By Annabel Graham, Executive and Team Coach, and Director of Successful Training, Leadership & Coaching Consultancy
Ever sat there, frustrated because you have no idea what your team is doing? They seem to be going off at tangents, doing anything except what you asked them to do. And then you get frustrated, send a ranting email or snap their head off. Familiar?
Cue then a lot of dancing around each other, rubbish behaviours, avoidance and sulking. And yes – you are grown adults!
I see this weekly, sometimes daily in organisations, and I’ve been there myself. We each make massive assumptions of the other as we’ve failed to discuss our wants and needs clearly.
Time and again I speak to leaders in organisations who I am coaching, mentoring or training and when they tell me it’s all a bit tense between them and their line manager, I ask the same question: “have you had the expectations conversation, where you both agree what you expect of each other and how you’ll work together?”.
And what do you think the answer is? No!
95% of the time, without fail, this conversation hasn’t happened. And it hasn’t just not happened within the first week or first month. I’ve known people who have had the same line manager for over two years and they haven’t had the conversation. Even more scary – this can be at any level of the organisation from the senior leadership team down.
So why does this keep happening? Why do we keep setting our team members up to fail by not saying what we expect of them? Giving them the job description is simply not enough, nor is the company induction.
As a line manager (at any level) and employee, a two-way conversation needs to happen within month one, exploring:
What makes that person tick? What do they love doing? What are their strengths, their fears, and where are their development areas?
What do you expect of that person – in both deliverables and behaviour?
How often you would like to meet/talk to them to get an update on what they are doing?
How would you like them to give you this update? Face to face, email, phone, in a team meeting? And what you’d like to know?
When you will meet them for a one to one meeting to review performance and development? How will you give feedback to each other, and discuss how you are working together?
What does your team member expect of you as a line manager? How would they like to receive feedback? What does support looks like to them, and when do they expect you to respond if they ask you for help or feedback?
Now this is not rocket science; it’s basic people management. It’s straightforward, honest conversations in simple language. Plus with organisations increasingly changing the annual appraisal to informal regular conversations, this one is vital.
The benefits of this conversation are simple:
1. You both know what you expect of each other, where you stand and how & what you will communicate, when. This removes guess work, takes away all assumptions and means conflict and misunderstanding are a lot less likely to happen.
2. You have a contract of what good behaviour looks like between both of you, which is not open to interpretation.
3. It builds trust! And this is crucial to working together and is the basis for creating high performance. Without the bedrock of trust, we lose focus on results, encourage negative conflict, damage commitment and create barriers for accountability.
And do you know the best bit? You can use this conversation with so many people! A direct report, peer, line manager, stakeholder or even your customer and clients. It works in every setting.
So, the next time you feel things aren’t going that well with a certain stakeholder; please ask the following question.
“Can we please talk about how we can work together more effectively?”
Then take the conversation from there.