Who is the one person in your business you would least want to lose? Now a harder question: do you know how that person spends a normal Tuesday? Most owners can’t answer the second one. They know the results that person delivers, the fires they put out, the customers who ask for them by name. What they rarely know is how many hours of the week go to what the business needs and how many go to whatever that person happens to enjoy. After more than 35 years and more than 500 organizations, I can tell you that the most talented people in a company are often the least measured, because everyone assumes they’re fine.
The research says that assumption is expensive. According to Gallup’s midyear 2026 update on U.S. employee engagement (opens in new tab), only 49% of employees strongly agreed that they know what is expected of them at work. That’s up two points from last year, which is welcome news, but it’s still well below the 61% Gallup measured in 2015. Gallup’s researchers suggest part of the recent bump came from managers talking more often with their teams about how AI fits into their jobs. That tells you something useful: conversation moves the number. Read the 49% the way an owner should. Roughly half of your people are guessing at what you want from them, and the guessing doesn’t stop at the entry level. Your stars are guessing too; they’ve just gotten good enough at it that nobody notices.
Make sure that, written and orally, you make your expectations very clear.
— Gary Henson, Founder of Gary Henson Group
One company I’ve worked with had a department head who was, by every measure the owner cared about, one of his best people. He was very bright and very resourceful, he made a significant contribution to the company on a regular basis, and he was one of the highest-paid people in the organization. Then another employee brought something to the owner’s attention. This department head wasn’t using 50% of his hours on any given day, and he only liked working on certain kinds of projects, the ones that were his favorites. Everything else sat.
Pay attention to how the owner found out: from a coworker, which means the rest of the team had known for a while. That’s how it usually goes. When a strong performer picks and chooses his assignments, the people around him absorb what he leaves behind, and they draw their own conclusions about what the standard in this business is. Every week it goes unaddressed, the owner is teaching everyone else that the job description is optional for the people he likes. This is what I mean when I say culture defaults to the personality of whoever is running the business. Nobody decided that favorites get a pass. The owner’s silence decided it for him.
So we confronted him, in a very genuine and realistic way, and we gave him two choices. He could keep doing what he’d been doing, and under the company’s new cultural standard, that would cost him about 50% of his salary. Or he could fit into the owner’s expectations, his job description, and the new culture, and keep his existing salary. He changed his behavior. He became a very productive person, for the organization and for himself, and he got to keep his total income.
of U.S. employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work, well below the 61% peak Gallup measured in 2015. Gallup →
The salary figure got his attention. What kept the change in place was that his expectations finally lived somewhere other than the owner’s head. They were in writing, attached to his role, and said out loud to him in the same room. When I’m asked for the one habit I’d want every client to build, my answer is always the same: “Make sure that, written and orally, you make your expectations very clear.” Most owners do one or the other. They write a job description once and never mention it again, or they say what they want in a hallway and never put it on paper. You need both.
If you suspect one of your best people is doing half the job, here’s where I’d start.
Write the standard before you have the conversation. Pull out the job description for that role. If there isn’t one, build it from a written job description with standards of performance. Spell out what the role owns, how results get measured, and which parts of it aren’t optional. You can’t hold someone accountable to a standard they’ve never seen.
Look at hours as well as output. Stars produce enough that their results hide the gaps. Put the parts of the role that tend to get skipped on the same weekly scorecard as everything else, so you learn about the gap from a number instead of from a frustrated coworker.
Give a choice, and mean it. The department head’s conversation worked because nobody was making him wrong. He was told the truth, shown both paths, and trusted to pick. A consequence you won’t enforce is worse than no consequence at all, because the whole team is watching to see whether the standard applies to everyone or only to the people you can’t afford to lose.
Then keep saying it. One conversation won’t carry a standard for a year. Bring it back up in one-on-ones, in reviews, and in your regular management meetings until nobody has to guess.
Squeezing more hours out of good people was never the point. The point is that your best people should know what you want as clearly as your newest hire does. Once expectations are in writing and reinforced with every employee, it has been documented that productivity increases anywhere from 15% to 50%. That’s the heart of GH Group’s Inside-Out Method™: it starts with the owner getting clear on what he wants, then putting it in front of every employee. Your top performer may be the easiest place to begin. He’s already proven he can do the job. He may just be waiting for someone to tell him which parts of it count.
