Raising the bar

I had a bit of an enlightenment today… While listening to The Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett, he shared his approach to identifying underperforming employees and the importance of letting them go. He posed a thought-provoking question:

Pick any random employee and imagine if the entire company inherited this person’s qualities – their values, sense of culture, ambition, character, and attitude. Would the company’s overall bar be raised, maintained, or lowered? If the answer is lowered – that person is a candidate for letting go.

Then he explained what “the bar” actually is – not the peak achievement of one individual, but the average across the team: a blend of current achievements, ambitions, values, and attitudes. And this… is where it finally clicked for me.

I’ve heard the phrase “raising the bar” so many times in so many contexts. But I always imagined it meant pushing an already high standard even higher – like beating the best deal closed, launching the biggest project, or winning the highest price. That kind of thinking felt exhausting. The bar was already sky-high… now we’re meant to raise it again? And again? Forever?

So while the phrase sounded cool, it never really landed with me – until now. Because the bar isn’t the best result. It’s the average.

And when you look at it that way, everything changes.

Every person brings a unique mix of skills, personality, work ethic, values, and attitude – and all of that evolves over time. If you could average out those traits for one person, then average those across the team, and then do that across every important trait, what you end up with is the real bar – the average of all averages.

That’s what we’re trying to shift. Not the best, but the baseline. A small nudge upward, every day, with every hire and every fire. That feels practical. Realistic. Achievable. And honestly, far more inspiring.

Yes… average. How did I not think of this before?

Thank you, Steven!