Are you holding different success criteria for your team? The answer is probably yes. 

Many of us show up to work with clear ideas about what success looks like. For most of us, unfortunately, we do not articulate our definitions of “quality” and “success” explicitly to our teams, and most importantly, to ourselves. And our teams do not have a secret decoder ring that they can use to decode what we are thinking. This secret decoder ring is really a metaphor to describe the ways knowledge, meaning, and we would argue, power, is hidden in the workplace. Having a secret decoder ring means you have the “tool” to decode the information and power that is being transmitted throughout a variety of professional interactions. So why do we share with some colleagues/direct reports and not others? What should leaders do instead?