Last week was about calling people up vs out.  This week we will look at cleaning rooms, clear expectations, and feedback.

Thursday is “Clean your room” day at the house.  When we first initiated this, the kids had a very different idea of what clean was vs my wife and I (#shocker).  Rather than get angry, my wife and I realized we needed to articulate the goal in a clearer and more explicit way.  “Clean your room” day means picking up all the trash, taking it out, picking up all the things that are laying about so I can run a vacuum without sucking up your stuff, putting everything in its home, putting up your clean laundry, and ensuring everything is tidy.  Those are the expectations.  After outlining all of this, we also had to be more hands on initially to model and show them what this meant.  Then, we would have them clean their room on their own, and after we inspected the work, we would give them feedback on what they did well and where they needed to improve based on the expectations we set.  Today, they know what the standard is and the deliver on that, most of the time 😉

You might be wondering what this has to do with work.  Throughout my work experiences, I’ve noticed that one of the biggest issues with feedback is a lack of clear expectations.  Similar to my kids and cleaning their rooms, we can’t ASSUME that people will automatically know what the expectation is or how to execute it.  Everyone is coming to work with their own experiences and views on things, which likely means that everyone will have a different view of what the minimum expectations are for any given situation.  With this in mind, we have to be intentional about establishing clear expectations and we have to be willing to model and coach to those expectations until we are all where we need to be.  This might include needing to be even more explicit than we think is necessary in order to deliver the feedback message.

The challenges

• As a leader, are you clear about the minimum expectations for a role, project, and/or situation?  Are you providing feedback when people aren’t meeting those expectations?
• As an individual contributor, do you know what the minimum expectations are from your supervisor AND teammates?  Do you know whether or not you’re meeting those expectations?

Bonus thought- It’s important to understand that expectations evolve over time.  When my kids were much younger my expectations for them cleaning up after themselves was much lower.  Now the context has changed, and my expectations are higher.  In a similar way, our world is continuing to evolve and what might have been acceptable performance a few years ago, might not even come close to meeting the new bar.  We must be willing to have those conversations with people to reset where the minimum expectation is, so they are able to know what they are shooting for.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry