Clarifying Expectations

Imagine the difficulty you might encounter if you and your boss had different assumptions

regarding whose role it was to create your job description.

"When am I going to get my job description?" you might ask.

"I've been waiting for you to bring one to me so that we could discuss it," your boss might reply.

"I thought defining my job was your role."

"That's not my role at all. Don't you remember? Right from the first, I said that how you do in the job largely depends on you."

"I thought you meant that the quality of my job depended on me. But I don't even know what my

job really is."

"I did exactly what you asked me to do and here is the report."

"I don't want a report. The goals was to solve the problem -- not to analyze it and report on it."

"I thought the goal was to get a handle on the problem so we could delegate it to someone else."

How many times have we had these kinds of conversations?

"You said..."

"No, you're wrong! I said..."

"You did not! You never said I was supposed to..."

"Oh, yes I did! I clearly said..."

"You never even mentioned..."

"But that was our agreement..."

The cause of almost all relationship difficulties is rooted in conflicting or ambiguous expectations

around roles and goals. Whether we are dealing with the question of who does what at work, how

you communicate with your daughter when you tell her to clean her room, or who feeds the fish and

THE SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE PEOPLE Brought to you by FlyHeart takes out the garbage, we can be certain that unclear expectations will lead to misunderstanding,

disappointment, and withdrawals of trust.

Many expectations are implicit. They haven't been explicitly stated or announced, but people

nevertheless bring them to a particular situation. In marriage, for example, a man and a woman have

implicit expectations of each other in their marriage roles. Although these expectations have not been discussed, or sometimes even recognized by the person who has them, fulfilling them makes great

deposits in the relationship and violating them makes withdrawals.

That's why it's so important whenever you come into a new situation to get all the expectations out

on the table. People will begin to judge each other through those expectations. And if they feel like their basic expectations have been violated, the reserve of trust is diminished. We create many

negative situations by simply assuming that our expectations are self-evident and that they are clearly

understood and shared by other people.

The deposit is to make the expectations clear and explicit in the beginning. This takes a real

investment of time and effort up front, but it saves great amounts of time and effort down the road.

When expectations are not clear and shared, people begin to become emotionally involved and simple

misunderstandings become compounded, turning into personality clashes and communication

breakdowns.

Clarifying expectations sometimes takes a great deal of courage. It seems easier to act as though

differences don't exist and to hope things will work out than it is to face the differences and work

together to arrive at a mutually agreeable set of expectations.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 867