Jackie: Welcome to Slingshot25’s Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Jackie. I’m Courtney. Something we’ve been thinking about is rocks. Oh, rocks. And I went to do something interesting and special today, Courtney with rocks. I can’t wait. Well, sort of sounds very exciting.
That’s what I’m doing going to do. It’s very exciting. I’m going to read the Parable of the Rock. Are you ready for this little story?
Courtney: I’m trying not to snore, but I am ready.
Jackie: Okay. I’m, I’m literally reading this. Okay. This is my narrator voice. All right. Get it on. Here it goes. You ask me to bring you a rock. I go outside, look around and find a rock that seems nice enough when you see the rock. You say, that’s a nice rock, but I need something a little bigger. When I bring you a slightly bigger rock, you say, okay, that size is close, but it needs to be more round. The next rock is round enough, but the wrong color in the end, I bring you a perfect rock but I think, wow, it would’ve been a lot easier if you had just told me, you wanted a nice black round rock about five inches in diameter. The end. Now the moral of this story, Courtney, is frequently stated like this, for employees to do a good job the first time, leaders need to be explicit about what success looks like.
Courtney: You really do like to read.
Jackie: I do. Well, let’s go back to the rock. This sounds all simple enough, doesn’t it? The moral of the story, it sounds simple enough, and then you try to describe what success looks like for your employee who’s doing complex, flexible, adaptive work. Yeah, not so easy.
Courtney: And it gets really hard. It’s harder than you think. And I think the thing with expectations. Expectations are such a big part of change, such a big part of leadership, and leaders really believe, and in their heart of hearts, good-intentioned, good people, they believe they’ve shared their expectations. And all you leaders out there that are listening, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re wrong.
Yeah. People do not know what you’re expecting. That’s right. And you haven’t been explicit. You might not even know what you’re expecting.
Jackie: Yeah. I mean, think about that when, when we, again, going back to the Parable of Rock, it assumes that people are doing something that you can so clearly define that you could get it right the first time.
But I, I’m guessing that most of the people who are listening to this, their employees are not doing the kind of work that you could just summarize that in a, in a sentence or even a paragraph. Okay. There’s much more to it. There are, you know, the puts and the takes and the ifs, ands, or buts and what have yous.
All of those things count. All of those things are what people encounter on the job, doing the work. And then all of a sudden, you start to feel some frustration that you’re not getting what you want. And what do we say about that frustration?
Courtney: Yeah. So, most of the time it’s kind of interesting. You can see what you expect when the expectation you have when they’re not being met. So for example, you may tell someone, Hey, I want you to go out and design this part of some sort of design project you have, and the person’s really excited that you’ve entrusted ’em with this, and they run off and they work on it and they squirrel away and they do all the problem-solving. And then they come back to you with a solution, and you’re disappointed because they didn’t collaborate with anyone. They didn’t ask anyone for input. They didn’t work with their peers on it. And you’re like, dude, you’re supposed to work with people. Hmm? Why? Why did you just run up a tree and then come back with the answer?
But did you tell ’em that? Right? And so, you’re frustrated that they didn’t ask for input, but. They didn’t know you wanted them to do that. And so, we have this world where leaders are really frustrated that people aren’t meeting their expectations. They’re, they’re like, they’re not accountable. They’re not working the way I want them to.
They’re doing what I ask them to do, but I have all these expectations about how that isn’t being art. You’re not articulating them. Mm-hmm. And when I say, like, you might not even know ’em, it’s a great example. Like, did you know? That’s what you expected, or do you just sort of have it embedded in your assumptions?
So yeah, we’re going to challenge you to think about what I’m assuming, what I’ve asked from people? What am I expecting that I haven’t articulated? And then start sharing that with people. Yeah, often.
Jackie: And then what do you do when, despite all of your best efforts to do all of what you just said, Courtney?
You’ll still discover something that was an expectation of yours and you hadn’t realized it was an expectation until it wasn’t met. And that’s normal. It’s, and, and what, what we don’t want you to do with that is to just go take that frustration and land that frustration on someone. Mm-hmm. Uh, with, you know, uh, that’s completely unfair, but to say, you know, I’ve, I’ve realized I actually have this expectation, and so now let’s, let’s pause and let’s talk about it.
Maybe back some things up and, and, and look at this a different way. I think maybe, maybe the real moral of this story, if bring me a rock, was to get perfectly concise if that was the moral of, of that parable. I think the moral of our story is it’s not so easy to do that, and so we suggest you just. Take some time to do it, to live with the complexity of it, to think through as many scenarios as you can on the front end of not only what do you expect for an ultimate outcome, the part to be built for this design project.
That might be the ultimate outcome. But you also think through all of those enabling expectations that you have about how they work, when they work, how often they show status, all of those kinds of things. And you’re still going to miss some things. Because it’s way too messy to get it completely explicitly right on the front end, but you then be ever mindful of as those things appear that you keep the dialogue going and you don’t start telling yourself a story that this person doesn’t know what they’re doing, doesn’t care, isn’t as smart as you.
All of the things that we’re all the places we tend to go. Mm-hmm. When we get frustrated.
Courtney: Yeah, I love it. I think, I think if you, if you’re frustrated, somebody’s not doing something, the first question you should ask yourself is, have I told them? Yeah. Have I asked them?
Jackie: Wow. Okay. So, this expectation stuff is not so simple.
Man. Um, I know, you know, we’ve got a lot more to say about this, Courtney. We could go on and on and on, but I don’t think we should. I think we’re going to say that’s all for this episode.
Courtney: I would expect we’ve wrapped this up.
Jackie: Okay. Let’s do it. Thank you for sharing your expectations. I’ll see if I can live up to them.
I’m going to say that’s all for this, uh, episode of our shot then, um, but we always have much more to say, so if you want more, drop us a line at slingshot25.com. Until next time.
