Clarity: Asking Not Assuming

Is “next week” Friday or Monday? 

Not long ago I worked with a client for whom a variance in internal assumptions about the answer to that question led to thousands of dollars of expense, a decrease in trust with an external partner awaiting a key deliverable, and a lot of internal frustration. 

While the particulars in this situation were unique, I often meet with clients who avoid being prescriptive with their team, which is wonderful… if indeed the situation allows for flexibility. But vague in language and exacting in expectation is common and never a good fit. Common ways I see this show up:

 ·         Requests without deadlines 

 ·         Lack of front-end guidance, but then feedback that a product is not wrong, but just not right

·         Unstated expectations around reporting back when a task is completed

 Sometimes leaders are moving fast and forget the upfront guidance, but I find just as often leaders think they are flexible but have a blind spot to their own unspoken expectations. This sounds like: “There wasn’t a deadline, but a week was plenty of time to get this back to me.” Or “I didn’t tell them what I wanted, but shouldn’t they know what quality looks like?” Or “I told them to do it, and then I never heard back about it.”

 Rather than looking solely at whether the leader’s own expectation was reasonable, I ask them to consider whether what the employee delivered/ or didn’t could ALSO be considered reasonable. If so, the issue isn’t the team member’s performance or judgement, but the leader’s performative flexibility. And the solution is clarity. 

 In short, if you don’t ask for what you want, it’s unreasonable to expect others to deliver on it.