Why "raise the floor" beat "set the bar" — and what it cost me to learn it.

For years I thought leadership was about the bar. Cast a big vision, set a high standard, tell people where we're headed, and they'll rise to meet it. I was good at the bar. I could stand up in a meeting and paint a picture that got the whole room leaning in.

What I missed is that nobody actually lives at the bar. They live at the floor.

The bar is what you say you expect. The floor is what you actually accept. And the gap between those two is where good companies quietly rot.

I learned the language for this from Ben Hardy and Blake Erickson's The Science of Scaling — but I earned the lesson the hard way, by losing people I couldn't afford to lose.

The cost

Here's how it went. We had someone on the team — I'll keep it vague, because the point isn't the person — who was genuinely talented and quietly corrosive. Missed commitments. Made the people around them a little smaller. Treated our standards as suggestions. And I tolerated it. I told myself the talent was worth the friction. I told myself they'd come around. I set the bar high in every meeting, and then, in practice, accepted something well below it.

You know who noticed? Not the person below the floor — they were fine. The people who noticed were my best people. The ones already operating above the bar without being asked. They watched me accept less than I preached, and they drew the only conclusion available to them: the standard isn't real.

I didn't lose the corrosive person. I lost two of my best — who left for places where the floor matched the words. That's the tax you pay for a low floor, and it always comes out of your best account, never your worst.

The turn

Raising the floor sounds like getting tougher. It isn't. It's getting honest.

Hardy and Erickson say it plainly: the number one reason companies don't scale is that the founder is lying to himself. I was. I'd built a story where tolerating the intolerable was patience — maybe even grace. It wasn't grace. It was fear wearing grace's coat. Fear of the hard conversation, fear of the gap I'd have to cover myself, fear of being wrong about someone I'd hired.

The floor is the floor. Once you set it, it only means something if you defend it — with consequences, not speeches. A standard you announce but won't enforce isn't a standard. It's marketing.

So I started defending it. I had the conversation I'd been avoiding for months. It cost me a talented person and a few uncomfortable weeks. And then something I didn't expect: the room got faster. The people who'd been quietly carrying the standard exhaled. The next folks we brought on inherited a floor that was actually load-bearing. Growth I'd been grinding for started showing up closer to on its own — because I'd stopped asking my best people to work in a building with a cracked foundation.

Why this isn't just business

There's a part of this that's plain operations, and a part that, for me, isn't.

I believe the people on my team were entrusted to me — that leading them well is a kind of stewardship. And you cannot steward people well on a low floor. When you accept less than you both know is right, you're not being kind. You're robbing your best people of the standard they signed up for, and robbing the struggling one of the honest word that might actually change them. The floor isn't the cold part of leadership. Some days it's the most caring thing I do.

Where I've landed

So here's how I run The Nine now:

Don't manage to the bar. Manage to the floor. Let the vision be as high as you want — but ask yourself, relentlessly, what am I actually accepting? Because that, not the slide with the big number, is your real standard.

And watch your best people. They are the floor's truest reading. Long before a metric tells you something is wrong, your A-players already know. When you accept less than you promised, they're the first to leave — and the last you can afford to.

The bar is for the speech. The floor is for the building. Take care of the floor.