A Tool For Getting Clearer Expectations 🏆

The expectations scale

Whenever you dig into unhealthy conflict in the workplace, you’ll invariably discover mismatched expectations. Whether accusations are flying explicitly or a team is navigating bubbling resentments, some voice is saying “how could you have done X?” and a counter-voice is saying “why on earth would you ever have expected something else?”

Mismatched expectations fosters conflict

Team Chartering

The problem is that, often, teams aren’t deliberate about managing their shared expectations. We all have a tendency to fall into the “that’s obvious” trap because we assume others will think the way we do. We convince ourselves that everyone ‘should’ already be aligned. Then we discover we were wrong about this by inadvertently driving into a brick wall.

Motivated by these kinds of situations, we’re often asked to work with teams to help them establish their common mission, goals and ways of working. We (and others before us) call this ‘team chartering’. 

We encourage teams to measure the success chartering based on how well in-sync everyone’s expectations are when they’ve completed it. In other words, the fewer surprises, misunderstandings and misalignments that occur in the subsequent months, the more successful the chartering exercises were.

Our chartering process typically involves exercises and outputs that fall into a few familiar buckets…

• Something around the mission, strategy and success measures for the team:

  • “What are we trying to achieve and how will we know it’s had the impact we thought it should?”

• Something around the roles and accountabilities on the team:

  • “We know we’re here for each other but what does that mean specifically? What can I rely on you to deliver and vice versa?”

• Something around the processes and norms on the team:

  • “We aren’t just going to hang out in Slack all day, saying ‘are we there yet’. So how are we going to keep track of who’s doing what and how it all fits together?”

The Expectations Scale

Even if your team has a charter, it still can’t be specific enough to cover every commitment team members will make to each other and it likely has even less coverage of commitments made to people outside the team.

For a person making commitments (a ‘provider’) to other people (‘customers’) there is a technique that we particularly like. The provider will ask the customers to imagine what it would look like to receive…

• Deficient work - work that has important gaps or that fails to meet important dates - work that would disappoint them

• Adequate work - work that checks all the boxes and gets the job done, competently if not spectacularly - work that would satisfy them

• Great work - work that covers all the bases and squeezes all the extra value possible out of the problem space - work that would delight them

These three anchors form a spectrum that gives the provider a much more grounded sense of what the customers expect. This ‘full color picture’ often helps the provider to ask more detailed / useful questions to further tune their own thinking right from the outset. Further, it gives all parties a historical anchor to refer back to if they start to discover their expectations drifting (reducing unhealthy conflict).

Try It Yourself

Think about a relationship you have with a colleague where expectations have become mismatched in the past. Now think about a current commitment you have made to them…

• Lay the groundwork for a safe, collaborative conversation that fosters openness and curiosity.

• Introduce the idea to them that you want to better-manage expectations for this work.

• Ask them to give you a three-point grading (as above) imagining the circumstances in which they’d be (respectively) disappointed, satisfied or delighted.

• Ask clarifying questions around anything you hear that you find surprising.

• Write down the graded scale for yourself (their answers plus your clarifications) and share it with them.

• Once the work is delivered, take a look at the scale together and use it to talk about the results of the work.

A recent client said our chartering was “like having a loving marriage counselor for your leadership team!”. If your team could benefit from a greater sense of alignment and cohesion, please reach out about our team chartering program.