Why standards kept slipping

Years ago, working in hospitality, I watched a business where standards weren’t being met. They were good people, with decent training and reasonable systems on paper. And still, things kept slipping.

Managers were being bombarded with updates and actions all week. New pricing from head office on a Tuesday. A marketing push needing local sign-off by Thursday. An HR reminder buried in an inbox already full of emails, about a fire door inspection, a discount code nobody asked for. All of it landing on top of running the business.

And because those managers weren’t always on site, walking a delivery through, covering a shift, dealing with a guest complaint, plenty of it arrived while they were elsewhere. By the time they got back to a screen, the update had already been buried under four more.

The obvious read on that is a discipline problem. To tighten the standards, we need to retrain the team.

We didn’t have an empowered culture for assistants or deputies either, as it happens. No one expected a deputy manager to see something land, judge it important, and act without waiting for the manager to resurface. So when a message arrived, and the manager was off-site, it just sat there, waiting for someone with the authority to notice it and decide it mattered.

Strip the language of skill and effort away from that, and what’s left is an input problem. The team, and the managers running it, had a diet, the same way an individual does. And that diet was chaotic: too many messages, from too many directions, with no filter and no priority attached to any of them.

Retraining wouldn’t have touched that. Neither would a stricter standards audit. You can hold someone as accountable as you like for missing an update they never properly received, buried under six others, on a day they were dealing with a supplier problem on the other side of the building.

So, they built something that started life as Air Traffic Control. A small function whose entire job was to take every key message coming from across the company, like head office pricing, marketing pushes, HR notes, compliance changes, and filter it into a single weekly document. One update, every Monday, prioritised and clear.

The person running it had one job: decide what needed a manager’s attention that week, and what could wait. Most updates, once someone looked properly, turned out to need neither urgency nor an audience of everyone.

That’s it. A single filtered channel replaced a dozen unfiltered ones.

The effect was almost immediate. Standards, the same ones that had been slipping for months, started holding within weeks. The information people needed to do their job stopped getting lost in the noise.

I think about that business often now, sitting with a client and looking at an underperforming team. The instinct, almost always, is to look at the people. Send someone on a course or have the difficult conversation about standards slipping.

Rarely does anyone ask what’s actually landing on that team’s desk in a given week: how many updates, from how many directions, filtered by whom, if anyone, before it reaches them.

Empowerment matters too, and we had to build that alongside the filtering, deputies and assistants who felt able to act on what they were given. But the filtering came first. You can’t empower someone to act well on information they never clearly received.

Most of what erodes standards is noise nobody’s been given the job of filtering.

If your own team’s execution has been slipping lately, before you reach for training or a harder conversation, it might be worth asking a simpler question. What’s actually feeding them this week, and is anyone filtering it before it lands?

Have a brilliant week!

Dave Rogers, The Business Explorer

If this struck a chord, my Substack goes further on the same questions. Want help applying any of it to your business? Book a call.

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For 30 years, I’ve worked with business owners and leaders who are stuck on the wrong question. My job is to find the right one.

That usually means sitting with the messy “what if” long enough to turn it into something you can actually move on—no roadmap handed down from on high, just clearer thinking and harder questions.