Great Expectations

The key and also the down fall the most of the managers that I've spoken to recently have involved setting clear and succinct expectations. From what I gathered to most effective managers us some of the following to maintain high job satisfaction, high retention and increased morale.

Here are key components to setting clear expectations:

1. Be clear yourself – understand where you are driving to and what it will take to get there
2. Keep it simple – the best expectations are ones that you can translate easily
3. Write them down and repeat often – avoid thinking that people “should” know and make it clear, visible and say it often.
4. Provide Support – if you’re expectation is to do 10 sales calls a day or fulfill 15 customer service requests a week (both tangible and easy to measure) then make sure you’re creating the time and space for you’re employees to do those things
5. Be sure that you’re expectations are about what people can DO – managing by result is something we so often default to because results drive our business, but getting people focused on what they can DO and how often you expect them to DO it is critical for morale and for turning your business around

Why do clear expectations matter?

• People thrive with clear expectations: most of the sales people I talk to are given clear results objectives, but nothing about the thing that they can control, which is the activities required to get the results.
• You provide yourself or your employees a framework in which they are able to define success and link those things to their own activity
• There’s a saying that people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers, well clear expectations can lead to higher job satisfaction and lower turn over