How to visualise expectations towards your reports in a fun and engaging way

I’ll open with a simple question: do you know what are the expectations of your direct manager?

I’m not talking about the job description you applied for, I’m not talking about the contents of your working agreement, I’m not talking about your idea of what these expectations may be. I’m talking about you having a conversation with your manager about what he or she expects of you in your current position. In my experience, more often than not, the answer is: no.

The reason for it is that we’re all guilty of making too much assumptions. And that includes you and your manager. You probably have your understanding of your role and what you should do. And I’ll bet that your manager has a slightly different one.

And that’s a problem.

One of the techniques I find extremely helpful to counter it, is something that I call Expectations Workshop.

Expectations Workshop recipe

The idea is very simple — you meet with your report, you write down and discuss what you expect from each other and you create a personalised joint working agreement that you revisit every once in a while.

Step-by-step guide:

1. You bring two colors of post-it notes
2. One color represents expectations upon you as the manager, the other represents expectations upon your report
3. Each of you take some post-it in one color and some in the other
4. You spend 15–20 mins for filling both colors — you write what your report can expect of you and what do you expect of them
5. In the end you have two piles of post-it notes — one represent expectations towards you, the other one towards your report
6. Then you take turns — you can say for example “I expect you to build an A-Team” Does it makes? Do we agree upon this? Do we understand it the same way?
   
   They can say straight “yes, you can expect me to do that”, but they can say something like “well, what do you EXACTLY mean by A-Team? Do you mean diversity? Do you mean performance?” — the important part is that you had the conversation.
   
   Then it’s their turn — they can say something like “I expect you to mentor me to be a lead some day” and you say “That’s great! I didn’t know that — it’s good that we had this conversation, I will help you.”

The end result looks like that:

That’s it. You capture it, you share it with each other and you hold each other accountable.

I tend to revisit it every one in a while (6–12 months) because things (roles, expectations) change in the organisation.

Also it’s a really nice way to open yourself up as a manager, start building rapport and talk about your management style (similarly to Manager’s Readme).

Manager’s README

And it’s fun. Plus #agile if you use post-it cards and sharpies.

Inspiration

Here are things that I often put as expectations towards my direct reports (depending on the role & person, but applies mostly to leaders):

• Paint the big picture
• Create conditions to enable teams to align
• Work to make yourself redundant
• Create a shared sense of accountability
• Empower team to make decision on their own
• Setup a framework for collaboration
• Make people awesome
• Be a change agent
• Make mistakes
• Give recognition
• Help the team to remove their bottlenecks
• Do great things (or tell me why not)

PS: I am by no means author of this idea, I’ve heard it first time from Kevin Goldsmith on one of the conferences.