Setting clear expectations is an important skill for leaders to develop, but it is often overlooked. In the newest blog of the series, Bryan Shelton and Brian Molina explore how leaders can do this well, covering key skills for effective communication, and highlighting common pitfalls that hinder clarity.
Transcription: Brian, we wrote about setting clear expectations. Setting clear expectations has been a wildly successful management strategy for increasing performance in many organizations. In our blog, you discuss some key elements and how to set clear expectations. Tell me about some of the best practices that you wrote about. Yeah, sure. It's one of those things that's wildly impactful, as you say, seems simple, but harder to do in practice and harder to get good at. So first piece I talked about is relationships. I want to underscore how important it is to go in and invest in developing those human person-to-person relationships even before doing too much expectation setting and coaching. But after that, I think there's a lot of value in pinpointing and clarifying things that could otherwise be misinterpreted or be vague, right? So, you and I might be on the same page about what I mean when I say, "Hey, I expect us both to work safely every single day." But that might not be the same to someone else hearing it, right? Their expectation of working safely might be wildly different. So, we've really got to get in there and clarify and pinpoint. So I think those are some of the bigger opportunities. I know you discussed barriers as well. So, what kinds of things did you highlight? Yeah, actually you just mentioned one of my favorite traps that leaders fall into, which is being vague, but expecting perfection. For example, something like, hey, let's give excellence in our customer service. You know, the leader might understand or have some idea of what he's talking about, but when it comes down to it, the listeners, the people that are responsible for that have no clue actually what it means. And so that is a trap that I've seen all too often inside organizations. Brian, hey, thanks again so much for blogging with me and for our audience. I hope you like this video and enjoy the blog. Please give it a read. Thanks so much. Thank you.
