, made visible. One corollary comes with it: you cannot ask people to own a bar over work you will not let them control. High expectations plus micromanagement is the fear formula wearing a quality costume.

A culture of growth is what makes the bar land as stretch instead of verdict. A high bar hits a fixed mindset as a threat, so people hide work and defend instead of improve. The same bar hits a growth culture as an invitation. A miss becomes information about what to work on next, and the distance between here and excellent becomes a development path instead of a judgment. That is why the belief line matters: high expectations, plus I know you can reach them, is what tells people the bar is an invitation.

And a culture of meritocracy makes the bar pay. A company that reviews excellent work and adequate work into the same raises and promotions is announcing, every cycle, that the bar is optional, and people are logical. Excellence has to visibly decide who rises. Meritocracy also has an uncomfortable half that every real excellence culture faces squarely: sustained mediocrity. One visibly tolerated underperformer recalibrates the whole team’s bar, because people read who is kept as accurately as they read who is promoted.

To be clear about the sequencing, you do not need five other cultures in place before you pursue excellence. But if you are going for truly committed excellence, you will need to work on the other pillars, and the pursuit itself will tell you which one, because the bar wobbles exactly where a pillar is missing.

WHEN THE BAR BECOMES IDENTITY

Everything so far is the demanding half of the culture. Here is the half that makes people want it. The deep fuel of committed excellence is not pressure. It is pride: the felt experience of doing something at the top of your ability and having it seen. Ask anyone who has worked a station in a great kitchen, or delivered real work on a genuinely excellent team. They describe it the way athletes describe a championship season, as hard, and as one of the best things they were ever part of. Being stretched by a team that expects your best and helps you deliver it is one of the most alive ways a person can work. That is what you are feeling in the kitchen where it seems like you are with friends. Not the absence of a bar. The presence of pride.

And excellence becomes durable at the exact moment it crosses from standard to identity. “The bar is high here” is a rule, and rules need enforcement. “We are the kind of team that does not do mediocre work” is an identity, and identities enforce themselves, because now a lapse in the work is a lapse in who we are. This is how the bar finally gets owned rather than complied with, and celebration is the installation tool. Celebrate excellent work specifically, by name, with the why attached, and you teach what excellent means better than any refusal ever will. What gets celebrated is what gets repeated, because people build identity out of what their team applauds.

WINNING TEAMS ARE HARD

Now the part most culture content will not say to you. A culture of excellence, even the committed kind, is hard to be part of, and it is supposed to be. The expectations, the pace, the intellectual and physical tenacity it takes. Service is tonight, every night. You do not take time off from excellence, because the bar does not have office hours, and everyone on a winning team knows it. One clarification keeps that sentence honest: the bar is constant, and human energy is managed. Athletes hold the highest standards on earth and still train in cycles, recover on purpose, and peak for what matters. Confusing the constancy of the bar with a permanent sprint is how excellence cultures eat their own people, and the selectivity above is the protection.

This is also where the burnout question gets its honest answer, because burnout in excellence cultures has exactly two sources, and the two cultures name the first. Fuel people on have to, and no amount of clarity about the bar saves them. That is compliant excellence doing what it always does, and the fix is everything on this page about the committed version. The second source is selectivity failure: the bar applied to everything, so that nothing is ever good enough and done. Even a team that genuinely wants the bar burns out polishing work that never mattered, which is why the 80/20 permission in the language is not a nicety. It is the guardrail that keeps a ferocious bar humane. Get the fuel right and the selectivity right, and a high bar does not burn people out. It is what turns them on.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of leaders absorbed the idea that a good culture is a comfortable one, and comfort is a fine thing to want and a fatal thing to optimize a company for. Comfortable competence is real: pleasant, steady, and quietly beaten by every team that chose stretch, while its most ambitious people leave for somewhere that will demand something of them. Researchers who study team culture have found exactly that: in the comfort zone, high achievers become leavers. Being honest about the hardness does two things. It protects the people who join you, because excellence cultures self-select, and people deserve to know what kind of team they are joining before they join it. Not everyone wants to work in a Michelin kitchen, and that is a legitimate choice. And it protects the culture itself, because the moment a leader apologizes for the bar, the bar starts falling.

Think about the last piece of work your team finished that genuinely mattered. Did anyone define excellent before it started? Did anyone say out loud whether it got there? And if you had stepped away for a month, would the bar have held? Your answers are your current culture.

START NOW

You do not need a program to start. Start playing with the language today. In your next meeting, ask: what does excellent look like for this? Ask your team: how could we aspire to more here, how do we reach higher? And sit with the leader’s question underneath all of it: what is the real potential of my people and my team, and how do I communicate it, and then help them reach it?

Stop accepting mediocrity, and coach the feedback in with belief attached: I am giving you this feedback because you have real potential, and I want to see you reach it. Then watch what happens. Watch how people respond to a named bar and a believed-in stretch. Make the team’s metrics transparent. Have people report on their own productivity. Let a little healthy competition into the room.

Excellence is a mindset for you to establish, and it starts with you playing with the language and watching the response. Over time, build the big picture: a culture of excellence, created through language at every level, from the North Star down to the daily activities, and reinforced through the systems.

Here is the simplest way I can put the whole page. Your company is already playing. The market does not offer a spectator section. The only real choice is the standard you play to, and whether your people carry it with fear or with pride. If you are going to play, you might as well play to win. You might as well be excellent.