Communicating Your Expectations

To effectively communicate your expectations to the people you hold accountable, simply tell them exactly what you want and when you want it. Sound right? Sorry, that approach doesn’t seem to be working anymore. Why? It utterly fails to engage the hearts and minds of your people.

A recent Associated Press report illustrates just how ineffective (and woefully humorous) the What-When approach to communicating expectations can be. A Chicago man filed a law­suit against a tattoo artist for misspelling the word tomorrow on his forearm. The artist’s defense was that he spelled the word exactly as the customer wrote it on a slip of paper, “I did what he wanted, when he wanted it!” Not surprisingly, when you use the What-When approach, people often do exactly what you ask them to do, exactly the way you tell them to do it, without ever considering whether doing so will achieve the expected result. Consequently, you end up engaging only the hands and feet of your people, while neglectfully allowing their hearts and minds to remain unengaged in the vital search for what else can be done to achieve the desired results.

Our recommendation is to use a Why-What-When approach to communicate expectations, which means beginning with an explanation of the Why behind each expectation. To be most effective, your explanation should focus on individuals—make sure you have a two-way conversation that sparks their imagination, strikes a nerve, and convinces them that accomplishing the What and When really matters on a personal level. To help you improve your effectiveness when communicating expectations, consider these six ways to craft a compelling Why:

-Tailor the why to individuals and specific audiences.
-Make it short, simple, and clear.
-Be candid, honest, and forthcoming so people believe it is real and genuine and not just the “company line.”
-Make it a dialogue, not a monologue.
-Create “the hook” that catches people’s attention and persuades them to “buy in.”
-Frame it in a strategic context (how the expectation fits into the big picture).

Communicating the Why does much more than simply explain the rationale behind a task, purpose, or mission—it lets people know they’re worth the effort it takes to enthuse, persuade, and engage them. It shows that you respect and value them as key contributors to the process of making things happen, that you deem them worthy of needing to know. The Why-What-When approach not only builds morale and increases ownership, it also supercharges everyone’s effort to achieve the results you expect. Sadly, many leaders spend 95 percent of their effort on What-When while devoting only 5 percent to the Why. When you reverse the emphasis, focusing the majority of your efforts on the Why, you will immediately begin to see people and teams aligning more readily and completely around your expectations and the results that all of you need to achieve. Engaging hearts and minds along with hands and feet can make an enormous difference.