High standards and high humanity

On my last day at Digitas, I tried to compress twelve years into a single line for my team: high standards, high humanity — ambitious for the work, and generous with each other. I'd never actually used the phrase before that day, although it consciously echoes Simon Gill's "hard on the work, kind to the people" mantra, which had long been something of a north star. It took leaving to find my own version of the words for what I'd been trying to build all along.

It's the closest thing I have to a leadership belief. I spent a decade building and leading a product and technology capability of 200+ people across the UK, India and Europe, and the pattern held consistently: the teams that did the best work were the ones where the bar was high and the people setting it visibly cared about the humans clearing it. Not one or the other. Both, at the same time, all the time.

The reason this is worth writing down is that most organisations don't behave as though they believe it. They'd never say so... every values deck has a slide about excellence and a slide about people... but watch how they actually behave under pressure and you'll see the two treated as a dial. Turn it towards the work and you get "high-performance culture" (too often a euphemism for burning people). Turn it towards the people and you get "supportive culture" (sometimes a euphemism for not having hard conversations). Too frequently, there is a quiet assumption that standards and humanity trade off against each other, and leadership is about picking your position on the dial.

I think that's wrong. Moreover, it's the assumption that produces much of the mediocre work and many of the miserable teams I've encountered.

What each looks like on its own

Standards without humanity is the easier failure to spot, because it's loud. You've seen it: the team that ships impressive work while quietly haemorrhaging its best people. The deadline culture where late nights are a badge rather than a warning light.

Early in my time leading a large team on Formula 1, I wrote an email to senior leadership that I can still more or less quote: "we appear to be promising things and pursuing timelines that are not sustainable, and I need to consider morale, wellbeing, and retention" and then articulated steps that would be necessary "if we are to successfully complete this programme". I was fortunate to be heard and given the autonomy to act. It came down to plain pragmatism: resetting expectations on scope and people; explaining why the deadlines needed to move back; and making an intentional, sustained effort to value the team under heavy pressure. It was a formative experience for my leadership style, although I still regret not acting earlier because some great people had already been used up. However, the lessons stayed with me for years and I think the trust and safety earned in that time compounded invisibly for years afterwards.

High standards without humanity always looks like winning right up until the moment the people who made the winning possible stop believing you'll look after them. Then you get fear, defensiveness, quiet attrition and eventually the standards go too, because frightened people don't tell you the truth about the work.

Humanity without standards is quieter and, I'd argue, more insidious, because it feels virtuous while it's happening. For me, it's the difference between being nice and being kind. When everyone is nice, nobody gets the hard feedback, low-value projects or initiatives are allowed to persist, nobody is clearly accountable for outcomes or missed opportunities. The result is comfortable mediocrity and it's a decision to fail more slowly. Kindness means being clear about what is needed, having difficult conversations early and considering the consequences for the whole team, not simply avoiding discomfort for one person.

So the trade-off framing fails in both directions. Which raises the more interesting question: what happens when you refuse it?

How they compound

Held together consistently, the two reinforce each other in ways that are hard to see from inside either failure mode.

High standards give people work worth committing to. Capable people generally don't want work emptied of challenge. They want to do work they're proud of, alongside people who help them improve. A genuinely high bar is a form of respect: it says I believe you're capable of this.

High humanity gives people the safety to actually clear that bar. Hard problems require people to say "I don't know", "I got this wrong", "this estimate is fiction" and they'll only say those things out loud if they trust that honesty won't be punished. Psychological safety isn't the opposite of high standards. It's the operating condition for them.

Two examples from my own experience, one fast and one slow.

The fast one: when the previous supplier pulled out, we designed and built the Glastonbury Festival app from scratch — live in seven weeks, three weeks before the gates opened. The deadline was as immovable as deadlines get; the festival happens whether your app is ready or not, with a couple of hundred thousand attendees expecting to rely on it. The conventional response to that kind of pressure is a big team, long hours and a command-and-control delivery structure. We did roughly the opposite: a small, empowered product trio – product, design, and engineering — with clear outcomes, genuine authority to make decisions without escalating, and leadership whose main job was absorbing pressure rather than transmitting it. In all honesty, there were some long hours, but it was a choice made by a team, and we supported each other (including not cancelling holidays during the period). I don't think either half of that was optional: the standards made the scope decisions honest; the humanity kept an exceptional period of intensity bounded, supported and voluntary rather than allowing it to become the operating model.

The slow one: our Honda partnership ran for more than a decade: through platform consolidations, commercial negotiations, the introduction of e-commerce, car-and-bike launch deadlines and the occasional genuinely bad week. Client relationships don't survive that long on standards alone (plenty of technically excellent agencies get rotated out) or on relationship warmth alone (plenty of well-liked agencies get rotated out too). What compounds over a decade is the combination: work that keeps earning its place, delivered by a team stable and trusted enough to hold years of context. And team stability is a humanity outcome. People stayed on that account for years, during a period when moving jobs every couple of years was the default, because the work was worth doing and the environment was worth doing it in. Both the business and the client earned compound interest from the combination.

The hard bits

The reason the combination is rare is that it's hard to hold both simultaneously and the rewards emerge over a longer horizon than many companies allow for.

Hard feedback is the everyday case. Telling someone their work isn't meeting the standard, kindly, is a skill most leaders never properly develop, because two common failure modes are more comfortable: soften it until the message disappears, or deliver it bluntly and call it honesty. The version that works — direct on the work, generous about the person, and collaborative about the path forward — takes real effort every single time. It should also be tuned to each individual wherever possible (adapt the delivery, not the standard) because there is no one strategy or playbook that works with everyone.

Positive feedback is equally underused – not praise for its own sake, but specific reinforcement of the behaviours that lift the wider team. Turning high-performing individuals into catalysts and stewards for the wider team and system takes deliberate coaching and a lot of trust. It is too often underdeveloped, partly because it requires trust that such behaviour will be rewarded, rather than exploited; and partly because it carries a risk of temporarily reducing their individual output. Nurturing that instinct has paid some of the greatest dividends of my career: an individual contributor who went on to become an outstanding leader, loved by the team and the client; a Tech Director who cross-mentored a Designer in accessibility and championing their success; a brilliant product person who applied their skills to team ownership and being an advocate for product thinking beyond their own discipline.

Redundancies are an interesting case. I've had to make roles redundant, and I've been made redundant myself as part of a leadership restructure and a change in priorities. I won't pretend either side of that conversation can be made painless. But there is an enormous difference between a hard decision executed with genuine care — honestly explained, properly supported, the person's dignity intact — and the same decision executed as an administrative or cost process. The decision tests your standards; the execution tests your humanity. People watch both the decision itself and how you handle it, and what they learn shapes how safe your organisation feels for years afterwards.

And saying no – to a timeline that requires burning the team, to a commercial opportunity that risks compromising standards – is where the belief gets expensive. It's easy to hold "high standards and high humanity" when they're free. The test is whether you'll pay for them when they're not.

There's also a responsibility in how you embody the belief as a leader. I see a parallel with what Jim Collins, in "Good to Great", calls "Level 5 Leadership": the "paradoxical combination of personal humility and professional will". Professional will supplies the resolve to protect the standard; personal humility stops that resolve becoming about the leader’s ego. It isn’t exactly the same formulation, but it expresses the same productive tension. The practical test is whether people experience both: a leader who will look after them and who will not pretend mediocre work is good enough.

Why this matters more now

I’m wary of every post in 2026 becoming AI-linked, but we cannot ignore what AI is changing. It is making the production of plausible output dramatically cheaper. Ideas, first-pass strategies, designs, solution options and code iterations can all be generated faster and in far greater volume. That is not the whole of execution – integrating, adopting and operating what gets produced remain difficult – but it changes where the constraint lies.

AI makes output abundant, not automatically good. That increases the value of judgement: knowing what good looks like, understanding which problems are worth solving, and caring enough to insist on a better answer. The human system that sustains that judgement is made up of people who trust each other enough to say “this isn’t good enough yet” and hear it as help rather than attack.

It also creates uncertainty for people whose work, skills and roles are changing. Humanity without standards risks reassuring people while leaving them unprepared. Standards without humanity turns transformation into something done to people, with little honesty about the consequences. Leaders need to give people room to learn, speak candidly about what is changing and still raise the bar for what the team can achieve.

The trade-off was always false; AI is about to make it more obviously so. Teams that learn to hold both will compound. Teams that pick one will produce more mediocre output, faster than has ever been possible – and probably won’t even realise they are doing it.

High standards, high humanity. Ambitious for the work, generous with each other. It was the last thing I said to my team, and I meant it as a beginning rather than an ending.