About this series: This is Part 4 of the Barbershop Leadership Series — five management posts drawn from a real conversation I had at Players Studio, a barbershop in Oakville run by an entrepreneur named Raf. He was dealing with a genuinely difficult employee situation and opened up about it while I was in the chair. I’ve spent nineteen years leading support teams across SaaS and fintech, and I recognized the pattern immediately. Each post in this series covers one principle. They’re designed to stand alone — but the full picture is in Part 1 if you want to start there.
Raf didn’t frame it as four separate problems. He just started talking, and as I listened, I started counting.
His employee was late. Not always, but enough. The quality of his work was inconsistent — some days sharp, other days sloppy. His attitude toward Raf had started to feel dismissive, like the feedback wasn’t landing or wasn’t being taken seriously. And when Raf tried to bring things up, the conversation went sideways. The employee would get defensive, or quiet, or say he understood and then do the same thing again next week.
Four things wrong. One person. What do you do with that?
I’ve seen this pattern more times than I can count across nineteen years of leading support teams. And the instinct — the very natural, very human instinct — is to look at each problem individually. Address the lateness. Address the quality. Address the attitude. Address the communication. Four conversations, four fixes.
But that’s the wrong diagnosis. When everything is failing at the same time, it almost never means four separate things broke. It usually means one thing was never built in the first place.
Nobody ever defined what the job looked like when it was done right.
I asked Raf a simple question: “When this guy started, what did you actually tell him the expectations were?”
He paused. He thought about it. He talked about the technical stuff — how to do a fade, how to handle a client, the tools they use. The craft. And that made sense, because that’s what you can show someone in a barbershop. You demonstrate, they watch, they practice, they improve. That part of the training is visible and immediate.
But I asked him: “Did you ever sit down and tell him what on-time meant to you specifically? What your standard for quality looked like on a scale — not just ‘do it well’, but what good versus great versus not acceptable actually looked like? What you expected when you gave him feedback — how you needed him to receive it, what you expected him to do with it?”
Another pause.
That’s not a criticism of Raf. That’s almost universal among first-time managers and small business owners. You get someone in, you show them the work, and you assume the rest is obvious. It isn’t. What feels obvious to you — because you’ve been building this thing and living inside these standards — is invisible to someone who just walked through the door.
The employee isn’t a mind reader. He filled the gap with his own interpretation of what the job required. And his interpretation was different from Raf’s. That gap is where every one of those four problems was born.
The data on this is remarkably consistent. Gallup’s research calls clarity of expectations “the most foundational of all engagement elements” — and their findings show that unclear expectations make every other management intervention less effective. You can’t coach someone to improve at something they don’t know is a standard. You can’t hold someone accountable to a bar they weren’t shown.
And yet only about 47% of employees globally report that they know what’s expected of them at work. In the small business context, that number is likely worse — because there are no HR systems, no onboarding programs, no formalized performance frameworks. There’s just a manager who assumes the new person will figure it out, and a new person who’s trying to read the room.
Here’s the hard truth that comes with this: if you’ve never explicitly told someone what good looks like, you haven’t actually given them the chance to achieve it. You can’t hold someone accountable to a standard they didn’t know existed. That’s not accountability — it’s frustration dressed up as management.
So what does setting expectations actually look like in practice? It’s simpler than most people make it:
Be specific. “Be on time” is not an expectation. “Your shift starts at 9:00. That means you are in the building, set up, and ready at 9:00 — not pulling into the parking lot” is an expectation. The specificity feels uncomfortable at first, like you’re being rigid or untrusting. You’re not. You’re being clear. Clear is a gift.
Write it down. If it was only said, it can be forgotten, reinterpreted, or disputed. If it’s written down — even just a simple document, a notes app, an email thread — it exists outside of anyone’s memory. You both signed off on the same reality. This is especially important when the employee keeps the meeting notes, which we covered in Part 3 of this series. The notes they write are documentation they authored. You can’t unsee your own handwriting.
Set the standard before you need to enforce it. This is the sequencing that most managers get backwards. They wait until something goes wrong, then they define the expectation as part of the correction. That puts the employee in an unfair position — they’re being corrected for something they weren’t told was a standard. Set the bar at the start, before there’s any heat in the room, so that when you do have to address something, you’re both referencing the same agreed-upon baseline.
Do it together, not at them. The best version of this conversation is collaborative. “Here’s what I need from the role. What do you need to be successful in it? Are there any of these expectations that feel unclear or unrealistic?” You’re not issuing a mandate — you’re building a shared understanding. Gallup’s research on collaborative goal-setting shows that employees who are actively involved in defining their own expectations are twice as likely to have clarity about what they need to do — and far more likely to hold themselves to the standard because they had a hand in shaping it.
Review them. This one doesn’t get said enough: expectations aren’t a one-time document you write at the beginning of someone’s employment and never revisit. As the business changes, as the employee’s role evolves, as you identify new areas for development — the expectations need to be updated. Put a review in the calendar we talked about in Part 2. “Every 90 days, we’ll sit down and look at whether these expectations still reflect what the role requires.” That practice alone signals that you’re running a professional operation — not just reacting to fires.
And here’s something worth sitting with: most employees actually want clear expectations. That might sound counterintuitive, especially if you’ve worked with people who seem to resist structure or accountability. But what they’re usually resisting isn’t the standard — it’s the unpredictability. The feeling of never knowing exactly where they stand, of being corrected for things they didn’t realize were problems, of operating under standards that seem to shift depending on your mood that day. Clarity isn’t a threat. It’s a relief.
I told Raf that the good news was this: it’s not too late to have the expectations conversation, even now. Even with an existing employee. Even after the problems have already surfaced.
You can walk in tomorrow, acknowledge that you haven’t been as structured as you needed to be, and set the baseline together from here. Most employees — when approached with honesty rather than accusation — respond to that. It resets the dynamic. It gives them something concrete to aim for. And it gives you something concrete to reference when they fall short.
The conversation doesn’t fix everything overnight. But it ends the ambiguity. And ambiguity is where performance problems live.
← Part 3: Stop Taking Notes for Your Team
→ Part 5: The Talk You’re Avoiding Is Getting Expensive
Hutch Morzaria is a Director-level CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building global support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has hired dozens of support and CX leaders across his career and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
