Someone on your team is polishing a slide deck right now that nobody will read past page three. Someone else just sent you the thing that actually mattered, and it’s fine, but it’s a B. You needed an A.
Neither of them made a mistake. They made a guess. Because you never told them what they were being graded on.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: not everything gets an A.
F — didn’t get done.
D — barely got done. Nobody’s proud of it.
C — average. Clears the bar, nothing more.
B — solid. On most work, a B+ is genuinely good.
A — excellent. On most tasks, an A- is a great result.
Your team knows this scale exists. They just don’t know which one you’re using on any given task. So they guess and they can guess wrong in both directions.
The over-guessers burn a week on something you’d have accepted in an afternoon. They’re not slow; they’re scared. Nobody told them a B was allowed, so they treat everything like it’s the one that counts. They cost you time, because you could have made a decision and moved toward the objective instead of polishing the report.
The under-guessers coast on the thing that gets seen by your boss’s boss. They’re not lazy. They’re calibrated to the last five tasks you gave them, and those were all Bs, so they assumed this one was too. They cost you rework, because you’re either going to have them redo it, or you’re going to have to clean it up to be presentable.
But the trick is that you created both problems. Fixing them takes one sentence.
Say the grade when you hand out the work.
“This is a quick-and-solid B. Don’t gold-plate it.”
“This one gets a lot of eyes. It’s worth the extra pass.”
That’s it. That’s the whole intervention. Don’t see this as lowering your standards. You are telling people what the standards actually are, which is something they currently have to reverse-engineer from your body language in meetings.
Here’s what you get back. When you tell someone a task is a B, you’re not giving them permission to be mediocre. You’re giving them permission to spend that saved effort somewhere it matters. Effort is finite. If you don’t direct it, it gets spread evenly across everything, which means the important work gets exactly the same energy as the throwaway work.
Three things that make this work:
- Grade the task, not the person. “This one’s a B” is information about the work. Say it about the person and you’ve just handed out a performance review nobody asked for. Now they’re either going to retreat and you won’t get the best from them. They may also take on less work or lower risk work (aka those classes that pad your GPA), so that they can ensure they get an A on everything. Those are two different conversations. Don’t let one leak into the other.
- Say it up front, not at the end. A grade delivered after the work is done is a critique. A grading scale delivered before the work starts is a map.
- Mean it when you say B. If you call something a B and then send it back with sixteen edits, you’ve taught your team that you lie about grades. They’ll go back to guessing, and they’ll guess high on everything, forever. You’ve just cost yourself time on everything they’re going to send you from now ‘til forever.
Nobody nails every task. If some fraction of your team’s work doesn’t land perfectly because they were reaching for something better, that’s the cost of people getting good. The goal was never to carry a safe load all year without dropping anything. The goal is that when something actually matters, everyone knows it, and they’ve got the energy left to reach.
Your team isn’t underperforming. They’re guessing.
Tell them the grading scale before they start.
See you next week!
-Frank
