Clear Expectations
Practical Applications in Servant Leadership, part 1
Last week I posted a short thought introducing the idea of upside-down leadership. For the next few weeks,we will be looking more at what you, as a leader or manager, can do in practice to properly serve those who have been entrusted to your care as direct reports.
I’m going to use the questions in Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement survey as a launching point for some pointed and practical ways that you can improve your leadership. Gallup’s questions are derived from the central theme “How satisfied are you with your company as a place to work?” Those same 12 questions appear in some form in almost every major employee engagement survey process including those from Great Place to Work and the Best Christian Workplaces. I’ve worked as a leader in organizations that have used both of those, and while they are more comprehensive than the Q12, Gallup’s questions (or some form of them) are a central feature in those as well.
I first became aware of Q12 via Marcus Buckingham’s great book First, Break all the Rules. The book is about what sets the best managers apart in their work and leads to their teams’ success. Most organizations use these employee surveys to measure engagement. Rarely have I seen those results get used for anything other than promoting what they believe is an overall healthy culture. Over the course of this series, we’re going to look at how you can use these questions to reverse engineer best practices for you as a leader. Without further ado:
Q1: I know what is expected of me at work
Does everyone on your team strongly agree with that statement? How confident are you that you could get 100%, enthusiastic agreement from your direct reports in candid honesty?
This is a central part of leading with clarity: providing clear expectations for those you’re leading and serving. And speaking of 100%, I’m nearly 100% certain that you’re not as clear with delivering expectations as you think you are. There’s ambiguity and murkiness that you have yet to discover, even if you’re doing pretty well in this area. As time goes on we’ll come back to additional ways that you improve clarity in expectations but here are three best practices for you that should be part of achieving this goal:
Make sure every job description has clearly communicated responsibilities and boundaries. There’s a lot of fluff in job descriptions and it doesn’t help anyone. When you take a job, you should be able to draw a clear line between what’s expected and your compensation. Ambiguity in job descriptions rarely favors the employee, and while it may look like an advantage to you to be able to throw extra work at a person, it’s not. Each of you having definition and clarity in responsibilities allows for building trust, developing skills in the right areas, and true, effective accountability for both of you. It also guards against exploitative tendencies that are easy temptations when seeking profit or efficiency (both good goals in themselves). Your direct reports will be best engaged and most effective when they know the boundaries of expectations and are set free to thrive within them.
Have regular 1 on 1 meetings with every direct report. I like scheduling them weekly in most office environments and bi-weekly at worst. You want them to be scheduled frequently enough that you can miss the occasional one and still be having at least 2 a month. Later on I’ll have a full post on structuring your 1 on 1 meetings but just having them and making sure there’s a vehicle for regular, direct and private communication is a crucial first step, irrespective of the finer design of meetings.
Make sure every project your direct report is working on includes a clear focus. This means at least 3 things for me:
a purpose or a “why” for the project to ensure that it fulfills its intent
a clear completion metric (something that can be measured) so that both of you know when it’s done and done right
clearly defined abandonment criteria to define when a project is no longer desirable or feasible
Engagement surveys are great- something like going to the doctor for a regular checkup or physical exam. But they’re only as valuable as what you do with the feedback you get from them. All too often we don’t think of practical ways to give people what they need to succeed and be engaged, and that starts with clear expectations.
You may have other best practices in your leadership role that help each person know for sure what is expected of them. Feel free to drop a comment with one or two of them below.
This is Part 1 of the Practical Applications in Servant Leadership series.
Part 2: Fully Equipped
Part 5: Action Steps to a Caring Heart
Part 6: Investing in People
Part 7: Everyone’s Opinion Counts
Part 9: Building Your Roster
Part 10: Work Besties
Part 11: Charting Progress
Part 12: All-Inclusive Employment
Conclusion: How to Avoid Creating Miserable Jobs