You tell the team the business needs to grow revenue by 20% this year. Everyone agrees it matters. A few weeks later, little has changed. Salespeople follow up customers the way they always have. Invoices still go out late. Managers find out at month-end that the target is off track.
It's tempting to conclude that people don't care. Often the problem is that the goal was never translated into what each person should do differently. The salesperson thinks the answer is more calls. The account manager thinks it's keeping existing customers happy. The finance officer assumes revenue isn't their department. The operations manager carries on focusing on deliveries. You expected all four to contribute, and each of them is working from a reasonable reading of the same sentence.
A goal that's clear in your head can still be vague at the level of someone's daily work. Closing that gap is a management job, and it can be done in a few steps.
Make the goal specific enough to act on
"We need to grow" and "we need better customer service" point in a direction, but they're too broad to guide anyone's week. A useful business goal says what needs to change, by when, and why it matters. For example: increase monthly sales from KSh 8 million to KSh 10 million over the next six months while holding the agreed margin. Or: reduce invoices unpaid for more than 60 days over the next three months, so the business can pay its suppliers on time.
That's clearer than "finance needs to improve collections". It's still a company goal, though. It doesn't yet tell anyone what to do on Monday morning.
Find the work that produces the result, and who owns each part
Next, ask what work has to happen consistently for the goal to be met. Results rarely come from one department. A salesperson can win an order and the business can still lose the customer if the quotation took a week, the product was out of stock, the order was packed wrong or the delivery came late.
Cash works the same way. Collections improve when project teams submit completion documents promptly, account managers resolve disputes, salespeople agree clear payment terms, finance issues correct invoices and a director approves credit notes without sitting on them. Sending more payment reminders from finance covers only one link in that chain.
Once you can see the work, decide who owns each part. For each role, be clear about what the person owns outright, what they share with others, what they must escalate, and what only management can decide. In a smaller company one person may wear several of these hats, which is fine as long as everyone knows which hat they're wearing.
Take a finance officer asked to "make sure we get paid faster". Their work depends on a project manager sending completion documents, an account manager confirming the customer accepted the work, a director approving any discount, and the customer supplying a purchase order number. A fairer expectation reads: "Issue complete invoices within one working day of receiving the required documents, and raise any missing information at the weekly collections meeting." The finance officer owns prompt invoicing and escalation. The project manager owns the documents. The director owns the approvals.
Write expectations a person can act on
Many managers write a list of duties and call it a set of expectations. "Update the sales spreadsheet", "call customers" and "prepare invoices" are activities. They say what to do without saying what it's for or how well it should be done.
A stronger expectation links the activity to its purpose and sets a standard. "Update the sales spreadsheet" becomes "Keep an accurate record of active opportunities, so the manager can see delayed follow-ups at the weekly review." "Follow up quotations quickly" becomes "Follow up every approved quotation within two working days, record the customer's response and agree the next step." "Improve customer service" becomes "Acknowledge priority complaints within one working hour, confirm who's handling the issue, and update the customer before close of business."
If you're unsure what a standard should cover, guidance on writing performance standards from the US Office of Personnel Management suggests four angles: quality, quantity, timeliness and cost. Not every expectation needs all four. The point is to replace words like "quickly", "properly" and "regularly" with something both sides would read the same way.
Keep the list short. If every duty becomes a measure, the employee can't tell which ones matter most this quarter. Three to five expectations tied to the current priorities will do more than fifteen. If the starting point is a job description that lists duties, our article on job descriptions and role scorecards shows how to turn it into outcomes.
Agree the evidence, and check what the person controls
Agree with the employee what will show whether an expectation was met. In many businesses the records already exist: a quotation register, delivery notes, stock cards, the sales pipeline sheet. They should be easy to find and visible to both of you. Without them, performance conversations turn into an argument between two memories. "You didn't follow up." "I followed up several times."
Before you confirm an expectation, ask whether the person can reasonably influence the result. A salesperson can follow up, keep records and raise stalled deals. They can't make stock appear, approve a discount or grant a customer credit terms. So the expectation should separate what they own from what they escalate: "Follow up all qualified opportunities, record the next step, and raise any deal held up by stock, pricing or credit approval at the weekly sales meeting." Management then owns the response.
This matters a great deal in founder-led businesses, where the founder often still approves discounts, customer credit, refunds and supplier payments. An employee shouldn't be marked down for waiting three days on a decision only you can make. Our article on why staff may be unsupported goes further into this.
Review at the speed of the work
An expectation that's written down and then left until the annual appraisal won't change much. Agree when progress will be discussed, and match the timing to how fast the work moves. Stalled sales opportunities need a weekly look, because by the end of the quarter the customer may have bought elsewhere. Total sales, margins and customer retention can be reviewed monthly or quarterly.
A short weekly or monthly review can work through a few questions. What moved since last time? What's delayed, and why? What has the employee already tried? What support or decision do they need from management? What happens before the next review? It should end with named actions and dates: "The salesperson calls the customer by Tuesday. The manager approves the revised discount by Monday afternoon. We check again at Friday's sales meeting." That's more useful than "please improve your follow-up".
Priorities shift. A major customer leaves, or cash suddenly matters more than expansion. Changing an expectation for a genuine business reason is fair. Changing it without explaining the reason, the new standard and the support that comes with it is where people lose trust.
What it looks like in a distribution business
Take a distributor of household goods in Kisumu with about 30 staff. (This is an illustrative example, not a client.) The goal is to grow monthly sales while protecting margin and keeping overdue customer debt from rising.
The sales representative keeps an active list of qualified customers, follows up approved quotations within two working days, records the next step and raises stalled orders at the weekly sales meeting. Stores confirms stock availability accurately and flags low stock that could affect confirmed or likely orders. Finance completes customer credit checks, tells sales the outcome promptly and issues accurate invoices once the documents are in. The sales manager reviews the pipeline weekly, clears internal delays and gives the team clear answers on pricing, stock and credit.
The evidence comes from records the business already keeps: the quotation register, the pipeline, order records, the stock report, invoices and the overdue debt report. The company goal hasn't been copied into everyone's paperwork. Each person has their own part of it.
Setting expectations is the easy part
Most founders could do this exercise for one goal in an afternoon. The harder part is keeping it going: managers holding the weekly review when they're busy, updating expectations when priorities move, and getting quick answers from the founder when something is escalated. In many growing businesses the expectations get written, the first few reviews happen, and then the routine fades until the next target is announced.
That's the work Talentos does with founder-led businesses: building a way of managing performance where expectations, check-ins and simple records are part of every manager's normal week, and the founder doesn't have to drive each one. If your targets keep getting announced and not delivered, the Performance Picture will show you where the chain breaks. It's a ten-working-day assessment of how performance is actually managed across your business, drawing on leadership and staff perspectives and the records you keep, and it tells you what to fix first. You can also start with the free three-minute Quick Picture. For more on the gap between targets and execution, see Your business has growth targets. Does your team know what to do with them?