TL;DR: Most performance conversations fail because “what good looks like” is never written down. WGLL is a document that defines the mindset, behaviours, and ways of working you hold as the standard on your team — not an operating manual, not a values poster, not a scoring rubric. It gives you the thing you’re missing in every hard conversation: something concrete to point at. This post includes a full worked example — the six First Principles I built with a 40-person B2B SaaS marketing team — plus how to use WGLL in hiring, calibration, performance reviews, and onboarding.
Jump to:
- The problem with unspoken rules
- What WGLL is, and isn’t
- What a feedback conversation looks like with and without it
- A real WGLL: the six First Principles
- How to write one for your team
- Where it goes to work
I learned this the hard way.
It took me a long time and multiple tries to truly understand what it takes to specifically document what it means to be excellent, and then how to use that in practice with real humans, in a way they understand and don’t just nod passively at you.
My early, unpracticed leadership conversations looked a bit like this: I sat down with someone smart, hardworking, but I knew there was something in their performance that wasn’t quite hitting the mark. I knew I had to give feedback. It went like “I need you to take more ownership.” “The work needs to be more strategic.” “I need to see you thinking more about outcomes, not inputs.” They would naturally reply, “What do you mean by ‘be more strategic’ or ‘think more about impact?’”
Me inside: “Uhhhh.” In all seriousness, I knew in my gut what those meant, but I didn’t have a language to use at the ready. I hacked my way through it and hoped they’d remember, and that I would remember enough to be consistent in the next conversation.
Unfortunately, after this feedback conversation, very little action was taken by my direct report. Not because they didn’t care and not because I was wrong. It was because we were both working without a shared definition of what “good” actually means on this team, in this role, right now. This is what I call “the unspoken rules problem,” and it lives inside almost every performance conversation.
My inability to answer those questions confidently led me to tap into my love for specificity. So with the help of a really strong HR Business Partner (HRBP), I was coached on how to give feedback with precision, clarity, and examples. This led to the first iterations of “What Good Looks Like (WGLL)”, which I initially built with HR, and then shared with my team. The team welcomed the tool, and over time we iterated on them together. I learned on the job how to use WGLL across multiple axes: most importantly in performance management, then in hiring, and in the in-between moments where we need a frame to help make hard decisions.
The problem with unspoken rules.
Leadership qualities like what makes someone excellent, what makes someone good enough, what actually differentiates a strong marketer from a forgettable one, are almost always left as unspoken rules or understood through gut instinct. Every leader on the team has a version of the answer in their head. But those versions are different and they stay different, silently, until someone is deep in a performance process and it’s too late to have a useful conversation.
The cost isn’t just the bad review cycle. It’s everything upstream. The decisions people don’t make because they’re not sure what’s expected. The escalations that shouldn’t have happened. The hiring conversations that go sideways because the interviewer and hiring manager held different ideas of what they were looking for. The feedback that lands as a surprise because nobody ever said it plainly.
I walked into a turnaround environment once where the team was at -34% year-over-year growth and pipeline coverage of 1x against a target of 5–7x. There were a lot of contributing factors. But one of the consistent themes underneath all of it was this: lack of clarity from the leader, difficulty making decisions at all levels, a lack of “act like an owner” mentality, and no shared language for what excellence actually looked like.
People were not bad at their jobs. They just didn’t know what good looked like. So my leadership team and I wrote them down together.
What WGLL is, and isn’t.
WGLL is a document that defines the mindset, behaviours, and ways of working that you hold as the standard on your team. Done well, it’s a mental model. A distillation of a specific way of thinking about excellence in this context.
What it isn’t:
❌ It’s not an operating manual. It doesn’t tell people how to run a meeting or which tool to use for which task.
❌ It’s not a values poster. Company values are aspirational by design and exist at a level of abstraction that makes them genuinely difficult to use in a real conversation. “Act with integrity” is true but it doesn’t help anyone decide what to do on Tuesday afternoon when a VP of Demand Gen is pushing to pull the campaign forward even though product is still months away from shipping something credible a customer would pay money for.
❌ It’s not a competency matrix or a scoring rubric. Those tools exist to rate performance. WGLL exists to describe it — to give everyone a shared picture of what excellence looks like, in language specific enough to use in a real conversation. You use WGLL to inform how you assess. It doesn’t tell you where to draw the line between a 3 and a 4.
The clearest way I can put it: a WGLL document is the thing that lets you have the harder conversation. To make the hard decisions when your boss isn’t in the room. To give direction when the situation is ambiguous.
When a brief lands with no clear north star, a well-internalised WGLL means someone on your team can ask: is this the highest-leverage use of our time right now? Does this start with the customer’s problem? They don’t need a manager to weigh in. They have a frame. When a new hire is two weeks in and unsure what “ownership” means here — not in a poster sense, but in a blocker-on-a-Thursday sense — the document answers that question before they have to ask it. And when it comes to performance, without WGLL, you’re giving vague, rootless feedback. With it, you’re having a conversation about a shared agreement that makes someone feel invested in it, not hollowed out.
What a feedback conversation looks like with and without it
| Without WGLL | With WGLL |
|---|---|
|
You "I need you to show more ownership on this project."
Them "I thought I was. I shipped everything on time."
You "It's more about proactivity. About not waiting to be asked."
Them "I didn't know that was the expectation."
You (internally) I've said this before.
|
You "I want to give you some feedback on how the project went. When we think about what good looks like on this team around ownership, a big part of it is proactivity — flagging blockers before they land on someone else, not waiting to be asked. On this project, you executed the task list well. What I didn't see was you raising the dependency on the sales team until it was already causing a problem."
Them "You're right. I saw that coming and didn't raise it."
You "That's the pattern I want us to fix. At 80% confidence, you move. You had enough information to flag it early — how do we make sure that happens next time?"
|
The feedback is essentially the same. But the second version lands differently. You’re not naming a principle; you’re giving behavioural feedback that both of you understand because you’ve already agreed on what good looks like. The precision comes from the document. The conversation stays human.
In written performance documentation — a formal review, a mid-year check-in — that’s where you reference the principle explicitly, with specific examples: “Re: Own It — on the Q3 campaign, proactive communication of dependencies was consistently below expectation. A blocker with the sales team was identified but not raised until it had already impacted the timeline.” The person knows exactly what standard they’re being held to. The manager knows what evidence to gather. Both are working from the same agreement.
A real WGLL: the six First Principles co-created in one of my B2B marketing teams
What follows is the actual set of First Principles my marketing leadership team and I developed for a large, 40-person B2B SaaS marketing team. I’m sharing them in full because the real thing is more useful than a theoretical example.
Read them as a worked reference: not a template to copy wholesale, but a model for the depth, specificity, and behavioural grounding you’re aiming for.
1. Story Is Strategy
We don't just tell stories, we build belief. Narrative is our sharpest tool. We use it to clarify the "why," connect with people, and drive action — from campaigns to positioning to product. It's how we earn trust externally, and how we create clarity and alignment internally.
How we demonstrate it:
- Identify the central customer insight before creating messaging, briefs, or decks.
- Use a simple story arc in all communications: Problem → Shift → Solution → Outcome. What's broken or frustrating for our audience? What's changed in the world or their expectations? How do we meet the moment in a way others can't? What's the transformation they can expect?
- Frame features in terms of real-world value: not what it does, but why it matters.
- Align internally on a core narrative before launch, and use it across every touchpoint.
- Use story to get buy-in. Frame decisions in terms of challenges, context, and outcomes.
- Bring storytelling into team rituals: kickoff decks, strategy updates, presentations.
2. Make It Matter
Busy isn't the goal — impact is. We focus on work that drives results for our customers, our business, and our brand.
How we demonstrate it:
- Start with "Why does this matter to the customer?" in every brief or kickoff.
- Prioritise high-leverage projects that solve real problems or drive meaningful growth.
- Say no to low-impact or performative work — even if it's easy or popular.
- Tie goals to outcomes, not outputs. What are we actually trying to move?
- Every initiative should be tied to benchmarks and forecasts before it starts.
- Use postmortems to measure what worked, what didn't, and why — then apply it.
- Balance head and heart. Initiatives need to be rooted in data and real customer pain points, and inspire visceral emotions.
3. Own It
Act like an owner. Take initiative, follow through, and lead with accountability. If something's broken or unclear, we figure it out together.
How we demonstrate it:
- Be proactive. Don't wait for permission. Propose solutions and drive them forward.
- Own the full outcome of your work, not just your task list.
- Keep others unblocked. Communicate dependencies, share progress, flag issues early.
- Speak up when something's missing, even if it's not "your job."
- Be accountable. Follow through on asks, updates, and deliverables.
- Be decisive. Meet the 80% threshold of confidence, then go for it.
- Be resourceful. Find opportunities to do more with what you have.
4. Be Direct and Decent
Say the hard thing, with care. We speak plainly and kindly. We give feedback early, ask tough questions, and prioritise clarity over comfort — because it makes us better.
How we demonstrate it:
- Give feedback in real time. Don't save it for retros or performance reviews.
- Be honest about concerns, and communicate with empathy and respect.
- Ask clear questions instead of hinting or hedging.
- Choose live conversations when the stakes are high or emotion is involved.
- Treat candour as an act of care, not conflict.
- Ask for clarity instead of guessing. Reduce noise, avoid chaos.
5. Stay Human
Behind every dashboard, brief, chatbot, and buyer is a person. We never forget that our customers are real people — not logos, not leads. We build with empathy, solve real human problems, and treat each other with care.
How we demonstrate it:
- Make decisions that benefit the customer, not the org chart.
- Shorten the distance to the frontline. Talk to sales, talk to CS, listen to real calls.
- Use the customer's language, not corporate jargon.
- Respect boundaries. Don't reward always-on behaviour.
- Be honest about capacity. Take time off. Don't perform burnout.
- Make room for life. Celebrate the human moments, not just the milestones.
6. Keep Evolving
If we're not learning, we're falling behind. Curiosity fuels progress. We challenge assumptions, adapt fast, and stay open to what's next — even when it means letting go of what worked before.
How we demonstrate it:
- Make time to explore new tools, ideas, and creative approaches.
- Share what you learn — whether from an experiment, an article, or a customer conversation.
- Run retros and apply the lessons. Not just document them.
- Pilot ideas and iterate quickly. Progress over perfection.
- Challenge legacy processes when they're no longer serving you.
- Encourage a growth mindset: what can we learn, change, or try next?
How to write one for your team
Write it before you need it. The worst time to define what good looks like is when you’re already in a performance conversation that’s going sideways. WGLL needs to exist before the friction does. Try your best to prioritise and build it in your first 90 days in a new role, at the start of a new year, or before you scale the team. You want people to have internalised it long before it needs to be applied.
Use behavioural language, not aspirational language. “Be curious” is aspirational. “Ask questions before escalating, and explore ‘what if’ before concluding something can’t be done” is behavioural. The test: could two people read this independently and walk away with the same mental image of what it looks like in practice? If not, it’s not specific enough yet.
Build it with your leadership team, not alone. If you write it solo and hand it down, it’s a directive. If your leads help build it, they’ll defend it and live it. Co-authoring is the difference between a pinned document people read once and a reference people actually cite in hard conversations. In the example I shared, my MLT and I got together in person, and dug into the expectations we have as a leadership team, what is broken and dysfunctional in the team today, what needs to meaningfully change, and how does that show up in the behaviours we need. Tbh, I sat there and mostly listened and pushed. The MLT did most of the heavy lifting.
Renew it annually. A WGLL written for a team of 8 in a growth phase needs to be different from one for a team of 20 after a restructure. Commit to revisiting it. The act of renewal — what still holds, what needs updating — is itself a useful team-building exercise.
Keep it to six principles or fewer. If you have 12, you have 12 priorities, which means you effectively have zero. The constraint forces the right kind of clarity. Ask yourself: what are the things that, if this team embodied them completely, would genuinely change everything? Candidly, even six feels too hefty. If I could, I’d bring it down to 4 or 5 so it pushes leadership to prioritise the behaviours most critical to the team’s success.
Where it goes to work
This is where WGLL earns its place in the system.
In calibration conversations, it replaces “I think she’s ready for the next level” (subjective, hard to defend) with “she consistently demonstrates Own It; she ran the Q3 campaign end-to-end without being managed, flagged the video production dependency before it became a blocker, and delivered above forecast” (evidence-based, something to anchor the conversation to).
In hiring, it sharpens your interview questions. Instead of “tell me about a time you showed leadership,” you ask: “Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete information. What was your threshold for moving forward?” That’s Own It, in question form. You’re not testing for a trait. You’re testing for a specific behaviour.
In peer feedback and performance reviews, it creates a shared reference that makes feedback more specific and less personal. In conversation, you give behavioural feedback: “The content calendar isn’t tied to any outcomes; I’m not clear what we’re trying to move this quarter.” In written performance documentation, you reference the principle explicitly, with evidence: “Re: Make It Matter — Q3 initiatives were not tied to benchmarks or customer outcomes, resulting in a volume-over-impact pattern.” The person knows the standard. The manager knows what evidence to look for. There’s no guessing from either side.
In onboarding, it tells a new hire what it actually means to be excellent on this specific team. Not the official handbook stuff. The real thing. The standard you’re actually holding people to.
WGLL doesn’t replace management. It doesn’t replace hard conversations. What it does is give you something to point at when you have them — and that turns out to make all the difference between feedback that lands and feedback that disappears, or worse, erodes credibility and trust.
Anne-Marie Goulet is the founder of Swim Club, a strategic practice for founders and marketing leaders who are done with the theatre. She spent 15 years inside Salesforce, Shopify, and WordPress Enterprise leading global marketing teams. Say hi at anne-marie@joinswimclub.com.
