Creating a Culture of Success through Clear Expectations
Proactive Conversations and Feedback Loops for Empowered Teams
In the world of the humanized leader, effective communication, and expectation management guides teams toward success. The leader’s job is to navigate projects, deploy human capital and be clear how those humans succeed. Setting and communicating clear expectations from the start is crucial.
This article stems from a recent client conversation about managing expectations, project changes and new information. The conversation yielded seven important points, providing a roadmap for understanding the process of expectation feedback. Different than performance feedback, this feedback focuses specifically on executing success measures.
Here is your roadmap:
- Clarity in Outcome Expectations: Leaders must communicate success at the start of any project. They articulate the desired outcomes and make sure team members understand the end goals. Occasionally, leaders will have to re-state expectations to align the team with the required results, a normal part of the process.
- Strategic Questioning: The team is asked strategic questions such as "How are they going to win in this situation?" and "What does success look like?" These questions create guiding principles, focusing on broader objectives, and respecting deadlines. The team understands the purpose of the project – the why.
- Embracing Change: Things change. Rules change. Timelines change. Sometimes the end goal post gets moved. Clarifying change brings new components and deadlines into focus. Change makes people uncomfortable. Best practice is to over-communicate expectations, ensuring everyone is on the same page. Some discomfort arises from the higher level of accountability asked of the team.
- Dependency and Milestone Management: Projects involve dependencies and milestones. Team members, focused on their success measures, may overlook connections to others’ work. Clear communication about broad expectations and specific milestones is crucial. Identify hand-offs, potential time lapses, and areas that need inspection.
- Proactive Conversations: Be proactive in conversations with team members. Revisit expectations early in the project to prevent misunderstandings. In the face of any red flags, restate expectations, provide, and accept constructive feedback, and collaborate to identify necessary changes in behavior or processes.
- Avoid Micromanagement: Using the expectation feedback model reduces the likelihood of micromanagement. Success measures are set, and inspection processes are clear, and empowered teams understand the relationship of expectations to project success. The leader expects, inspects, and uses Socratic questioning to create critical thinking, creating a culture of accountability, transparency, and success.
- Feedback Loop: Creating a feedback loop is integral to the expectation management process. Leaders learn to offer factual, direct, neutral, and kind feedback (The Humanized Leader way). This feedback, offered in the spirit of improvement, is specific to expectation achievement. The loop also promotes upward feedback, addressing challenges and refining expectations as the project evolves.
Everyone wins when the success measures are clear, and individuals grow as they follow the roadmap. Through proactive communication, strategic questioning, and a commitment to feedback, leaders create a vibrant work environment. Expectations are understood, aligned to an outcome, and consistently met. Mastering the art of expectation management becomes a key differentiator in achieving project success.
Mary Pat Knight is CEO of Leaders Inspired – an executive coaching and consulting agency devoted to the development of emotionally intelligent leaders. She is also the author of the Amazon #1 International Best Selling book, The Humanized Leader.
The ground-breaking new book, The Humanized Leader: The Transformative Power of Emotionally Intelligent Leadership to Impact Culture, Team and Business Results, is now available in Kindle, paperback, or as an audiobook. To get your copy – or extras for your team, click the button below.
