Unless you have made an enemy out of your employees, they don’t intend to perform poorly. Everyone wants to do excellence work. 

But that doesn’t mean everyone actually does excellent work. 

One of the most common reasons for this is a lack of clarity. Or to be less gentle in my wording, when we as leaders are sloppy in our communication, we make our team guess. And when they guess wrong, that’s our fault, not theirs.

So, if you want excellence. You have to make sure people are clear before they start working. Excellence requires clarity, especially for teams working together.

This doesn’t mean you have to spell everything out for everyone on the team in detail. That is one way to create clarity. But it is also exhausting for you and leaves no room for your team to make things better with their own ideas. A better way to create clarity is asking your team questions. In the process of answering them, they will define excellence for their work.

Some of my favorite clarity questions:
-Who is going to do that?
-When will you have that done?
-How will we know when we’ve been successful?

Note: if you’re working virtually, you have to put even more effort into this. Your virtual people have less opportunity to ask questions along the way or to see how others are doing the work. 

If you want excellence, don’t make them guess. Create clarity and excellence will follow.