One of the simplest and most useful phrases I use with practice owners is also one of the easiest to underestimate. What does good look like.

It sounds obvious. In practice, it almost never is.

Most teams in most practices are working without a clear, shared picture of what good actually looks like in their role. They have a job description, which is usually a list of tasks rather than a description of behaviour. They have an induction, which tends to focus on systems and policies rather than standards. They have a manager who knows what good looks like in their own head, but has rarely articulated it in a way that anyone else could repeat back.

So the team works from approximation. They do their best version of what they think good is. The principal works from a different picture, often a more demanding one. And the gap between those two pictures is where most of what gets called underperformance actually lives.

The frustrating thing is that this isn’t a people problem. It’s a clarity problem.

Take a typical example. A reception team is being asked to handle deposit conversations more confidently. The principal has explained the new policy, the rationale, the wording. Six weeks in, the conversations still aren’t happening consistently. Some patients are being asked, others aren’t. Some team members hold the line, others quietly waive it.

The instinct is to conclude that the team isn’t bought in, or doesn’t have the confidence, or needs more training. Sometimes that’s true. More often, what’s missing is a specific, behavioural picture of what good looks like in that conversation. What words to use. What tone. What to do when the patient pushes back. What’s a soft no versus a hard no. What the standard is, and where the line sits.

Without that picture, the team is being asked to perform to a standard nobody has ever fully described. It’s no wonder it doesn’t stick.

The same pattern shows up across almost every part of practice life. Good triage. Good handover between clinical and admin. Good morning huddles. Good chairside support. Good response to a complaint. We use these words as if everyone shares the same definition, and then we get frustrated when the behaviour doesn’t match the one we had in our heads.

The team isn’t being difficult. They’re working from a different picture, or no picture at all.

When you take the time to describe what good actually looks like, concretely, in behaviour, with examples, two things happen. The strong performers exhale, because the standard finally matches what they’ve been doing all along, and they feel seen. The people who’ve been drifting suddenly have something specific to aim at, and most of them rise to meet it. The very small number who can’t or won’t are now visible in a way they weren’t before, which is also useful information.

This isn’t a poster. It isn’t a values statement on the wall. It isn’t an away day. It’s a quiet, ongoing conversation about what we do here, and how, and why. Repeated often enough, in enough small moments, that the picture becomes shared.

The practices that get this right tend to feel different from the moment you walk in. There’s less drift. Less of the low-grade tension that comes from people not quite knowing where the line is. New hires bed in faster, because they can see the standard rather than having to guess at it. Existing team members hold each other to it, because it isn’t a secret only the principal knows.

The practices that get this wrong tend to spend a lot of energy on managing performance, addressing behaviour, and rewriting policies, none of which fixes the underlying issue. The standard is unclear, so behaviour is inconsistent, so management gets harder, so the principal gets pulled back in. Round it goes.

If there’s one piece of leadership work that pays back disproportionately, it’s this one. Get specific about what good looks like, in the roles and moments that matter most, and most of what currently feels like a people problem starts to resolve itself.

It isn’t dramatic work. It’s slow, careful, and unglamorous. It’s also most of the job.