Your operations manager has a three-page job description. It says they coordinate suppliers, supervise staff, prepare reports, monitor stock and handle operational issues.
Six months in, you're frustrated. Suppliers still surprise you. Stock problems reach you when they're already emergencies. The weekly report arrives on time, and you still have to ask three questions to understand what's going on. So you raise it, and the manager says: "But I'm doing everything in my job description."
You read the document again, and on paper they're right. They attend the meetings, send the reports, talk to suppliers and respond when something goes wrong. The job description described the work. It never said what the work was meant to achieve for the business.
Two people, two standards
A job description tells someone where to spend their time. It doesn't tell them what good performance looks like in that role.
That gap gets filled by each side's own reading. The employee judges the year by the tasks they completed. You judge it by results you had in mind and never wrote down. Both of you walk into the review with a different idea of what happened, and because there's nothing written to point to, the feedback drifts towards "you need to be more proactive" or "you need to take more ownership". Those phrases feel like a judgement of character, and the employee can't act on them.
Gallup has been tracking this for years. In a 2015 Gallup article, Marco Nink reported that only about half of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work, and wrote that employees "need more than a job description". They need to know when they're performing well and when they're not.
It's hard to hold someone to a standard that only exists in your head.
What would break if the role sat empty?
If you're struggling to say what a role is for, try this. Imagine the person leaves tomorrow and nobody replaces them for three months. What starts going wrong?
Take a credit controller at a hardware distributor in Nakuru with about 40 staff and a few hundred trade customers on 30-day terms. (This is an illustrative example, not a client.) Without that role for three months, overdue invoices pile up. Disputes over short deliveries and wrong prices sit unresolved, so the customer holds back the whole payment. Management loses sight of which accounts are getting risky. And by the second month the founder is back on the phone chasing contractors for money.
Turn those failures around and you have what the role exists to deliver. Invoices are followed up on a regular schedule. Disputes are resolved before they hold up payment for weeks. Management can see which customers are slipping before the debt becomes hard to recover.
The job description for that role probably says "follow up outstanding invoices". The thought exercise gets you to something different: the business keeps control of what customers owe it. That's the standard you were judging the person against all along.
What a role scorecard contains
A role scorecard is a short document, often one page, that sits alongside the job description. In its simplest form it answers three questions.
The first is why the role exists. Leave out the title and the duties and write the business purpose. For the operations manager above, it might read: "Make routine operations reliable enough that customer orders go out as promised, problems are spotted early, and the founder doesn't need to coordinate daily work personally."
The second is what the role must reliably produce. These are the conditions that tell you the role is working. For the operations manager, that could be orders delivered on the date promised, with foreseeable delays flagged to the customer before the date passes; stock and supplier problems raised while there's still time to act; and recurring problems fixed at the source, so the same failure doesn't need rescuing every month.
The third is what evidence will show it's happening. This is where measures come in, and it's where many businesses go wrong. If the job description says "prepare weekly reports" and the measure is "reports submitted every Friday", the manager can hit that measure every week while sending a report that hides every risk in the department. You've measured an activity and learned nothing about whether it helped. Write the result first, then decide what evidence would show it.
When the role changes and the paper doesn't
Roles in growing businesses change quickly. You hire someone to run the office. Three months later they're also handling procurement, dealing with staff complaints and paying suppliers. When something slips, you feel they aren't owning it.
But owning what, exactly? The role changed and your expectations changed with it. The written description of the job stayed where it was. The employee is working to one version of the job and you're judging them on another.
A scorecard gives you a reason to stop every few months and ask whether this is still the role you hired for. If it isn't, rewrite the scorecard with the person, and agree what's been added and what's come off their plate. In a fast-growing business, once a quarter is a sensible rhythm, and any time the role takes on a significant new responsibility.
Use both, in order
You need both documents. The job description sets out the scope: what sits in this person's area. The scorecard sets out what that work should produce. The measures give you the evidence. The review then asks whether the work produced the result.
When businesses skip the scorecard, they tend to go straight from a list of duties to a list of KPIs, and the KPIs end up counting whatever is easy to count. Our piece on why teams hit their KPIs and the business still struggles shows where that leads. Our article on how to measure roles that don't produce obvious numbers covers what to do when the evidence is harder to pin down.
Writing it down is the easy part
Most founders can write a decent scorecard for their operations manager in an hour. The harder part is what happens after.
A scorecard only changes performance if the manager uses it. That means talking through it when someone starts, checking progress against it in regular one-to-ones, updating it when the role changes, and opening it again at review time. In many growing businesses, the document gets written in a burst of effort and then sits in a folder while expectations go back to living in the founder's head. The founder becomes the only definition of good performance in the business, and work gets judged by whether it feels right to them.
That's the gap Talentos works on with founder-led businesses: building a way of managing performance where expectations are written down and managers check in against them every month, without you having to chase it. If your team has job descriptions and performance still feels like a matter of opinion, the Performance Picture will show you why. It's 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 things break down and what to fix first. If you'd like a quicker read first, the free three-minute Quick Picture is a good place to start.