Most leaders believe their team has a clear understanding of what is expected of them. The reality is that when role clarity is missing, that assumption can quickly become one of the most costly mistakes in business.
When people operate without a shared definition of success, everything suffers. Execution drops off, accountability weakens, and the culture starts to take a toll. And the leader, often unaware, keeps pushing harder on a foundation that was never properly built in the first place.
The Role Expectation Exercise is one of the most powerful and revealing tools I have found for closing that gap. My good friend and mentor, New York Times bestselling author Matthew Kelly, first introduced it to me, and I have used it with leadership teams across industries ever since. The premise is disarmingly simple: a leader and a direct report each independently list the top ten to twelve expectations for the direct report’s role, then sit down and compare what they wrote.
That moment reveals everything.
Watch the full breakdown in the video below, where I walk through this exercise from a recent keynote for 950 healthcare leaders.
What Happens When You Compare Lists
Before your next one-on-one with a direct report, ask them to write down the top ten to twelve expectations that define their role in their own words, without any input from you, and bring that list to the meeting.
As the leader, come prepared with your own list of expectations for their role as well. When your direct report arrives, the very first thing you do after greeting one another is exchange lists.
What happens next is where the true impact lies. In high-performing organizations, the lists largely mirror each other. Leaders and direct reports share a definition of success. It shows up in how they execute, communicate, and hold each other accountable.
That is not what most leaders find.
A few weeks ago, I walked a senior leadership team through this exact exercise. One leader’s direct report had been with the organization for thirty-five years. He had thirty-five years of experience and institutional knowledge and had been in daily proximity to the leader he reported to for the past ten years. When they exchanged lists, only two out of fifteen expectations matched.
That is not a performance problem. That is a clarity problem, pure and simple. And clarity problems are almost always invisible to the people inside them, which is exactly what makes them so costly. According to Gallup, only 46% of U.S. employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work, down from 56% in 2020. Misalignment at that level does not just slow a team down. It drains culture, erodes trust, and compounds quietly into missed targets and preventable turnover. After thirty-five years, that should never be the reality. The fact that it is, far more often than leaders want to admit, is the wake-up call this exercise is designed to deliver.
Why Clarity Is the Foundation of High Performance
When I think of the best coaches I ever played for, whether in college or even the NFL, they were relentless about one thing above everything else: they made sure every single person on that team knew exactly what was expected of them. Not assumed or implied, but defined, communicated, and reinforced. That level of clarity was not a management preference. It was a competitive advantage.
The same is true in business: leaders who value clarity consistently outperform those who do not. Are you building a culture where everyone knows exactly what is expected of them, or have you grown comfortable with the confusion?
Gallup’s latest research highlights the cost of getting this wrong. Gallup has reported that not engaged or actively disengaged employees account for approximately $1.9 trillion in lost productivity in the U.S., and only 46% of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work.
If you can’t clearly define what success looks like in a role, you have little chance of maximizing the person in it. Before your next big strategy initiative, before the next technology investment or organizational restructure, build the foundation that makes all of it work. Start with clarity. Make sure everyone knows exactly what is expected of them.
When people truly understand what is expected of them, they behave differently. They move with more confidence, more ownership, and more purpose. That shift, multiplied across an entire organization, is what sustainable growth looks like.
Put This into Practice This Week
Try the role clarity exercise with one of your direct reports this week. Write the expectations, exchange your lists, and sit with the gaps honestly. Then have the conversation about what success in that specific role should look like going forward.
Driving role clarity may seem simple, but simple does not mean effortless. Role clarity drives accountability. Accountability drives performance. And performance, sustained over the long-term and built on a foundation that people fully understand, is how organizations grow in a way that lasts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is role clarity and why does it matter for team performance?
Role clarity means every person on a team has a clear, shared understanding of their responsibilities, priorities, and what success looks like in their role. When role clarity is high, teams execute faster, communicate better, and hold each other accountable. When it is low, even talented people underperform because they are working from different definitions of what good looks like.
What are best practices for establishing clear expectations at work?
One of the best practices for establishing clear expectations at work is creating a shared definition of success before misalignment has a chance to grow. A practical method is the Role Expectation Exercise: a leader and direct report each independently list the top ten to twelve expectations for the role, then compare lists in a one-on-one meeting. The gaps that surface become the starting point for a shared, explicit definition of success.
What does role confusion cost an organization?
More than most leaders realize. When team members operate from different definitions of success, execution slows, accountability weakens, and cultural trust erodes. Gallup has reported that not engaged or actively disengaged employees account for approximately $1.9 trillion in lost productivity in the U.S., and it has also found that only 46% of employees clearly know what is expected of them at work. Over time, that kind of misalignment can compound into turnover, missed performance targets, and leadership energy spent managing confusion instead of driving results.
About Matt Mayberry
Matt Mayberry is a leadership keynote speaker, 2x Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, and former NFL linebacker. Through his writing and work with organizations, he focuses on helping leaders create clarity, strengthen culture, and improve performance.