Before You Decide Someone Isn't Performing, Ask Whether You Ever Defined Success

There's a pattern I see more consistently than almost anything else in my work with CEOs and MDs, and it goes something like this. A leader becomes genuinely frustrated with someone's output, convinced they aren't pulling their weight or operating at the level the role demands, and yet when you ask what the standard actually was, the honest answer is that it lived in the leader's head and nowhere else. Nobody ever sat down and said, here's what good looks like in this role, here's how we'll know it's being done well. The expectation was entirely real, but it was never spoken, which means the person being measured against it never had a fair chance to meet it.

Vague accountability produces vague performance, almost every time, and yet defining what good looks like before judging someone against it remains one of the most commonly skipped steps in leadership. Gallup, whose State of the Global Workplace research is the largest ongoing study of employee experience in the world, identified creating accountability as the single most neglected behaviour among leaders, and their most recent report found that only 10% of UK employees feel genuinely engaged at work, the lowest figure in Europe. Unclear expectations sit at the root of that number more often than most leaders would be comfortable admitting.

The HBR piece Accountability Is Leadership's Greatest Weakness puts it plainly: true accountability relies on translating organisational purpose into clear role expectations that actually define what exceptional performance looks like in practice, and it demands what the authors call disciplined specificity, something that doesn't come naturally to leaders more accustomed to operating at the level of vision and strategy. It's much easier to talk about the kind of business you're building than to sit down before a hire, a promotion or a new piece of responsibility and properly describe what success looks like in concrete terms, rather than relying on a general sense that the right person will simply know.

And that's exactly where the cost gets deferred rather than avoided. What does good look like in the first ninety days? What does a strong version of this role actually do differently to a weak one? What would make you, as the leader, genuinely confident this person has got it, rather than quietly worried they haven't? These questions take real discipline to answer properly, but skipping them doesn't save time, it just moves the cost further down the line, into a performance conversation that feels unfair to both sides, because one person is being measured against a standard the other never properly described.

There's also something worth naming about the emotional experience of this, because it isn't just an operational problem, it's a human one. There's a particular kind of disappointment that's harder to sit with than most, which is the feeling of being let down by something you never actually said out loud. It's tempting to feel hard done by when someone doesn't meet an expectation you were certain was obvious, but obvious to you isn't the same as communicated, and there's a real difference between someone failing to meet a standard and someone never being given that standard in the first place.

The leaders I respect most are willing to ask themselves the uncomfortable question before they ask it of anyone else, which is whether they actually made it clear, or whether they just assumed it was clear because it felt that way to them. That kind of honesty doesn't come naturally, because it's much easier to be frustrated with someone else than to examine whether the frustration is really about something you never properly named. But it's also the question that separates the leaders who build genuinely high performing teams from the ones who cycle through people without ever quite understanding why the problem keeps repeating.

If the bar was never described clearly, you can't really be surprised when someone doesn't clear it, because they were aiming at something they couldn't actually see.

Is there someone in your business right now who's falling short of an expectation you've never actually spoken out loud?

Nicola Gunstone is an executive coach working with CEOs and MDs of growing businesses. If this struck a chord, you can connect with her and follow the conversation on Nicola Gunstone, PCC | LinkedIn.