12 Questions that Solve Collisions of Expectation
Remarkable leaders exceed expectation.
Organizations love or hate leaders based on expectation. Exceed expectation and you’re respected, honored, even revered.
Disappoint expectation long enough, you’re gone.
Excitement, joy, sadness, and disappointment are rooted in expectation.
7 expectations of leadership:
- Results.
- Daily performance.
- Character.
- Relationship.
- Skill.
- Knowledge.
- Presence.
Collision:
The expectation others have for you often apply to the way you treat others, not themselves.
Take charge leaders want you to take charge, except when it applies to them. People who want you to tell others what to do, don’t want you to tell them what to do, for example.
Exposing and aligning expectation:
Complaints:
Recurring complaints often reveal misaligned expectation. Solve one issue and another complaint takes it’s place.
People who are never happy with each other have collisions of expectation.
12 questions to align and manage expectation:
- What do we really want? Include personal hopes, individual involvement, as well as organizational results.
- What’s important about this situation? Leaders who enjoy developing others may sacrifice results for development, for example. They’re happy as long as people are growing.
- How would you like to treat others with this challenge in mind?
- How would you like me to treat others with this challenge in mind?
- How do you want me to treat you with this challenge in mind?
- What does progress look like? Include behaviors as well as results.
- How would we like to move forward this week/month? Specifically.
- How involved would you like to be?
- How involved would you like me to be?
- How would you like to deal with resistance?
- How will we celebrate wins and communicate vision?
- How might leveraging our individual strengths create broader solutions to this challenge?
Warning: Disengaged power players end up judging from a distance.
Successful leaders establish, clarify, and manage expectation because remarkable leadership includes exceeding expectation.
What expectations do you feel from others?
How are you managing the expectations of others?
Do we ever know what we really want? “Make up your mind” they would say. Most of life’s journey seems to be figuring out what others want, never knowing what we really want changing our minds to what we think we want and still asking what you want? Complex to say the least. Good luck if you can keep life simple and know what you really want, not sure if we truthfully know within ourselves..
Thanks Tim. Your point is well taken. It takes time to uncover and then align expectations. I find that it takes time for us to even “admit” our real expectations. 🙂
Sometimes we don’t know what we want until after the fact.
As you can tell, I think it’s worth the effort.
Expectations shape so much of life. I like your point about the connection between recurring complaints and expectations.
Really excellent questions. The key is open communication that encourages a real sharing of thoughts or ideas. Great job.
Expectation that people rarely have of leaders–and an essential leadership behavior at times–is to help people take on what Heifitz and Linsky call “adaptive challenges.” Such challenges cause people to move into unknown and uncomfortable territory. People rarely “authorize” to do that as leaders, and yet we often need to take on. Then the challenge is to manage ourselves and remain humble, while disappointing people (aks challenging people) at a rate they can manage.