Managing Expectations
The first in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.
The concept of “managing expectations” is a deceptively simple one. It just means making sure other people’s expectations of you and your work are in line with reality.On the most basic level, this means being honest. Don’t say you can do something you can’t. Don’t pull a “scotty” (of star trek fame) and claim something will take two days that you can actually do in half an hour. If people have a clear picture of what you’re capable of - and what you’re not capable of - they’re less likely to accidentally set you up for failure. This doesn’t stop them from intentionally setting you up to fail, but if you put things like time estimates in writing (all the items in the list work together, see?) you can back yourself up later when the fireworks start.
On a deeper level, managing expectations means making sure the people around you are prepared for what you’re going to do/give them. This isn’t so much being “honest” as making sure you understand what your part is and that other people are prepared for what you’re going to deliver.
Real life example - something that nearly got me fired:
Part of my job at one time was to send a weekly email report summing up website statistics and providing some analysis. The people I was writing this for didn’t have a technical background, and didn’t know the difference between a “page view” and a “hit,” but they wanted to have a sense of what was going on with the website.
By that time, I had enough experience to know I needed to manage the expectations of the people I was sending this to. So, I made sure I personally knew every one of the people on the “To” line of this email. Many of them were higher up on the org chart than me. Some were VP’s of the company even. When these reports started, I had conversations with all of them about how web statistics are inherently messy. I explained that all we can do is make educated guesses about why one page gets lots more traffic than another, for instance.
In my first reports, I reminded them of our conversations and provided a primer on all the words I used. As time went on, I started leaving out the strong disclaimers about how inexact these statistics were. I didn’t want to be redundant and boring for this group I knew I had educated over time.
What I didn’t know was at some point (not at the beginning) one of the people on the “To:” list started forwarding this email report to other powerful people in the Los Angeles office without any further explanation than I provided. I thought I was writing to a small audience with a certain level of expectations. In reality, the audience was at least three times the size I thought it was, and most of them had very different expectations about this report.
My informal, unframed updates were showing up in their inboxes right next to the formal statistical analysis of television show ratings. Ratings of the TV show these people were creating. As a result, my emails took on an air of importance and accuracy I never intended.
One week, I was faced with a fairly sizeable dip in the numbers. I couldn’t trace the change to any of the usual suspects, and I wrote something to that effect… usual suspects. I wasn’t any more specific than that. If I had stopped there, I would have been okay. But since I thought I was among friends, I brainstormed a little and postulated a few reasons for why the numbers may have gone down. One, among others, was that the web audience didn’t like the episode airing that week. I was trying to stave off the many phone calls saying, “If it wasn’t the usual suspects, what are the unusual suspects?”
Instead, I got an angry phone call out of the blue from a very important producer on the show. He expressed his displeasure with my work, accused me of having subversive motives, and without a trace of irony used the phrase, “You’ll never work in this town again.” This was not an empty threat.
My offhand remark looked to him like a full-frontal assault on his career, and he pulled out the big guns to retaliate.
Let me be clear here. I do not blame him. This was entirely a failure (on my part) to manage expectations. I wasn’t an email newbie - I knew emails were easy to forward, and I knew at least one person on my “To:” list had an itchy trigger finger. I should have continued to manage the expectations of my readers. When I stopped doing that, I lost control of my message and nearly lost my job.
The remedy to this situation? Managing expectations backwards. One little sentence or two at the beginning of the saga would have saved me about a week of explaining and apologizing. In the end, the whole audience knew what to expect from these reports. Expectations managed. In this case - the hard way.
So, that’s my elaboration on managing expectations. Any questions?