How To Communicate Expectations With Your Team?

Aligning a team to drive high performance begins with effectively setting and communicating expectations. Leaders who fail at this erode trust, productivity, and outcomes.

In this comprehensive 2600+ word guide, we’ll explore the science behind expectations as well as best practices for maximizing team alignment.

Why Communicating Expectations Matters

Per a 2020 study by talent accelerator Collective Campus, unclear goals and responsibilities ranked among the top team dysfunctions. Their survey of 150 managers revealed that poor expectation communication causes:

• 69% – Confusion and misalignment
• 55% – Missed deadlines
• 62% – Interpersonal conflicts

Communicating expectations serves as a fundamental building block for team cohesion and effectiveness. Failing at it introduces problems that cascade throughout an organization.

Let‘s explore key reasons it matters:

Ensures Alignment

When expectations aren’t clear, team members build their own interpretations of priorities.

Marketing focuses more on lead gen than content creation. Sales promises unrealistic turnarounds. Different departments optimize for competing KPIs.

This misalignment on goals causes redundant work, critical gaps, and fragmented strategies that cripple productivity.

Explicit expectations synchronize teams to work collaboratively towards common outcomes. This prevents wasted efforts from duplication and overlap.

According to Gallup, aligned teams demonstrate:

• 32% higher productivity
• 41% lower absenteeism
• 24% lower turnover

Drives Accountability

Undefined expectations make it impossible for team members to assess their own performance accurately. This causes both overconfidence and also confusion about areas requiring improvement.

With clearly communicated standards, individuals take ownership over monitoring quality and progress. This intrinsic drive lifts collective accountability beyond what manager oversight alone can accomplish.

A 2016 Harvard study demonstrated that when people better understand expectations, their performance against them improves by an average of 17 percent.

Aligning on success metrics, project plans, and role clarity builds a culture of personal accountability.

Boosts Productivity

Unclear directives waste copious amounts of time and energy. When goals seem ambiguous, team members either spin their wheels or wait on leaders to provide direction.

Engineers build the wrong feature because the acceptance criteria lacked specifics. Marketing creates inconsistent branding lacking style guides. Team members redo work or wait for input due to fuzzy guidelines.

An Asana study suggests that nearly a third of workplace productivity gets sacrificed due to poor communication and coordination. Defining responsibilities and objectives seeks to reclaim this lost efficiency.

Finally, well understood expectations give teams autonomy. Once enabled with clarity, they no longer depend on leaders doling out piecemeal instructions. This vehicles self-direction lifts output velocity.

Defuses Conflict

When expectations seem vague or unrealistic, finger-pointing manifests between team members, departments, and leaders. Confusion on deliverables breeds accusations over failure.

Marketing blames engineering for lacking integration documentation. Sales blames product for incomplete feature sets. Leaders blame teams for missing deadlines built on flawed milestone estimates.

Explicit expectations diffuse debates over accountability by assigning clear ownership. This prevents responsibility ambiguities that spark friction during crises. It also reduces subjective performance interpretations that cause conflict during reviews.

Well-crafted expectations foster harmony by ensuring all parties share the same understanding of individual and collective commitments.

How To Effectively Set & Communicate Expectations

With reasons why expectation excellence matters covered, let‘s transition to tangible strategies for optimizing alignment.

These five best practices create clarity within teams of any size or structure:

1. Be Specific

Leaders must leave no detail undefined. Vague, subjective expectations give too much room for interpretation differences that misalign teams.

Set precise, measurable guidelines around:

Deadlines

Determine project timelines collaboratively with team members to match realities on the ground. Build in buffers given unforeseen complexities.

Optimize for consistent progress over perfection by breaking larger milestones into smaller increments with staging deadlines built in.

Regular heartbeat rhythms where teams sync up on current phase finalizations enable tighter coordination over attempting big bang deliveries.

Standards

Quality expectations require specifics grounded in examples. Marketing provides design specs and sample creative executions like emails, web pages, and offers. Engineers document code standards and complexity constraints. Support supplies escalation protocols and satisfaction score targets.

Pictures, videos, and samples give life to otherwise nebulous standards. Stats-driven service level agreements make support expectations mathematical. Leaders should limit use of subjective descriptors like “delight” that invite interpretation gaps without illustrative grounding.

Resources

Be clear on what tools, data, leadership support and cross-functional alignment each function needs to deliver on expectations. Finance can’t forecast accurately lacking sales stage data. Creative requires brand style guides and design software.

Uncover all unseen dependencies, empower the team accordingly, then setcorresponding deadlines.

Measurement

Teams improve what leaders inspect, not what they expect. Set metrics guiding both interim progress and overall results.

Marketing shares weekly traffic goals and monthly funnel conversion benchmarks. Sales tracks activity quotas, lead follow-up timing, and deal velocity rates. Support measures customer satisfaction, case resolution times, and app stability.

Align teams on outcome metrics while empowering them to build plans for achieving targets collaboratively. Lead measures like output volume matter less than lag measures showing overall performance against key business priorities.

2. Collaborate & Listen

While leaders should set initial expectations, good refinement stems from internal team dialogue. Those closest to the work better understand constraints impacting priorities.

Discuss role-specific responsibilities and standards one-on-one when possible. What challenges do they anticipate? What support or resources might lift performance? Where do plan or timeline misalignments exist?

Then convene broader working sessions bringing together parties relying on interconnected deliverables. How do proposed solutions holistically impact other departments? Where might priorities or capacities compete? Refine standards and stages until all voices get heard and major gaps get unlocked.

Team members demonstrate greater ownership over expectations they influence. Collaboration balances top-down vision with bottom-up ground truths for a integrated path to shared success.

3. Communicate Consistently

Communicating expectations once breeds temporary clarity that fades as projects progress and priorities shift. Leaders must reinforce key guidelines regularly through diverse channels including:

• Team stand ups – Quick periodic sync-ups to validate known assignments and bring unknowns into focus earlier
• Status updates – Whether via email, chat, or informal check-ins, highlight milestones achieved or missed
• Documentation – From wikis to trello boards, referenceable documentation on policies, standards and docs defeats forgetfulness
• One-on-ones – Leaders coaching against role-specific expectations and managing any misperceptions.

Reinforcement across mediums and gatherings grounds understandings for the long haul.

4. Inspect & Reflect

Simply communicating fails to ensure accurate comprehension over time. Leaders must inspect work frequently and reflect on results transparently with teams.

Relay quantitative assessments of deliverables against documented expectations to eliminate subjective interpretations. Maintain an open dialogue around performance patterns across individuals and departments. Then mutually identify where misaligned understandings of priorities may exist and refine accordingly.

Sometimes expectations demand revision before teams can achieve them. Other times capabilities require development. Reflection cycles build self-improvement into the team rhythm.

5. Implement Accountability Structures

Even with excellent communication, some team members struggle meeting expectations due to skill deficiencies or motivational issues.

Leaders must close performance gaps through accountability systems that apply appropriate pressure:

• Feedback – Clear, regular, helpful coaching focused on expectation gaps
• Training – Skills development to boost capabilities where deficits cause underperformance
• Incentives – Compensation and perks aligned to results metrics underlying key expectations
• Consequences – Performance management escalations where engagement and improvement efforts require harder line accountability

Well-constructed expectations enable effective personal development plans, self-correcting feedback loops, and objective performance conversations grounded in factual delivery evidence.

Optimal Team Composition & Communication Norms

Even with strong centralized policies around expectation excellence, optimal implementation requires securing buy-in across diverse personalities.

Certain team member archetypes embrace ready execution of clearly documented plans. Others balk at rigid guidelines or stretch timelines preferring fluid standards that match their work cadences.

To build a balanced team capable of both alignment and flexibility, leaders should:

• **Compliment planners with innovators** – The former thrive on structured goals while the latter provide high octane creativity fueled by autonomy. Communications to planners emphasize clarity and predictability. Messages to innovators frame expectations as starting points rather than boundaries.
• **Combine introverts with extraverts** – Self-starters content with asynchronous documentation can still benefit from some extroverted social pressure. Multi-channel communications across mediums gives space for all workstyles to process priorities.
• **Mix technical specialists with generalists** – Deeply skilled engineers may desire more specs while jack-of-all-trade marketers want only the big picture. Customized communications help each access understandings tailored to their detail orientation.

Beyond composition strategies, leaders can nurture inclusive communication norms where all team members actively participate, ask clarifying questions freely, and shape understandings together.

Psychological safety establishes a shared belief that teams can engage transparently without fear of embarrassment or retribution. Failures provide lessons when framed constructively in psychologically safe environments. Over time self-aware teams build muscle memory around regularly revisiting and refining expectations together.

Diagnosing & Preventing Dysfunctions

Despite best practices, even well-led teams fall into expectation traps. Let‘s explore common pitfalls and solutions:

Inconsistency Between Leadership Words & Actions

Nothing undermines tenuous trust in communicated expectations like leaders who fail to model their own standards.

Outcomes: Teams embrace mixed messages skeptically, following behaviours over policies when incongruencies appear between communications and role model actions.

Solutions: Leaders must hold themselves fiercely accountable to the same expectations set for teams. Admitting faults transparently when acting inconsistently rebuilds credibility damaged when leaders fail leading by example.

Lack of Consequences

Accountability proves foundational to securing recurring commitment to codified expectations over time. Leaders undermine teams by communicting standards without consequences.

Outcomes: Expectations get treated as optional guidelines losing binding authority when consistently unenforced by leaders allergic to difficult conversations. Teams increasingly blow deadlines and ignore policies without accountability guardrails.

Solutions: Institute structured accountability systems holding all team members to consistent standards for meeting communicated expectations with proportional results for outstanding or unacceptable deliveries against documented goals.

Poor Conflict Resolution

Unresolved tensions fester creating teams prone to blaming and finger-pointing instead of cohesion and supportiveness. Psychologically unsafe environments inhibit transparency on unmet expectations and needed help.

Outcomes: People disengage, resign, or even sabotage team performance over frustrations stemming from undiscussed conflicts festering under the surface.

Solutions: Institute mediation frameworks promoting active listening, understanding, and constructive solutions grounded in reconciling seemingly competing expectations or needs. Expertly facilitated dispute resolution provides teams trust to surface dysfunctions early before they metastasize.

Key Takeaways

Aligning teams to perform harmoniously with excellence begins by creating clarity at the foundation through communication of expectations.

Follow these best practices as an expectation excellence leader:

• Specify standards extensively so no details get lost in interpretation
• Debate timeframes and resource needs collaboratively
• Reinforce regularly through status updates and access to reference documentation
• Inspect work frequently giving positive and constructive feedback
• Hold team members accountable to communicated expectations

With alignment enhanced through precision expectations, teams gain empowerment to excel independently within clearly articulated guardrails. They sustain productivity through accountability structures rewarding those who consistently deliver while supporting those still progressing toward performance goals.

Ultimately, seamless communications translate leaders’ strategic priorities into operational excellence. Alignment unlocks the discretionary effort required to turn lofty goals into tangible reality.