Why your team can’t read your mind (and how clear expectations fix that)

We all don’t want to admit this, but we’ve said to ourselves, I wish I had a second me in the team. I know we want to bring in different perspectives. I know we want different ideas. And we also kind of wish that we had someone to run with us that’s like a clone of us. How do we get that? Well, we first have to set expectations. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast. I’m Leah Garvin, your host and team operations consultant.

Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple.

From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today we’re going to talk about the question that we all ask ourselves as managers. We do. And even if you don’t admit it, I know you have asked yourself subconsciously in your mind. And that question is, why can’t my team members read my mind?

Right? Okay. I mean, if you don’t want to admit it, that’s okay. But a lot of us sort of get in this place where we feel like we’ve said it. We know we’ve explained it. And yeah, okay. It changed a little bit as it evolved. And we felt like, well, that thing was obvious. They should just get it. Why can’t they read my mind? And the answer to this question is, well, they can read our mind when we’ve set clear expectations.

And expectations are one of my favorite topics. And I want to caveat that with, I say a lot that this is my favorite topic. I know I’ve said about feedback. I know I’ve said it about accountability, but I sure I know I’ve said it about setting expectations because setting expectations becomes this tool that we have for our team members to legitimately be able to read our minds. And when we also say to ourselves, and we all don’t want to admit this, but we’ve said to ourselves, ah, I just, I wish I had a second me in the team.

I know we want to bring in different perspectives. I know we want different ideas. We know that feels innovation. And I know we also kind of wish that we want, we had someone to run with us. That’s like a clone of us so that we can get a little bit more free time. How do we get that? Well, we get better at delegating. That’s for sure. But I’m going to do that another episode. We first have to set expectations.

And this is why it is such a huge piece of the ops playbook. And especially in the implementation phase. So as I’ve mentioned, when I would do that playbook with a client, we do a four hour deep dive. We figure out where we are today and where we want to go across these six different dimensions that I talk about. And then I create the playbook. But the meat is really in the implementation. When I get in there with your team and bring all this to life.

And in that, that’s where these working norms, really our expectations come to life. Because we have to see, well, how do we know that these things are going to happen? What happens once we say, Hey, you know, we want to make sure everybody is playing a role in growing the business. I know I talk about that in the priorities conversations. Well, there’s an expectation that has to be set with what does that look like? So this is a huge piece that stuff can start to get a little bit murky and really resetting around expectations and working norms is going to be your answer.

So let’s talk first about the messy space without expectations. Okay. Miscommunications. First, we have you thinking you said one thing. Team members think you said something else. Things taking way, way longer than you wanted. People working on something that you thought was important and it was, you know, and they thought something else was important. We have people feeling like unclear around communication, right? Like, well, I sent you this email. Why didn’t that happen? Well, we thought it goes in Slack and we thought it goes here.

Lack of clarity around where documents are kept. Is it in drive? Is it in this? Is it in that? What’s the server? So many little weird, nuancy, little annoying things can start to happen when we don’t have expectations because it’s literally becomes a free for all. And this is why, you know, work tracking is a huge piece of it too, which is another conversation. But when we don’t set an expectation around where do we track work?

How? What level of detail? This kind of stuff, it starts to create some distrust with our team members because we think, well, they said that task takes an hour. I think it should take five minutes. Like they must not be working. They must be inflating their timesheets. They must be this. We start making assumptions. And that’s again, where we’re thinking they can read our mind, even if we don’t really realize that’s what we’re thinking. That’s why I said, we don’t consciously know that we’ve expected people to read our minds.

But when in our mind, we think of a task and we think, okay, here’s what goes into that. This is what I, yeah, this is about an hour long thing. And we see our team members say it took four hours or two days. There’s a miscommunication there and it starts to create some frustration and some tension. But if we had set expectations and we had some kind of norm around that first, we wouldn’t have that. What do issues with cashflow, revenue, hiring, marketing, and scaling all have in common?

They all stem from inefficiencies and how work gets done on your team. As a business owner, you have a team so you can grow and scale. And when they’re not set up for success with the right game plan and systems, well, it starts working against you. That’s why I developed the Ops Playbook, a program, including a roadmap and implementation support to get everyone on your team on the same page around how to work in your business, reducing communication issues, inefficiencies, and most of all stress.

Not only that, you’ll save an average of 30 hours a month. That’s time you can reinvest into your business without doing any extra work. So if you are ready to enter 2024 with your team firing on all cylinders, schedule your free scale of strategy call today at LeahGarvin.com. Let’s do this. So when we’re setting expectations, this means everything. In my opinion, the more you can lay it out there, the better. And the more you can think of any sort of thing that you have to repeat more than once, that keeps being a sticking point where you keep seeing something delivered at a different quality than you had wanted, where things are taking longer, where there’s just some like little like weirdness, like this should be easier than it is.

This should be smoother. Every single one of those moments, that’s where an expectation can come into play. So let me give an example. I was working with a client, a MedSpot client, and she felt like her team members were doing great work. Clients were super happy, loved, loved the service delivery. There was no issue with that. But between client meetings, between services, she’d glance over and see, you know, folks standing around looking at their phones or people kind of just chit-chatting.

And she felt frustrated because she knew there was a lot more work that actually had to get done within the MedSpot. And she started to feel like, well, you know, I don’t know what to say. I don’t want to be micromanaging, but I also don’t love watching people standing around when we have clients walking through the door. And so we had a conversation. I said, I think this is a great opportunity to set some expectations. Like what are the moments when we take breaks and what does that look like and how long and what’s paid, right?

We have breaks, we have lunch, all that stuff. And there’s still idle time between appointments. Well, here’s some of the expectations of what we do with that time. So we created a checklist of, you know, here are some of the things that we want to have done in a given day. Charting, like ordering supplies, reaching out to clients proactively, you know, checking your day for tomorrow, make sure you’re really ready for that. Confirming appointments, whatever. And we created this checklist so that we could set a clear expectation of what to do when you have idle time.

And the awesome thing was people were really excited to have that checklist. They weren’t thinking it was micromanaging. They weren’t thinking it was heavy handed because we didn’t go in there and say like, Hey, no one’s doing what they’re supposed to be. You’re all standing around. We said, Hey, we want to make sure that everybody’s super clear and feels like you’re set up for success between appointments when it’s not a break or not lunch, when it’s like time that you’re clocked in.

Here’s a list of some of the stuff that’s, that’s really important to be focusing on. And people did it. And so that’s what I really want to reinforce here is a lot of times when I’m talking about expectations, I hear people like, Oh, I don’t want to micromanage. I don’t want to be in the weed. I don’t want everybody to think I’m like in their, in their business. But what we’re missing is usually that happens and it’s perceived as micromanagement or it’s perceived as in their business when we address it after like when we’re frustrated or we’re like kind of accusing someone of something or it’s feedback that was never grounded in expectations.

So if we actually plant the seed on, Hey, here’s an expectation. We want to get a line, make sure you’re set up for success. Let’s talk about this. Any questions, any adjustments you want to make when you lay all that out first, now you have something to come back to. And this is why when I talk about things like feedback, step zero is always expectation setting because you can’t give feedback if there’s nothing that you’ve aligned around in the first place.

You know what I mean? So first we set expectations, then we can have a feedback conversation. We can check in on that. We can reward and appreciate and give recognition based on that because the expectation, the awesome thing about that is we then know when someone goes above and beyond. So it’s a really important tool to be able to be assessing someone’s like super fast growth trajectory, or is it time for that person to get a raise?

Or is there a bonus like that that person deserves, right? Because we’ve identified what the baseline, like what they should be doing. And then we can see if they’ve over-delivered. So what’s on the other side of expectation setting is we actually start to feel like, gosh, people are kind of reading my mind a little bit more than I thought, or I am able to scale myself because the things that were in my mind that were really important, they’re now written on paper and everybody gets it and they’re just running with it.

So the time savings that you create by not having to explain things over and over, by not having to double check everything over and over, by not having to be always sort of like worrying about everything, right? Each one of those three things that I listed, that’s hours every single week of your time as that manager, as that business owner, that you can get back to focus on other things to grow your business or to focus on something else.

Wouldn’t that be nice to be able to sleep through the night instead of worrying about if Joe Schmo finished their work? No, because you know that Joe Schmo, when he’s done, he puts his task in this system and it sends you an email and you know when you can sleep through the night. Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to go on vacation and actually not look at your phone every 18 minutes where your family keeps like, mom, dad, stop it.

Wouldn’t that be awesome? So that’s what you get when you’ve set clear expectations because you get to have peace. Okay. You’ve closed that open loop in your mind. I mean, how many of us, I know every night, you know, you wake up three in the morning maybe and you get this thought and you don’t want to grab your phone. So you’re like, okay, remember to do that. Remember to do that. Remember to do that. I remember I had like a piece of mail that I had to send.

I was like, I don’t want to go in the hallway and get it. So I was like, piece of mail, piece of mail, piece of, and I thought about it every minute from three to 5 a.m. when I woke up and I was like, not the best system. That’s what happens when we haven’t set expectations with our team members. We keep thinking and it’s in this open loop at the top of our head. Remember to tell them that.

Remember to tell them that. Remember that. And we can’t let it go. So we get distracted and it slows us down. Okay. So that’s all the same as you get for yourself. Now for your teams, tons of time savings and stress savings because people want to know what success looks like. They want to know they’re doing a good job. And that’s what expectations tell us. Hey, when you do this thing, that’s a good job. When you finish this thing, that’s what done looks like.

When you do this, this is good enough. So that gives us a sense of security, a sense of stability, a sense of predictability. Predictability is very important in building trust with your team members and them knowing, hey, when I say something this way, this is how it is consistently. I don’t change my mind. I don’t say this is success here and this is success there and they don’t align. So for your team members, that’s a huge amount of cognitive load too that you’re saving, which allows them to be more productive and get more done.

And that’s how we do more with less. So set expectations. This is so key because it’s going to give you that ability to scale yourself and scale your team. Again, that’s why it is such a big piece of the OBS playbook, especially that implementation, because we have to see, well, what are the little things that are being missed? What are the things that we thought were super clear that weren’t so clear? And then we have that conversation up front.

Hey, let’s get aligned. Let’s get on the same page. Want to make sure everyone’s clear. Here’s the expectation. Any questions, any feedback, boom. Now you’ve planted that flag and you can give feedback on that thing later. All right. You’ve got this. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

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