SERIES 1 OF 4 :: Excellence Under Pressure: What Does Our Best Look Like Together?
When the deadline moves up but the expectations stay the same, how does your team respond?
As you move through Q4, you may be balancing the push to finish strong with the need to plan for next year. Like I shared in last week’s newsletter, asking people to work harder doesn’t resolve competing priorities or clarify what they need from one another.
That’s the focus of my work: empowering teams to work together better under pressure by strengthening how they communicate, align, and execute with each other.
Over the next four weeks, I’ll share perspectives and practical tools from my E.P.I.C. system to help you put that into practice.
Here’s a sneak peak at what my system covers and our upcoming four-week journey:
- Excellence: What does our best look like under pressure, and what do we need from each other to sustain it?
- Presence: How do we stay engaged, listen fully, and recognize when a teammate needs our attention or support?
- Intentionality: How do we respond with purpose rather than letting urgency determine our words and actions?
- Curiosity: How do we ask better questions and challenge assumptions so we hear the best thinking, not just the loudest or fastest?
Let’s begin with Excellence, because asking people to bring their best only works when you’ve agreed on what “best” means.
Get clear on what you’re asking for
Picture a team preparing a customer proposal for Friday. Sales wants it out quickly, operations wants realistic delivery commitments, and finance wants to protect the margin.
Everyone wants an excellent proposal, but each person is working from a different definition.
Before asking for more effort, ask yourself: Have I made the standard clear, or am I expecting people to figure it out?
“Our best means a clear recommendation, confirmed delivery commitments, and agreed pricing before this reaches the customer” gives the team something useful to work toward together.
That’s the difference between performance assumptions and performance alignment.
Include what you need from each other
Think about a pit stop. Each person has a job, but the performance depends on how those jobs connect.
The same is true on your team. A thorough report that arrives too late for someone else to use may meet one person’s standard while creating a problem for the next.
Ask your team: “What do you need from the rest of us to do your best work when things get busy?”
You’re looking for practical answers, such as:
- Give me an early heads-up when a deadline is at risk.
- Confirm who owns the next step before handing off the work.
- Tell me when priorities change so I know what can wait.
These agreements make excellence something people can practice, not just something you ask them to pursue.
Talk honestly about what you can sustain
There’s a difference between occasionally stretching to meet a challenge and relying on the same people to rescue the work every week.
In your next meeting, ask everyone to rate these statements from 1–10:
- “We agree on what excellent work looks like for our top priority.”
- “We have the support and capacity to deliver it.”
Explore the differences in the answers. If someone gives clarity a nine and capacity a four, another explanation of the goal probably isn’t what they need.
Ask instead: “What would help move that four to a five?”
Put it to work this week
Set aside 15 minutes for an Excellence Huddle. Pick one shared priority and complete these sentences together:
- Our best looks like…
- The standards we need to protect are…
- We need _ from each other.
- If we get stretched, we will…
Keep the answers nearby so you can revisit next week, then talk about what helped and where you still need to adjust.
The purpose is to make the work clearer and the support more specific, so doing your best doesn’t depend on everyone quietly figuring it out alone.
Next week, we’ll explore Presence and how to stay available to your teammates when your own attention is stretched.
As you look at the weeks ahead, what’s one thing your team needs from each other to sustain its best work under pressure?