Managing Expectations Overview: Managing expectations is a key ingredient of career success in any field. Promise only what you can deliver. Deliver what you promise. Meet deadlines. Display thoroughness. Moreover, someone who consistently delivers more than expected, or ahead of schedule, will be highly regarded. Likewise, someone else who regularly delivers less, or late, will be considered a failure. This is often true even if the latter person actually accomplishes more, in an absolute sense, than the former.
Managing Expectations and Over-Promising: Many ambitious people try to get ahead by over-promising. They fear saying no to their superiors, lest they be branded as shirkers and thus damage their careers. However, accepting an assignment that you know cannot be accomplished, or finished on time, usually will not help your reputation. It generally is better to raise the caveats up front than to explain failure. Particularly on Wall Street, middle managers tend to be deathly afraid of pushing back against unreasonable demands from executives, and typically never say no, no matter how unreasonable the demand. Inevitably, the end result is loss of face and recriminations when they fail. Or, they work their staffs unreasonably hard to meet goals of questionable value.
Managing Expectations and CFOs: Another result of the "can't say no" mindset is the expansion of critical few objectives (CFOs) into lengthy, unfocused laundry lists that leave staff confused. Particularly problematic are managers who have a constantly shifting set of priorities, including top priorities, often in response to the changing whims of unfocused superiors. When more than a handful of objectives are given top priority, nothing really is.
Dealing With Difficult Requests: Addressing difficult or non-standard requests often requires Socratic dialogue to ascertain more precisely what the person wants, and to indicate what you can deliver. In many cases, especially if the request is unduly vague or ill-thought, you probably should offer a few (usually 3 or 4) choices.
Managing Expectations and Under-Promising: A relative minority try the gambit of giving extreme lowball estimates of what they can achieve, and with excessively padded timetables (like the airlines do to boost their on-time performance stats), in an attempt to inflate their achievements. This trickery is soon exposed, and usually causes a loss of credibility.
Managing Expectations Successfully: The trick is steering a middle course, wherein you give realistic estimates of what you can achieve given the resources at your disposal, and consistently meet them. A big part of this is managing your boss, in an attempt to ensure that critical few objectives are not constantly shifting or being piled up so high that they become a mountain that cannot be scaled. In sum, you must be deft about indicating what is doable, given the resources at hand, and what is not.
You constantly see expectations management in politics. What you hear from candidates and their backers pre- and post-election can differ widely. It is common for candidates to make extravagant promises, then to ratchet down supporters' expectations once elected. For example, on election night 2008 President-elect Obama cautioned a jubilant throng of supporters in Grant Park, Chicago that "Our climb will be steep; we may not get there in one year or even in one term." Shortly thereafter, a headline in the Asbury Park Press, which had endorsed Obama, asked whether "Yes, we can" had suddenly morphed into "No, we can't."
In business, however, switching to "No, I can't" after being hired on the basis of "Yes, I can" can earn you a quick exit. In management consulting firms, for example, it is not uncommon for people to be fired within days of starting work if they seem to have oversold their capabilities.
Lesson: do not over-promise in job interviews, hoping that once hired, you can finesse the problems that can come your way. You may be setting yourself up for a serious fall. You do not have the luxury of being secure until the next election, at which time you will hope that people forgot what you promised last time, or that you caught some breaks in the interim. In business, you are subject to continual votes of confidence/no confidence from your superiors, or from your customers.
The Expectations Treadmill: The phrase expectations treadmill was coined to describe a phenomenon related to corporate earnings reports. The same concept also is applicable to individuals, as past achievements often ratchet up current expectations of performance, and as people frequently live up (or live down) to what is expected of them.
Crying Wolf: An important aspect of managing expectations involves the requests that you make of others. Press someone to deliver something to you on a very tight timetable, and you better be seen to use that input just as quickly. By contrast, if you sit on that input for an extended period, expect to be labelled as the boy who cries wolf, and not to be believed the next time you really need something fast.
However, it may not be your fault if you are acting as the messenger for a superior who fails to act on that input in a timely fashion. Nonetheless, your reputation may suffer as a result, and your ability to deliver what that superior wants thus may be impaired the next time you are passing along a supposedly urgent request.
Compensation and Managing Expectations: In a Financial Times opinion piece ("Reward real growth, not expectations," 8/3/2010) University of Toronto business school dean Roger Martin found severe fault with using stock-based compensation for executives. His reason is that stock prices reflect expectations about a company's future, and thus may owe more to executives' skills in inflating these expectations than in what they actually have delivered, or are likely to deliver.
Accordingly, Martin argues that executive compensation instead should be determined by measures of real performance, effectively paying royalties on metrics such as growth in revenues, profits, market share and customer satisfaction, to cite a few examples. Those involved in designing and implementing compensation plans should consider this.
