If your team isn’t giving you the results that you want, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself if you’ve been clear on what you expect.
People often forget how different everyone else’s priorities and views can be. You think you’re so obvious about what truly matters and what you expect. But you’re looking at things from your perspective, colored by your unique standing and past experiences. They’re looking at it through their own lens, which can differ completely from yours.
Think about it:
Your team is showing up every day, working long and hard hours. They’re busy during the day, answering every email promptly, putting their entire energy into the work, and staying past regular hours when needed. In their view, they’re doing a great job, being great employees, because they’re operating from the assumption that the currency of your firm is hard work.
You, on the other hand, are operating in the results economy. To you, it doesn’t matter if someone’s putting in 60 hours or 20. If the results are met and exceeded, that’s all that matters. If they fall short, you believe that you and your team have underperformed, regardless of how many hours you put into the performance. To you, it’s not about the quantity but the quality, which is measured by hard numbers.
Those are two very different things.
So if you’re frustrated because your team isn’t producing at the level you expect, you first have to make sure everyone agrees on what “good” actually looks like.
Imagine you have an employee who came from an environment where the expectation was simple: show up, work hard, keep your head down, and you keep your job. They’re doing exactly what they were taught. Meanwhile, you’re now looking at them thinking, “You’re not doing a good job.”
As a business owner, you understand something that can be easy to forget: businesses survive by creating value in the marketplace. You provide a service. A client decides that service is valuable enough to pay for it. That money becomes revenue. The equation has to add up so that you create more value than you consume. If you’re spending more money than you’re generating, you don’t have a sustainable business, no matter how hard everyone is working.
Your team doesn’t necessarily need to understand all of the economics, and frankly, they shouldn’t have to. But as a leader, you have to ensure that they understand your expectations of them.
Instead of “You guys aren’t working hard enough,” a more effective approach may sound like: “I’m sorry, guys, I haven’t done a good enough job explaining what I consider valuable and what the standard is.”
Now you can define what success looks like, establish measurable expectations, explain what outcomes matter, and how each person contributes to them.
After all that, if someone starts meeting your expectations, you know they were simply misunderstood. If some are still prioritizing “long hours” without fruitful results, you know that it’s not due to your management skills.
Effort deserves recognition. Results require measurement. In the end, the goal should be to have a team that understands what winning looks like and knows how to get there.
