Does your team know what good looks like?

Have you ever had that sinking feeling when you've looked at a piece of work from someone in your team and realised that the quality of it is not where you need it to be?

It is tempting to think that the person should have known better. And sometimes they probably should.

But there are times, if we are honest with ourselves as managers and leaders, when we need to ask ourselves how clearly we explained what was required.

When I moved from working as a lawyer into management, I brought several years of professional experience with me and that experience formed part of how I judged the work I was presented with. It will be the same for you in your field.

And I clearly remember one occasion when I was feeding back to a more junior lawyer on the first piece of work she had done for me. There was quite a lot to go through and she said something like: "this is what I was worried about, I had heard that you were a 'tough marker' with high standards." At the time, I thought of it as a bit of a badge of honour, but when I think back now, I realise it would have been better all round if I had made my expectations clearer up front.

The reason we don't do this is not laziness. It is often because we are wary of being too prescriptive. But being clear about the standards expected and leaving somebody to work their own way are not mutually exclusive.

So, let's look at how we can achieve this without micromanaging and without being that annoying person who clarifies the brief after the work has been done.

There is some useful evidence here that comes from research on support provided by teachers. Alexandra Patzak and colleagues found that when teachers support people's autonomy and provide structure by being clear about what is expected and how to get there, the two approaches reinforce each other. Both approaches also lead to more motivation and engagement (Patzak et al., 2025).

But research by Nathalie Aelterman and colleagues drilled down further into how these different approaches operate. They found that giving autonomy and being directive are two entirely separate things, not two ends of one scale (Aelterman et al., 2019). And each of these can either promote a good outcome or prevent one.

So, you can give autonomy by:

And you can be directive by:

The natural conclusion from all of this is that we need to take care in each case to ensure that our approach will promote rather than damage the prospects of a good outcome. And to do this we need to provide the degree of autonomy support and structure that is appropriate to the situation we are working with.

Minyoung Cheong and colleagues found that empowering people can both enable and burden them at the same time; it can raise their belief in themselves but also raise their stress levels (Cheong et al., 2016). And, in that situation, those who did not yet believe they were up to what was being asked of them suffered an unhelpful level of stress and eventually formed the intention to leave the job (Sun et al., 2025).

Thus, the hands-off approach that frees your most confident team member can be experienced by your newest one as being left to sink.

So how do we make this work?

1. Flex support by task, not by person

The same team member might need close support on a board paper and none whatsoever on the thing they have done thirty times, so sorting people into "needs direction" and "self-sufficient" is where this tends to go wrong. Therefore, it is important to get a feel for how competent and confident a person is in relation to the task in question, and the research shows this works best where your view of their competence and their own view of it agree (Thompson and Glasø, 2018).

So, it is more useful to ask than to diagnose. Asking "how do you feel about doing this, and where do you need more guidance?" takes a couple of minutes, and it usually helps you identify the person who may be out of their depth without them having to announce it.

2. Flex the amount of support, not the manner of it

Nobody should be getting the domineering version just because they are new.

Less experienced people may need more structure, not a straitjacket, and more experienced people will still need to know that you are there when needed.

Everything we have looked at so far is about setting standards through providing the right kinds of support and guidance on a case-by-case basis.

But we can also set up some standing expectations for what is required by the use of standard procedure type documents. I work in a highly regulated industry, so we are governed by regulations that require us to have systems and controls for what we do. This means we have to write down how we meet the regulatory expectations. It has also trained us to write down how we do things, with examples of what good looks like, even when we don't have to.

This kind of documentation can help by providing standards to work to without anybody feeling over-supervised. After all, it is hard for even the most sensitive of us to feel micromanaged by a document.

The best evidenced version of this relates to the use of exemplars, which are just examples of finished work at different levels of quality. Showing people the work itself lets them see what the difference between good and less good consists of in a way that just describing the standard does not (To and Panadero, 2021). One practical finding in that review is about the order you do it in: it is often best to ask for a rough draft first, and show the examples afterwards, so that the person finds the gap themselves instead of copying yours. That helps build their judgement.

So, for the work that comes round again and again, these are some of the things worth writing down:

Obviously, these are just examples and there may be other ways of achieving similar benefits in relation to the work that your team does. But the decision ladder might be good to start with. It replaces the anxious "should I check this first?" hesitation with something the person can work out for themselves. And it means that when you do need to see something, as we discussed last week, it is just part of the agreed work process rather than looking like you are checking up.

Of course, there is a resource cost in creating these types of documents and they can go stale. So don't create them if nobody is going to use them or update them when required.

There is also the possibility that you will still not be told when somebody has no idea what good looks like. You need to create a culture in which people are not afraid to admit their limitations and people will generally only do that when it is safe to do so (more on that here).

This is not about creating a team in your own image who all know exactly what you want for any given piece of work. This is about empowering and developing your team so they will know themselves whether a piece of work is any good or not. And that is a far more useful thing for them to be able to do.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

The New Leader's Delegation Manual. The manual has scripts and templates for the handover conversation itself, including a chapter on following up without micromanaging, which covers how closely to monitor different kinds of work. You can get it here.

Coaching. If you are finding that work keeps coming back not quite right, and you are not sure whether to say more about what you want or step further back, that is a good thing to work through with somebody. There are more details here.