We go through out daily life monitoring and depending on expectations. These include our expectations of ourselves, others, and our surrounding environment. We expect our co-workers to show up at work, we expect the car to start, and we expect to be able to perform our tasks to our standards, just to name a few.
When things don’t match our expectation we then respond to it. The nicest way for things to go is for them to exceed our expectations. A bigger raise, a nicer outcome, a better meal, when the outcome exceeds our expectations we respond happily. Sadly, most of the time our expectations are not met it is because the outcome has failed to meet them. Not making a sale, getting a bad report, burning dinner, etc. all result in some form of negative emotional response. The strength of the response is usually directly related to the importance of the expectation. Of course repeated failures in a row will increase our anxiety and negative response. This can result in the “bad day” idea where we feel like we just had a bad day or assignment of a negative response to something which fails repeatedly. Your car can only break down on you so many times before you decide it has to go, despite the fact that it probably performed well for more than 99% of the time you owned it.
In dealing with people it is important to make sure that we meet their expectations as much as possible in order to continue to build and grow important relationships. This spans from your boss and co-workers to your family and friends. The more people find you to meet their good expectations the more they will feel they can rely and depend on you.
This doesn’t mean you become a bootlicking toady who does anything anyone asks but rather that you refine a couple of skills; one in communication, the other in organization.
When you discuss things with people you are creating and sharing an idea of the outcome, otherwise known as expectation. To improve this get more detailed in your descriptions and agreement with others. Much of our communication involves shortcuts to make it faster, pronouns, generalizations, and unspecified words leave us in a position where two people can discuss something with both having a different expectation.
“I’ll get that report to you quickly.” This comment has great value in the upfront building of expectation. The person waiting for the report is now expecting that the right report, formatted the right way, transmitted the way they want it, is going to arrive in a period of time they have determined as “quickly”. You’re screwed unless you get more definition!
In order to get this outcome better defined clarify the following; time the report is expected, how it should be formatted, how it is to be transmitted, what data is to be in it. Not only does this save you the possibility of failing to meet the receiver’s expectation, it also helps you be more efficient as you will have less opportunity to have to redo work that wasn’t clearly defined.
Once you have gathered all the information to make a clear and mutually agreeable expectation, state the expectation back to the other person for their confirmation. “OK, so you want the sales figures for the first quarter of 2009, including gross sales, gross profit, and gross profit percentage, in a spreadsheet, via email, by 10 am tomorrow morning.” When the listener agrees then you have created a proper expectation in which both of you have agreed and confirmed the task.
The second skill that you will want to hone is that of knowing what you can actually do. If there is no way you can have the report ready by 10 am, then don’t agree to it. Better to work it out now than miss a deadline that the other person is relying on you to achieve. Additionally, if your performance is linked to someone or something else then this must also be clarified. There is no harm in saying that it is conditional to the materials being delivered or accounting having closed the books on those jobs. You have the opportunity here to build in a check point at which you let the person know that the conditions have been met or you are still waiting for something.
This is a point of communication that many people miss much to their own detriment, updates. Giving someone an update helps them adapt and adjust their expectation. If you are assigned a job and a week into it you are still waiting for a lab test to return it is worth the time to let your client know about that fact and the affect on the project. While it may seem pointless to update people with something as simple as “I am working on this and haven’t gotten the answer yet”, this type of communication goes a long way in keeping people happy. For the person awaiting your proposal, report, work, completion, dinner, etc. an update will let them adjust their expectation and stay happy. Failing to update often results in more upset when the expectation is missed as well as concerns about not being updated.
Test these ideas out a little. You will quickly find that better detail, achievable commitments, and interim communication, will result in improved cooperation, smoother relationships, and more leeway when things don’t go the way you would like them to.
As always, please feel free to share your feedback and experiences so that we can all benefit from your own exploration and discovery. Paul
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