Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Score Takes Care of Itself: Building a Standard of Performance
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Score Takes Care of Itself: Building a Standard of Performance. Here we go. There's a phrase that's been used so many times it's almost lost its weight. The score takes care of itself. You've probably heard it, you might have nodded at it and moved on. But I want to sit with this today. Because I think most leaders hear that phrase and understand it one way, and that understanding, while not wrong, stops short of where the real power lives. Bill Walsh said it, three time Super Bowl champion, one of the most decorated coaches in NFL history, and the man who turned a losing franchise into a dynasty without ever making the scoreboard the primary focus. That should stop you. We spend an enormous amount of time as leaders focused on the scoreboard. The score takes care of itself. That's it. Five words. And yet there's an entire philosophy of leadership compressed into that sentence. Walsh didn't say the score doesn't matter. He said it takes care of itself. The implication being that if you focus on the right things, the results will come. But if you chase the results directly, you'll usually compromise the very things that produce them. I've sat across the table from executives who could tell you their pipeline number, their quarterly target, their year over year growth percentage down to the decimal. What they couldn't tell me, at least not with any consistency, was what their team's standard of performance actually looked like on a Tuesday afternoon. That's the gap. And it's not a data gap, it's a leadership gap. Walsh built something he called the standard of performance. It's not a goal, it's a standard. A precise, detailed description how every person in the organization was expected to show up, prepare, execute, and carry themselves. Not when it mattered most, every day. Because every day is what builds the capacity to perform when it matters most. The leaders I've watched build the most durable organizations, the ones that sustain performance across cycles, across turnover, across adversity, are not the ones most obsessed with results. They're the ones most obsessed with the work itself. Here's where I think leaders go wrong with this idea. They hear the score takes care of itself and they interpret it as a call to detachment. Don't worry about the results, just do good work, trust the process. And that sounds freeing, but it can become a permission slip for avoiding accountability. That's not what Walsh meant. And it's not what this principle means in practice. Walsh was deeply competitive. He cared intensely about winning. The point isn't that outcomes don't matter. The point is that outcomes are the product of inputs, and most leaders spend their energy at the wrong end of that equation. Think about it this way. When you apply pressure directly to outcomes, you create urgency without direction. People feel the heat, but they don't know what to do differently. They try harder at the same things, which usually means more effort applied to the wrong behaviors. When you invest in the standard, you give people something concrete to execute against. They know what good looks like. They know where they are relative to that mark, and they have a path forward that doesn't depend on panic. Urgency gets a short-term result. Standards build a long-term culture. You want both, but you have to build in the right order. So here's what I want you to carry into this week. Not a tactic, not a framework, but a question. What is your standard of performance? Not your goal, not your KPI, your standard. The actual description of how your team is expected to think, prepare, and execute. If you can answer that clearly and specifically, you're building something. If you can't, the scoreboard is probably running you more than you realize. The most important leadership work often doesn't show up on a dashboard. It shows up in the habits, the rituals, the norms, and the expectations you build and reinforce every day. Walsh understood that. The leaders who build lasting organizations understand that. The score takes care of itself. Not because results don't matter, they do, but because results are the output of a system and the system is yours to build. Your job as a leader isn't to want results badly enough. It's to create the conditions in which excellent results become almost inevitable. That starts with clarity about what excellent actually looks like in your organization. Not on the day of the big presentation, every day, in the small things, in the repeated behaviors, in the standard. Build that and And the score will follow.