Expectations: Carry Your Influence Further

Free seems too simple or too easy, in business particularly, right?!... Or perhaps we are just waiting on 'the catch' or it seems like something that is for 'less experienced professionals'?

There is a core behavior that may surprise you at how effective it is for managing performance and influencing others. Expectation-setting is FREE by all rights, yet so many times we as leaders, managers and professionals on a team forget the return on investment that we get from Clarity & Alignment obtained through open dialogue about expectations.

This is primarily a concern within boss/employee working relationships, where expectations are far too often 'assumed' or blatantly overlooked because the RESULTS are paramount. More on this later. The second layer of concern is a lack of clear communication around expectations among team members, colleagues, etc. This is often an underlying source of friction, difficult to identify and once you do you are WAY behind the eight ball.

Switch gears real quick to a fun thought experiment and then we will tie this all together:

I want to share this snapshot from Google Trends to illustrate the relative popularity/frequency of these terms over the past 90 days, specifically narrowed down to the Business category as Google has it identified.

Granted CLARITY is a broad term, the obvious disproportion seems interesting, as well as the fact that alignment and expectations seem so low on the scale. Essentially, my takeaways from this chart and from my observations are:

1. Either the resources already exist in abundance and professionals are not seeking help through web search [for alignment and expectations in particular] OR the overall volume is relatively low for people looking to familiarize themselves or obtain better understanding.
2. This seems relatively positive for Clarity with 3x the interest, so that gives a little hope, but we can only try to subjectively extrapolate this out through the lens of expectation setting. Clarity is a pretty broad term, right? But for the sake of my takeaway I am going to assume that as Google categorizes the business and industrial, that Clarity here is correlated in a statistically significant fashion.

A Call to Action

If you have made it through to this point, here is who You are. You are an influential member on your team, regardless of your role or seniority. Perhaps you do not manage people and to take that a step further perhaps you are new to the team and early in your career; you too are influential in your own ways and with your own energy.

You have most likely held at least one role in a season of your career where the words Expectations, Clarity and Alignment were not a thing, and you understand the potential by looking at influence through the lens of expectations.

I was fortunate to have a world-class manager early in my career, and he really impressed the concept and leverage of Expectations upon me. He solidified in my head what seemed to be disconnect from the education and early training that I have been through. Lots of fantastic concepts and strategies out there, but if expectations are not communicated in a way that creates clarity and alignment then you quite literally are creating a path with much more friction to overcome than what could be possible.

So the Call To Action goes something like this: Embrace expectations. Challenge your current norms and look at how you can collaborate with team members or manage subordinates more effectively through over-communicating around expectations. Done respectfully, this will do anything but undermine or short-circuit growth or any other double that may enter your mind at this point. It will do the opposite. It will break down barriers you did not know were there. Your team members will appreciate it, they may even celebrate it! Be a catalyst, leverage good communication!