Day 50 — Stakeholder series 5/7: “Managing Expectation”
What’s the secret of success? Recently I sat down with 30+ designers/ developers to talk about what fundamental skill for success are, “expectation management” quickly came up to one of the top 3 skills. As the business school old saying goes, “it’s always about ME — Managing Expectation.” When we’re dealing with stakeholders, how do we effectively manage their expectations? In this article I can share some of the tools and my experience with you.
“It’s always about ME — Managing Expectation”
Managing expectation is not a science, but rather an art, or a required skill that can be acquired through learning and practices. I’m breaking it down into 4 area so that it’s easier to pick up:
- Empathize with Stakeholders
- Smart Communication
- Build Relationship
- Advance Techniques
By skillfully utilizing the knowledge and techniques, not only you can get to understand your stakeholders more, but also customize a plan of how to effectively managing individual stakeholder’s expectations. So, let’s start with the “understanding part”, which is building empathy with stakeholders.
Empathize with Stakeholders
Distracted Mind
Unlike UX and engineering team focusing on designing and building a product, lots of stakeholders have to deal with the whole product life-cycle activities and events. For example, from firm-level strategy planning, connecting with other groups (e.g. legal & compliance), relationship building, budgeting, resourcing, to product advocating, project planning, reporting, marketing, customer support, public relationship, and so on.
Sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? To make it worse, lots of stakeholders often work on 3+ project at the same time; so basically the amount of all the work I mentioned in the previous paragraph multiply by 3. That amount of work make lots of stakeholders super busy with all sorts of daily tasks. As a result, sometimes their attention spam is not as what we expected/hope for. Another common symptom out of miscellaneous work is sometimes they omit/forget the details.
Big-Picture Thinking
Given stakeholders have to deal with so much of various types of work, it’s not easy for them to keep track of everything. Take product managers as an example, it’s not their job to remember what’s the contract written between front end and middle-ware technology, or why designer chose a toggle button instead of radio button. What really anchors product managers on the project is the product vision, as product managers’ main responsibility. With that nature, they might not pay close attention to every single details, and they rely on other specialists to assist on sorting through the weeds. Therefore, when working with stakeholders, we need to be mindful that they are big-picture thinkers and might not remember all the details that matter to us.
Smart Communication
Since we know that their mental models, it’s easier for us to construct a communication plan. We can utilize 2 powerful tools, 4Rs, and CPR:
Communication 4Rs
- Right people: Who are the people we’re communicating with? Do we know what they’re expecting from us? In my previous post, we separate stakeholders based on their importance to the project, their interest level, and their influence level. We should be mindful of crafting different message to different stakeholders.
- Right message: What are the preferred communication style? For example, if you’re working with senior executives who have to deal with tons of information everyday, your message should be crafted in a BLOT way: Bottom Line On Top. If you’re stakeholders are the Amiable on the 4 Personality Types, don’t forget to start the message with “Hi” and “How are you”; otherwise you might be seen as a cold and heartless colleague.
- Right way: What’s the right channel of communication? Should be delivered in person, or through email, IM, private/public chatroom on Slack/HipChat, or Confluence/Wiki page? Some considerations might help you determine the delivery methods: How sensitive this piece of information is? Is it an FYI, or requires lots of back and forth discussion? How urgent/important is it?
- Right time: What’s the right cadence of communication? Depending on the level of stakeholder involvement, what are the information they need to know, what are the decision they need to make, we can determine when we should get them involved, how frequent. Still not sure? The simplest way to find out is to ask them what are the activities they want to be involved and how often.
Communication CPR
Except for the 4Rs as a framework of communication, also there are the guiding principles: CPR, which stands for Consistent, Predictable, Repeatable.
- Consistent: Arguably, consistency is the most important guiding principle in managing expectation and communication. Consistency creates psychological safety, and a feeling of reliable, trust-worthy. Inconsistent communication fosters doubt, lack of confidence, and affects the our odds when we need to get buy-in.
- Predictable: While we’re on the same side with our stakeholders, the “element of surprise” might not be a good thing in managing expectation (except for a surprise birthday party, or “under-promise, over-deliver”). Most of the time, our delivery timing and style should be predictable, so that we can not only build trust, but also enhance the relationship with our allies/stakeholders.
- Repeatable: One of the most important things that are often omitted is a repeatable communication process. It must sounds dull or boring, but a repeatable process is the only way to make it sustainable and can be maintained if there’s change on team members or organization.
Build Relationship
Formulate Trust
How do we create trust in a relationship? Perhaps “The Trust Equation” could be a starting point:
Let’s start from the bottom of the equation. If we focus on our stakeholders instead of our self-orientation, that will give out the message to our stakeholders that “We’re on the same side.” Move onto the top part of the equation, our credibility from other project success can be a testament and create positive impact on trust building; again, being reliable is imperative in a relationship; last but not least, the feeling of intimacy allows people to share more information and agree with each other with less concerns.
One Hand Washes The Other
Another powerful principle in relationship building is the Law of Reciprocity. In simple words, people tend to feel that “if you do something nice for me I’ll do something nice for you. I feel obligated to reciprocate.” When we create a positive loops of “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours”, it’s easier for us to create a positive relationship.
Advance Technique
Vision Driven
In order to deliver value and drive to positive outcomes, it’s always a good thing to remind people what the vision is and why we’re putting together what we’re doing. Also, whenever there’s a conflict, bringing back the greater vision helps us align what we’re trying to achieve, and evaluate the progress based on what we agreed upon.
Assume Good Intend
Sometimes we’re stuck with the words people chose in a conversation, or their tone, or even their expression. Maybe they’re not happy, but not necessarily not happy at us. It could be because of their physical conditions, work pressure, stress from family and friends, and all other reasons. Make sure we don’t let miscommunication cause unnecessary troubles and conflicts. Assume they have good intend and clarify their true meaning of the messages.
Documenting
It’s important to keep track of what happened, so when you need to negotiate, justify, or defend, you have a solid ground that you can stand on; you can create powerful message by stating the facts that you documented. This technique is a double edge sword, it’s effective but if not used carefully, it could give out the feeling that stakeholders and us are on the opposite side, instead of working as a team. It’s never a good idea to treat stakeholders as enemies, they should be our allies and we can help them to be successful with careful guidance.
Conclusion
- True understanding of our stakeholders through empathy is the first step for effective expectation management.
- Clear communication is not enough, use 4Rs & CPR to craft a communication plan.
- Building trust with stakeholders goes a long way. There are other advanced techniques you can pick-up, but nothing is more effective than a great relationship.
What are some problems you’ve seen in managing expectations? Any good techniques you’d like to share? I’d like to hear from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
