Why Your Managers Can't Tell Their Teams What "Good" Looks Like
Only 45% of U.S. employees say they know what is expected of them at work, according to Gallup's latest workforce research. That number has been declining since 2021 and recently hit a record low. Not satisfaction. Not engagement. The bare minimum: do your people know what their job is?
I was talking with a director of operations at a professional services firm recently who put it plainly. Of her twelve managers, she thought maybe three could clearly articulate what success looks like for the people on their teams. She paused, and then said she was not sure she could do it for all twelve of them, either.
That confession is not unusual. It is the norm. And it is quietly costing companies more than most leadership teams realize.
Most conversations about this problem land on "communication." Leaders need to communicate better. Managers need to set clearer goals. The assumption is that expectations exist in someone's head and simply need to be transmitted more effectively.
That framing is wrong. The problem is not communication. The problem is that most managers were never taught how to define expectations in the first place.
This is the Double Skills Gap in action. When organizations promote their best individual contributors into management roles, those new managers arrive with deep technical competence and almost no practice at the skills their new role actually demands: translating strategy into priorities, negotiating workload against capacity, and having the kind of two-way conversations where expectations get built rather than announced.
Gallup's December 2024 research, "The Great Detachment," makes the downstream cost visible. They estimate that restoring expectations clarity to best-practice levels could produce a 9% increase in profitability and an 11% improvement in work quality. Those are not engagement survey feel-good numbers. That is the P&L impact of managers knowing how to do one of the most basic parts of their job.
…restoring expectations clarity to best-practice levels could produce a 9% increase in profitability and an 11% improvement in work quality.
The context makes this harder, not easier. Gallup's same research found that 73% of employees report experiencing disruptive organizational change in the past year. Among managers, 55% are navigating team restructuring and 69% are managing added responsibilities for their direct reports, all while nearly half face budget cuts. These managers are being asked to create stability in an environment designed to produce chaos. And they are doing it without training, without frameworks, and often without anyone checking whether they are okay.
Through the Energy Triangle™, this is visible as a Performance Energy collapse; the gap between what was assigned and what managers are actually carrying has gone unnamed. Companies see declining engagement scores and assume the fix is cultural: better perks, more recognition, a town hall where the CEO talks about values. But engagement cannot improve when people do not understand the game they are playing. Performance Energy requires clarity. Without it, effort is wasted, frustration builds, and the best people start looking for an employer who can give them what their current one cannot: a straightforward answer to the question, "What does good look like here?"
The fix is not another performance management platform. Most leaders already distrust the ones they have. The fix is investing in the managerial capability to set, negotiate, and revisit expectations as conditions change. That means teaching managers that expectations are not a once-a-quarter event but an ongoing conversation. It means giving them the language and the time to do it well.
Back to that director of operations. After we worked together for three months on building her managers' capacity to have structured expectation-setting conversations, she told me the biggest shift was not in her team's engagement scores. It was that her managers stopped coming to her for permission on things they already had the authority to decide. Once they understood what success looked like, they could move without waiting to be told.
That is what clarity does. It does not just reduce confusion. It creates velocity.
The organizations that get this right are not the ones with the best performance management software. They are the ones that invested in the managerial skill of setting expectations before they needed to.
Source: Wigert, B. and Tatel, C. (2024). "The Great Detachment: Why Employees Feel Stuck." Gallup.