Make Excellence Unmistakable

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HR’s First Job: Define What Great Looks Like

In this episode, co-hosts Jackson Lynch and Scott Morris tackle a hard truth – if your best people are guessing what excellence means, you’re losing your biggest performance lever. Jackson and Scott explore why ambiguity erodes trust, burns cycles, and slows execution. They make the case that clarity is the CHRO’s most powerful tool for driving organizational performance and reveal why top performers need more clarity than anyone else.

Three Key Takeaways

• Top Performers Need More Clarity, Not Less – The belief that smart people don’t need clarity is wrong. Top performers see nuance that’s lost on others, and they need crystal-clear outcomes to drive innovation and take initiative.
• Fuzzy Goals Create False Signals – When expectations are vague, disengagement rises 20% and organizations waste 15% of manager time on reporting overhead. Fewer, sharper outcomes enable both accountability and speed.
• Clarity Should Flow from the Board Down – If the board and C-suite aren’t aligned on five to seven key outcomes, that ambiguity cascades through the entire organization. Only 5% of companies have this nailed.

Practical Advice

The Clarity Audit Framework:

Jackson and Scott recommend a systematic approach to embedding clarity throughout your organization:

1. Start at the Top – Audit the CEO’s expectations first. The CHRO must have absolute clarity about the CEO’s agenda before building systems around it.
2. Test Alignment – You and your CEO probably already know an executive where this could be an opportunity. Start there and test it. Have the CEO articulate expectations, then have the executive independently do the same. When they align, lock it in and cascade down through their directors.
3. Apply the Decision Rule – From a governance perspective, if you cannot explain it, measure it, and feature it in the first three slides of your board deck, it’s not clear enough yet.
4. Balance Outcomes and Methods – Be hyper-clear on “what” (outcomes) and leave freedom for “how” (methods). Overspecifying tasks kills innovation.

Remember: If clarity reduces rework, do more of it. If it creates rigidity and complaints, you’ve probably focused on tactics over outcomes.

Want More?

1. Stop the Meeting Madness – Harvard Business Review research showing executives now spend 23 hours per week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s – a symptom of unclear expectations requiring constant alignment conversations (Harvard Business Review, July 2017).
2. The Fairness Factor in Performance Management – McKinsey research on why half of executives say their evaluation systems have no impact on performance, with practical steps for creating role clarity and agile goal-setting (McKinsey, April 2018).
3. Reinventing Performance Management Processes Won’t Unlock Human Performance – Deloitte’s 2025 Global Human Capital Trends research revealing that 75% of organizations rate their ability to accurately evaluate worker value as not very or not at all effective, and only 47% of workers know what’s expected of them (Deloitte Insights, March 2025).

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