Expectation Management: A Manager’s Guide

This article is the first of a two part series focused on expectation management. The second installment, When You Don’t Know What to Do, Solve a Problem, was released in March 2020.

Intro

Expectation management is not only one of the most critical things a manager must do, it is also one that managers struggle with the most, according to employee satisfaction surveys. This is in large part because expectations must be managed not just between managers and their team members but also across an array of cross-functional (XFN) stakeholders. In other words, managing expectations is not as simple as telling your direct reports what is expected of them.

Instead, expectation management is a multi-party affair, one that requires building a shared understanding with your team and across stakeholders about where you are headed, how you plan to get there, and what you will deliver. And that is just the beginning. Once established, expectations must be continuously reinforced and adjusted when needed.

This note explains how you can expertly navigate this environment to masterfully manage expectations within and outside your team.

1. Publish Your Expectations

“Communication is the job”
— Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Facebook, VP, AR/VR

Unsurprisingly, the simplest way to ensure people know what is expected of them is to tell them. In addition to expectations outlined by your organization’s HR department (if you have one), post the expectations you have for your team in a place where everyone will read them. Your expectations should translate your company’s expectations into team-specific guidance with concrete examples.

For example, if your organization expects individual contributors at ‘x’ level to “effectively collaborate with stakeholders…” you should provide examples of what effective collaboration looks like. Is it making sure stakeholders are included in key decisions and kept up-to-date on a project’s progress? Is it collaborating within your team or across teams? After all, collaboration can mean different things to different people.

Aside from the functional aspects of your team’s day-to-day roles, you should post your expectations for them as members of your team. For example, should your team limit distractions during meetings? Should your team support new people by setting aside time to ramp up new team members? While you may think the answer to these questions is an obvious “Yes!”, do not assume your team will innately grasp these team norms.

And remember, it is not enough to post your guidance for what you expect of your team; you also need to include what your team can expect from you, as the following story illustrates.

A few months ago, I posted my expectations to my team’s shared drive. I thought I had covered all my bases, outlining guidance at the individual, team, and org levels. I was wrong. One of my team members commented on my post: “Can you tell us what we should expect from you?”

The question seemed so obvious. How can you tell people what you expect from them if you do not tell them what they can expect in return? You cannot. Do not make this mistake. Let your team know what they can expect from you.

At Facebook, we are lucky to have ‘Manager Behaviors’ to help do this. These Manager Behaviors are those that effective managers exhibit and include behaviors like helping teams set goals and expectations and giving fast, actionable feedback. I shared the full list of these Behaviors with my team, encouraging them to raise a red flag — and go as far as to call me out publicly — if I was falling short.

2. Establish a North Star

“If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
— Lewis Carrol, Author

Now that your team understands the company’s expectations for them, it is time to set a clear team vision for where you expect them to go within their role. A vision provides a north star by which your team can navigate ambiguity, helping them make decisions and tradeoffs in the absence of direct guidance.

Document your vision by creating a vision statement. A vision statement is intended to be aspirational and inspirational. It is an ideal end state you want to achieve, whether it be an ideal outcome for a product, project, initiative, or organization.

I will use the U.S. space program to illustrate this concept. In the 1950s, the young National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was tasked with exploring space. While a lofty charge, it was not particularly specific or inspirational. It wasn’t until the Russians sent the first human into space that NASA stepped up its game with a vision to be the first to the moon, a feat it accomplished in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the Moon.

Now, that’s a powerful vision statement. It clarified what NASA expected of its engineers, simplifying their decision-making by eliminating activities outside this mandate.

3. Understand the ‘How’

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”
— General George S. Patton, Badass WWII General

Now that your team understands where you want them to go, they can embark on building a roadmap to get them there. And while I agree with General Patton’s sentiment above, it is critical that you provide guidance during goal-setting to establish a mutual understanding of what is to be achieved and the “how” behind it. The following example underscores why.

A few years back, I requested that one of my team members — we will call him Brad — travel to Boston for an important client meeting. Since we were in Washington, DC, I assumed Brad would take a flight. What I did not know was that, since childhood, Brad had always wanted to take the Amtrak train up the East Coast to see the fall colors. Unfortunately, it was autumn and Brad fulfilled his childhood dream by booking a 12-hour train ride to Boston. He arrived at the meeting looking disheveled and tired, unable to perform at his best.

While Brad was present at the meeting, he did not meet my expectations for being prepared. Had I known he was going to take the train, I would have advised him against it. I am not telling you this story so that you will plan your team’s business trips, but instead hope to showcase the importance of establishing a mutual understanding of the “how.”

Speaking of this point, it is not only important you and your team share a mutual understanding of the ‘what’ and ‘how,’ it is also important other stakeholders do, too.

4. Seek Mutual Understanding With Stakeholders

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
― Albert Einstein

External stakeholder expectations are perhaps the most important and difficult expectations your team will manage. This can be especially true for XFN teams that are not embedded within the organizations they support because distance inherently complicates communication — and expectation management demands effective communication.

Ideally, your team conducts its project planning and roadmapping alongside the teams they support so there is no daylight between the two. However, this is not always the case, especially with new people and teams who have not built robust stakeholder relationships.

In such cases, you need to take a proactive approach to ensure your stakeholders know what they can expect from you, and what you can expect in return. Below are two useful approaches for doing so.

First, ensure your stakeholders understand the roles and responsibilities of your team.

On a few occasions, my team has been asked to perform tasks outside its scope, often because those asking for help did not understand our role. To fix this, we created an ‘About Us’ presentation and went on a roadshow to socialize it with key partners.

There were several ‘light bulb’ moments during these sessions, including an engineer who excitedly exclaimed, “Ah! I’ve been wondering what your team does!” When your partners do not understand your value proposition, they cannot possibly know what to expect from you.

“What would you say ya do here?”
– Bob Slydell, Office Space

Secondly, once your stakeholders understand what you could do, tell them what you will do through a simplified statement of work (SoW). This SoW should outline the problems you plan to solve, your objectives, what success looks like, how you are going to measure success, and the steps you plan to take to accomplish your objectives. Most importantly, this SoW should identify out-of-scope work. All key stakeholders should agree to the SoW before work commences.

5. Reinforce and Adjust

The last step in the expectation management cycle is to reinforce your expectations and make adjustments to keep your team on track.

A great way to do this is to use your weekly 1:1s to gather updates on your team members’ progress, reiterate your expectations/guidance, and provide feedback for your team to make adjustments when they are veering off course. The key to this feedback, of course, is that it is specific and actionable, as the following example illustrates.

I once had a boss, we will call him Larry, who was unable to articulate what he wanted. When presented with a brief or analysis that did not meet his expectations, he would exclaim, “This is not good enough!” or “This needs to be better!” without an explanation of what ‘better’ meant. Luckily, one of my coworkers — who was particularly good at reading body language — was able to understand what Larry was unable to articulate.

As a result, this co-worker was dubbed the ‘Larry’s whisperer,’ an unfortunate distinction that meant he was frequently called into meetings to translate Larry’s guidance into language our team could understand. This wasted a great deal of the team’s time, frustrated everyone, and meant that my co-worker was often overworked and unable to focus on the core aspects of his job.

The lesson here is that your guidance should be clear with concrete steps your team can follow when they veer off course. Instead of “This needs to be better!”, imagine if Larry had said “I do not think your analysis supports your conclusion because x, y, and z assumptions are flawed.” Now that is guidance upon which your team can act.

And if you are unable to articulate clear, concrete guidance in the moment, it is almost always more efficient to tell your team you need more time so you can gather your thoughts. In almost every case, you will save time in the long run by giving yourself the space to sort your thoughts.

Finally, once you have delivered feedback, ask your team to restate it aloud to ensure the message was received as you intended.

Traps to Avoid

“Knowing where the trap is — that’s the first step in evading it.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

The road to expectation management mastery is riddled with traps. I know because I have fallen into several of them, as you will see in the examples below. My hope is that by recounting these mistakes, I will help you avoid them.

Do not worry about your team disliking you. Among other things, being a great manager is about coaching and driving your team to achieve what they never thought was possible. This will require that you tell your people what they need to hear, and that will not always be what they want to hear. And that is OK.

Researcher and author Brené Brown said it best in her critically acclaimed book Daring Greatly when she wrote, “Clear is kind.” I love this because it underscores that feedback is a gift we give to those we care about.

High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectations. — Charles Kettering, Inventor

Do not feel guilty because you have high expectations. If Brené Brown says clear is kind, then I say firm is fair. While expectations should be adjusted based on changes in the environment, you should always aim high and demand excellence.

This may sound harsh, but think back to the teams and managers with which you have most enjoyed working. Were they the teams that set easily attainable goals and managers who demanded mediocrity? Of course not. If you are like me, you most enjoyed working for teams and organizations that sought goals just beyond their reach and for managers who enforced high standards. Your team is no different.

Do not assume your stakeholders will tell you what they expect. In the absence of clear guidance, it is your team’s job to clarify.

At my previous company, my team had a stakeholder, Travis, who often requested our support but never told us what his priorities were, what work he wanted performed, or what problems he wanted solved. On one project, Travis assumed my team would fill a gap that another XFN was responsible for. This led to confusion and missed deadlines, resulting in a disappointed Travis and constructive feedback for my team. Was this Travis’s fault? No. In the absence of guidance, it is your job to clarify.

Do not be afraid to say no. Setting boundaries is key to successful expectation management. It is much better to tell a stakeholder you cannot support them than to fail to deliver.

When I worked for the government, I managed a team that received a high-priority task from a senior defense official. I knew my team was tapped out, but I really wanted to build rapport with this official’s office. Instead of redirecting the request or asking for additional time to complete it, I accepted the task and agreed to an ambitious deadline. This was a mistake. Because my team was overstretched, we missed a key deadline. Instead of building rapport with this official, I harmed a critical relationship, all because I was afraid of saying no or asking for more time.

Conclusion

Expectation management is not easy, but it is critical to being an effective manager and team member. Today’s hyper-collaborative environment makes expectation management even more important because expectations must be managed across multiple stakeholders.

The good news is you can take proactive steps to effectively manage expectations in this environment by articulating your guidance to your team, creating a vision as a guide, reaching a mutual understanding of the ‘what’ and ‘how,’ and providing guidance along the way.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” A similar thing could be said about managing expectations: If you fail to manage expectations, you can expect to fail.