Standards Drift Down to What Is Achievable - The SPRIITE Series/Article 4 of 9

A quality problem landed on my desk at a company I was running, and the story I was given was that a team had gotten sloppy. The inspection step they were supposed to run on every unit was getting skipped, and it had been getting skipped for a while.

I went and watched the work. The inspection took eleven minutes. The schedule they were being held to allowed for about four. Nobody had ever decided to skip inspections. Somewhere over the previous two years, volume had gone up, the headcount had not, and the team had done the only arithmetic available to them. They protected the thing they were measured on, which was output, and they gave up the thing nobody asked about weekly, which was inspection.

They had never raised it. That is the part owners find hardest to believe, and it is the most common part of the story.

Resources are the third condition

Resources cover the tools, technology, budget, staffing, expertise, and hours behind the job you are asking someone to do. It is the most concrete of the seven conditions and the one most likely to be judged from a spreadsheet rather than from the floor.

The reason it needs to be scored separately is that under-resourcing does not announce itself. A team that is short on tools or time rarely comes to leadership and says so, at least not more than once or twice. What they do instead is adapt, and the adaptation is invisible from the corner office because the numbers leadership watches usually keep looking fine.

What under-resourcing actually looks like

It looks like corners cut quietly. The step that takes eleven minutes when there are four available. The follow-up call that stops happening on smaller accounts. The second review that gets skipped when the first reviewer is confident enough.

It looks like standards drifting down to what is achievable. This is the part I want owners to sit with, because it happens gradually and it happens without a decision. A team given eighty percent of what the job needs does not do eighty percent of the job. They redefine the job as what fits, and within a year everyone has forgotten the original definition, including the people who set it.

It looks like your best people leaving first. The people most bothered by the drift are the ones with the highest standards, and they are also the ones with the most options. The people who are comfortable with the lowered standard tend to stay. Sustained under-resourcing costs you output, and over a few years it also changes who works for you.

And it looks like a budget line that appears well controlled. The overtime is contained, the equipment request was deferred again this year, the open position stayed open. Every one of those reads as discipline in the monthly review.

The question that surfaces it

Asking a team whether they have what they need produces almost nothing. People say yes, because saying no sounds like an excuse and because most of them stopped expecting a different answer some time ago.

Ask this instead. What are you not doing that you know you should be doing, and what would you need to do it? Ask it in a one on one, ask it of someone who does the work rather than manages it, and then wait through the silence, because the first answer is usually polite and the second one is usually true.

I have almost never asked that question in a company and gotten nothing back. The answers tend to be smaller and more specific than owners expect, which is the good news. It is rarely a new facility. It is often eleven minutes, or a second license, or a person for twelve hours a week.

Scoring resources honestly

A two looks like this. Multiple people can name a standard the company officially holds that is not actually met in practice. Requests for tools or staffing stopped coming a while ago. Equipment gets replaced when it fails rather than when it stops being adequate.

A four looks like this. The people doing the work can describe what they need, they expect to be heard when they ask, and the answer is sometimes no with a reason rather than silence. Standards on paper match standards in practice, and when they stop matching, somebody says so.

A four does not mean fully funded. Every company runs with less than it would like, and constraint is a normal condition of business. What separates a four from a two is whether the constraints were chosen and named, or whether they were absorbed silently by the people closest to the work.

The inspection story above came out of a company I was responsible for, and the arithmetic had been running against us for two years before I looked at it. If your standards and your results have quietly diverged, count what the work actually takes before you have another conversation about performance. And if you want help counting it honestly, my door is open.