By: John S. Morlu II, CPA
Many small and medium-sized business owners have no idea what results their employees delivered last week. Ask them, and most will describe activity. Almost none will describe outcomes.
They know:
- Who showed up
- Who attended meetings
- Who sent emails
- Who was busy
Four answers, all instant, all about presence. None of them touch what actually got done.
What they often do not know is:
- What was actually accomplished
- What moved the business forward
- What is stuck
- What is behind schedule
- What requires management attention
Five questions. Most owners could not answer all five for their own team without stopping to go find out.
Think about that.
A business owner can tell you last month’s revenue down to the dollar.
But often cannot tell you what meaningful results were delivered by their team over the last seven days. The gap between those two answers is not a coincidence. One number gets reported automatically. The other has to be actively tracked, and usually isn’t. A revenue number gets pulled from a system that was built to report it automatically. A results number gets pulled from someone remembering a busy week, which is a very different kind of accuracy.
That is not a people problem.
That is not a management problem.
That is a visibility problem. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A people problem gets solved by hiring. A visibility problem gets solved by seeing.
As organizations grow, leaders slowly lose direct visibility into execution. It happens gradually enough that nobody notices the exact month it changed.
So they compensate with:
- More meetings
- More reports
- More emails
- More follow-ups
Each one adds another place to check. None of them actually answers the question.
Yet somehow they feel less informed than ever.
The irony is that many organizations have become experts at tracking activity and amateurs at tracking results. Activity is easy to count. Results require someone to actually define what counts as one.
Picture a Monday morning check-in. Five status updates, five confident voices, and not one answer to the actual question: what changed last week that leadership needed to know? Nobody in that meeting is hiding anything. They just genuinely do not know, because nothing in their week was built to answer that question.
But businesses do not grow because employees are busy.
Businesses grow because employees produce outcomes. A packed calendar has never once shipped a product or closed a deal.
The most important leadership question is not:
“What are people working on?”
It is:
“What results did we achieve this week?” Most leadership meetings never actually ask this question directly. They just assume the answer is buried somewhere in the status updates.
Consider two managers reviewing the same week.
One can name three results in thirty seconds. The other needs to open four different tools first.
The organizations that dominate the next decade will not necessarily have the smartest employees.
They will have the clearest visibility into execution. Talent has always been unevenly distributed. Visibility is a choice every organization can actually make.
Because when leaders can see results clearly, they can coach better, intervene earlier, and make better decisions.
And when they cannot, they are simply managing by assumption. Assumption feels like management right up until it’s wrong, and by then the cost has already been paid.
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Author: John S. Morlu II, CPA is the CEO and Chief Strategist of JS Morlu LLC, a licensed public accounting and management consultancy firm in Woodbridge, Virginia. He has more than 20 years of professional experience in auditing and advisory work, including service as Auditor General of Liberia and FAR and DCAA compliance work at Unisys Federal Systems. He has led international audit engagements and works across the firm’s government contracting, assurance and advisory practices. He is also the founder of ReckSoft, FinovatePro, Fixaars, Signal Playbook AI and Ratevora.