You set the target at the start of the year. Revenue up by a quarter, say, or margins back to where they were before fuel prices moved. You announce it at the staff meeting, the managers nod, and everyone goes back to work.
Then month-end comes and the numbers are short. When you dig in, the reasons were there for weeks. A dealer stopped ordering in August. Three quotations sat in someone's inbox. The operations team had been working around a delivery problem since the middle of the month. Somebody knew. The information just didn't reach you while it could still be fixed.
The target was clear to you. What was missing was the work in between: who does what each week because of it, and how problems come to the surface early.
When every report says things are fine
In 2006 Ford Motor Company reported a net loss of US$12.7 billion. Alan Mulally, the new chief executive, held a weekly meeting where each executive marked their projects green, yellow or red. Mark Fields, who ran Ford's North American business, later told Fortune that at the time "all the charts were green". When Fields finally showed a red chart, for a problem with the launch of the Ford Edge, Mulally started clapping. Fields described that meeting to Fortune as a turning point in how Ford dealt with bad news (Fortune, "The tipping point in Ford's turnaround", December 2010).
Ford is a long way from a business of 40 people. The same thing happens at a smaller scale, though. If raising a problem leads to a telling-off in front of the team, supervisors learn to say "we're on it" at the Monday meeting and fix things quietly, or not at all. You hear about it when it's too big to hide. In our work with founder-led businesses, we often find that the information a founder needed was sitting with someone two levels down weeks before it reached them.
A target is too broad for the people doing the work
"Grow sales" means something precise in the founder's head. To a sales rep it doesn't say which customers to chase first, how fast an enquiry should be answered, or when a drop in orders should be flagged. "Improve service" doesn't say who owns an unhappy customer. "Cut costs" doesn't show a supervisor where money is going on rework and delays.
Managers often pass the target down in the same words they received it. The team carries on with its usual work, and the gap shows up at month-end.
Take an agricultural inputs distributor in Eldoret with about 35 staff, selling seed, fertiliser and crop chemicals to agrovets across the North Rift. (This is an illustrative example, not a client.) The founder wants revenue up 25% this year. Turned into work for the sales team, that might look like this:
- every dealer enquiry, by phone or WhatsApp, answered the same working day
- the top 40 stockists visited at least once a fortnight in the run-up to planting season
- quotations for orders over KSh 200,000 sent within two working days
- any stockist whose orders have dropped two months in a row flagged to the sales manager, with a reason
Each line has an owner, and the sales manager can check it halfway through the month. If visits are behind by the 15th, there's still time to act. If the first sign is a short revenue figure on the 30th, there isn't.
The same exercise works for the warehouse (orders loaded complete, stock counts that match the system) and for accounts (invoices out the day goods leave, M-Pesa and bank receipts matched weekly so overdue balances get chased early). Our guide to turning business goals into performance expectations covers this step in more detail.
Then the founder steps in
When a target doesn't turn into work someone owns, the founder usually fills the gap. You chase updates, push stalled work through, call the customer yourself and sort out problems that should never have reached your desk. You may save the deal. You've also taught the business that things get fixed when you notice them. Over time that makes you the thing the business depends on, which we look at in founder dependency.
What has to be in place
For a target to become results without you chasing, a few things need to be true. They're easy to describe and harder to keep up.
The business has a short list of priorities for the period, and managers can name them without looking. When everything is urgent, people work on whatever feels most pressing today, and that often isn't the work that drives growth.
Each priority has been turned into work someone owns: the result, the deadline, the standard, and how you'll know it's done.
Managers check progress during the month. They look at the work that leads to the result (enquiries answered, visits made, quotes sent) as well as the result itself, and they clear whatever is blocking their people.
Problems get raised early, and raising them is treated as useful. If your reaction to bad news is to look for someone to blame, you'll hear less of it, and later.
When those things hold, you see it in the numbers you care about. More enquiries get followed up, so more of them turn into sales. More work is done right the first time, so less margin goes on redoing it or on discounts for poor delivery. Managers handle routine problems themselves, which gives you time back for the decisions only you can make.
Hiring more people won't fix it on its own
When targets slip, it's tempting to add staff. If the work isn't clear and managers aren't following up, more people usually means more updates for you to chase and more work for you to check. We've written about this in why hiring managers hasn't reduced your workload. Real capacity comes from managers who run their areas and spot problems early. You still need to see what's happening. That view should come from regular check-ins and simple reports, so you aren't inspecting every task yourself.
What performance management can't do
Some growth problems have nothing to do with how your team performs. Better management won't create demand for a product the market doesn't want, fix pricing that loses money, or repair a weak business model.
It can also backfire. That tends to happen when leadership changes priorities without explaining why, when people are measured on activity (calls logged, hours in the office) that doesn't connect to results, when managers ask for reports and do nothing with them, when staff are blamed for delays caused upstream, or when the founder overrides what a manager has just agreed with the team. If the system adds paperwork while the same problems continue, people stop taking it seriously.
Knowing this is the easy part
Little of this will surprise you. Many founders already know their managers should break targets down, check progress mid-month and raise problems early. The difficulty is getting it to happen every month, in every team, when you're not in the room. In many growing businesses it works in the one department whose manager happens to be organised, and depends on the founder everywhere else.
That's the work Talentos does with founder-led businesses across Kenya: building a way of managing performance where targets become clear expectations, managers check in and keep simple records, and problems surface while they can still be fixed, without the founder chasing. The Performance Picture is a ten-working-day assessment of how performance is actually managed across your business. We hear from leadership and staff, look at the records you keep, and show you where the line from target to daily work breaks and what to fix first. If you'd like a first look on your own, try the free three-minute Quick Picture.