The Echo Chamber of Excellence
When High Standards Close the Door
We all want to be excellent.
But excellence, like any ideal, can become a trap, especially when it’s defined too narrowly.
I’ve worked with leaders, educators, and institutions across Asia and the West. Again and again, I’ve seen a pattern: high standards held up as a sign of integrity, rigor, and seriousness. And yet, those same standards sometimes act as gatekeepers, not of quality, but of conformity.
It often starts subtly.
A professor praises only students who speak up with a certain kind of polished fluency, unintentionally silencing brilliant thinkers still forming their thoughts in a second language.
A company insists on “executive presence” in a way that privileges Western modes of expression – direct speech, firm eye contact, persuasive storytelling – while undervaluing quiet analysis or culturally grounded ways of showing respect.
A nonprofit selects “leaders of the future,” but only those who’ve mastered the language of grants and metrics, leaving behind those whose insights come from lived experience, not PowerPoint decks.
None of this is malicious. It’s just habitual.
We begin to mistake excellence for sameness.
And when we do, we build echo chambers – places where the only voices that sound “right” are the ones that match those already in the room.
I’ve seen it in translation, too. Work that stays too close to the original is called “wooden.” Work that takes too many liberties is “unfaithful.” The translator walks a razor’s edge, judged by criteria that may or may not fit the text, or the culture it came from.
So how do we protect excellence without shutting the door?
Here are a few practices I’ve found helpful in my leadership and consulting work:
1. Separate polish from potential
Ask yourself: Are we rewarding who delivers the best idea, or who delivers it in the most familiar form?
2. Diversify your mental image of excellence
If all your top performers share the same accent, background, or communication style, ask why. Are you seeing excellence, or just recognizing yourself?
3. Build scaffolding, not filters
Instead of raising the bar higher, make the path clearer. Help people grow into excellence rather than expecting them to arrive pre-formed.
4. Honor multiple kinds of intelligence
Emotional nuance. Cultural fluency. Embodied knowledge. Relational wisdom. These are harder to measure, but no less valuable.
Excellence should be an invitation, not an exclusion.
It should be something we grow into together, not something we gatekeep with checklists and scripts.
So the next time you're tempted to dismiss someone as “not quite there,” pause.
Ask: There by whose map?
And: What kind of excellence might we miss if we don’t make room for difference?
©2025 Shelly Bryant