Early, Often, and Everywhere In Between!

Here’s what I can promise you; we can indeed eliminate the cost of confusion and avoid leaving a ton of profit on the table if we’re willing to provide the kind of clear expectations that produce results! I’m certainly not suggesting that this is easy but by following a few simple steps, we can remove much of the doubt that so often bogs our team members down… But take note, this is absolutely not something we can do once and hope to move on with our lives. As leaders, the key to keeping this profitability killer at bay is making sure we provide the extremely clear expectations that we’ve been looking at here EARLY, OFTEN, and EVERYWHERE in between!

In Building Buy-In Around a Clear Mission & Vision, a lesson Cindy and I originally developed for our Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank but now share frequently as a keynote session for various organizations, we share something we learned from John Maxwell in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership as he describes The Law of the Picture. John says that “the temptation for any leader is to merely communicate about the vision.” I’m convinced this applies at least as much to expectations because those are usually less flashy than a leader’s vision. He goes on to warn of the challenge that comes with this. He shared that “vision has a tendency to leak.” And quite frankly, high expectations will leak too if we only talk about them occasionally.

One more thing I learned from all those years in behavior-based safety was that we all need boundaries. Our behaviors are driven by the consequences we’ve come to expect from those behaviors, and those consequences are tied directly to whether or not we know exactly what’s expected of us and whether or not we’ll be held accountable for not performing within those expectations. To be sure our team members have a clear understanding of what we expect, as well as how they can exceed those expectations on a regular basis, we need to communicate those expectations with them in the language they can best receive, be sure to tie them to a purpose that our team members buy into, then do it over and over and over again!

Make no mistake though, just talking about it will never be enough… We better be sure to provide them with an example to follow. And we also need to commit to holding folks accountable when they miss the mark or will fall prey to yet another profitability killer - so that’s exactly what we’ll work through next!