Many founders know the feeling of reading a manager's weekly update and finishing it none the wiser. The manager attended four customer meetings, reviewed eleven quotations, sorted out a stock problem, chased late deliveries and helped someone finish an urgent job. It was clearly a busy week.
But you still can't answer the questions that matter. What did the team actually achieve? Which commitments were met? What slipped? Is anyone getting better at their job? Which problems still need a decision?
The update describes the manager's activity. It says very little about how the team performed, and that's the part a manager is there to look after. A manager can be busy every hour of the week while priorities stay vague, missed deadlines roll into next week and decisions wait. As we set out in Manager or senior employee?, a manager's job is to get reliable work out of a team. So what should they be doing each week to make that happen?
Why weekly
A month can be long enough for a small problem to become an expensive one. By the time the month-end report shows a customer who hasn't paid or a complaint nobody answered, the cheap fix may have passed. A weekly rhythm shortens the time between a problem appearing and someone deciding what to do about it.
None of what follows needs five meetings or a fixed timetable. A Monday huddle, short check-ins during the week and the odd one-to-one can cover it. What matters is that each of the five things happens somewhere in the week.
1. Decide what the team must move this week
A team might have twenty open tasks, and only a handful will shape the week. The manager's first job is to choose those and say what finished looks like.
Compare a task with a direction. "Follow up on overdue invoices" is a task. "Bring down invoices more than 60 days overdue by KSh 800,000 this week. Jane takes the disputed accounts. Bring me any account above KSh 300,000 where the customer is rejecting the paperwork" tells people the result expected, who owns which part and when to escalate.
A manager who names seven priorities hasn't chosen. When everything is urgent, people tend to pick the easiest or most visible task.
2. Check what actually got done
A priority nobody follows up is only an announcement. Compare two reviews. In the first, the manager asks how the customer follow-up is going, hears "we're working on it", and says "okay, please make sure it's done". Nothing has become clearer. In the second, the manager asks how much was collected, whether the customer signed the approval and whether the delivery went out.
By Friday each commitment should be in one of four places: done, changed for a stated reason, blocked by something specific, or dropped on purpose. "Still following up" shouldn't be a fifth option. A delay nobody can explain is a sign the work is drifting.
3. Catch what's slipping early
Many problems start small. A delivery is two days late, returns creep up, or one person quietly carries more than their share. Individually they're easy to ignore. Together they tell you performance is moving in the wrong direction.
When a target is missed, the useful question is why. Was the expectation clear? Did the work get lost in a handover between departments? Was the workload realistic? A manager who finds the cause early can fix it while it's still cheap. One who only reacts to big failures teaches the team to keep small problems quiet.
4. Help someone get better at their job
Many managers treat coaching as something for when things calm down, and in a growing business things rarely calm down. Meanwhile the manager keeps fixing the same mistakes.
Coaching doesn't need a separate session. When a dispatcher asks what to tell a customer whose order is late, the manager can answer ("call them and offer Thursday") or ask ("what can we offer that we're sure we can deliver? What do you suggest?"). The first gets today's job done. The second helps the dispatcher handle the next one without asking.
The same goes for fixing work. When a manager quietly rewrites a poor report, the report is saved, and the manager has taken on that report for good. Give it back with clear feedback on what needs to change.
5. Get decisions made at the right level
Time leaks away when decisions stay open. A problem bounces between departments and meetings end with "let's think about it". A manager should make sure the questions that matter get settled, by deciding when it's within their authority and by escalating when it isn't.
A useful escalation is more than an email to the founder saying "please advise". It sets out the risk, the options and what the manager recommends. You should be receiving decisions to make, and fewer unfinished investigations. Our article on how founders accidentally train managers to wait looks at why many managers escalate without a recommendation.
An example
Take a clearing and forwarding business in Mombasa with an operations manager and eleven staff. (This is an illustrative example, not a client.) On Monday the manager posts three priorities in the team's WhatsApp group: clear the 14 containers waiting on documents, close the two customer complaints older than a week, and get the new documentation clerk processing entries without supervision. Each has a name next to it.
On Wednesday she checks progress with each owner. Two containers are stuck because a customer hasn't sent the commercial invoice, so she calls the customer and agrees a Thursday deadline. On Friday she updates a shared sheet. Each commitment is marked done, changed, blocked or dropped. There's a line on how the new clerk is doing, and one decision she needs from the founder, with her recommendation: whether to waive storage charges for a long-standing customer.
The founder reads that sheet in five minutes and knows how the week went.
A five-question check
At the end of this week, ask each manager:
- What were the team's most important results, and did everyone know their part?
- Which commitments were done, changed or blocked?
- What moved away from the standard, and what did you do about it?
- Who got better at their job, and how?
- What did you decide, and what did you bring to me with a recommendation?
A manager who can't answer these may still have worked a 60-hour week. Working hard and managing a team are different things, and you need both.
Why this is hard to keep going
Many founders would agree with everything above. The difficulty is getting it to happen every week, with every manager, without you checking. In many growing businesses a weekly routine like this runs well for a month after the founder raises it, then slides when a big order arrives. Updates go back to describing activity, and the founder goes back to asking around to find out what's really happening. Our article on what a founder should be able to see each week covers the founder's side of this.
What keeps it going is a way of managing performance that's part of how the business runs: clear expectations for each manager, a simple weekly record, check-ins that happen on schedule and a monthly review that uses those records. That's what Talentos builds with founder-led businesses, so the weekly work of managing happens without the founder chasing it.
The Performance Picture is a ten-working-day assessment of how performance is actually managed across your business. We talk to leadership and staff, look at the records your managers keep, and show you where the weekly routine breaks down and what to fix first. For a first view, take the free three-minute Quick Picture.