The Best Way to Manage Expectations, pt. 2

In my experience, the vast majority of human beings have expectations. That is both a curse and a blessing.

It's a curse because countless people in our lives, both at work and at home, have specific hopes and beliefs about what they want us to do or to say. Most of those expectations are not based on what we agreed to but rather what they want, often without thinking about our own abilities, capacities, personalities, preferences, or intentions. Because of that reason, we often fail to meet other people's expectations, leading to negative emotions for them like disappointment, frustration, and anger.

On the flip side, their expectations are a blessing because we have awareness of what they want from us. In my opinion, the only thing worse than knowing someone's expectations is not knowing them. So when we gain this awareness, it's a blessing because we have an opportunity to actually manage those expectations.

How? You guessed it - by setting standards.

I believe that when we learn about someone's expectations, we have a unique opportunity to set, update and/or respond with our standards. When we do, we create space for a conversation to occur, both with ourselves and the other party. Sometimes that conversation is easy, sometimes it's hard. But I believe that the conversation helps make progress.

For example, you probably have a friend or family member who expects you to remember their birthday or your relationship anniversary. Their expectation is based on a belief that you should care about the relationship as much as they do. After all, they always remember your birthday or the anniversary so why can't you?

In this case, there are multiple ways you can manage their expectation with standards.

1. If you have trouble remembering such dates, you can set a standard for yourself about reminders: entering the recurring date into your calendar, scheduling automated emails to yourself, etc. Of course, you must then act on the reminder, another standard to set and meet.
2. If you've already set such a standard but, for whatever reason it doesn't seem to work, you can tell your friend or family member just that: you have it in your calendar or you send yourself an email...you just struggle to either look at them or follow-through (which itself is a standard of sorts ;-) Just by communicating your deficiency, you're helping manage their expectation.
3. If birthdays and anniversaries aren't a big deal to you, and you have a tendency to not remember them or pay little attention when you do, you can set a standard of telling people just this. Of course, it smacks of lacking empathy so there's indeed some danger in taking this approach, especially with close relationships.

There are countless other ways to set a standard in this situation in order to manage the other person's expectation. The point is that when you do set it, you must live to that standard and/or communicate it to others. Only then can you show people what they can expect from you and only then can you manage their expectation.

Another way you can manage people's expectations is to communicate your values. When you tell people what matters to you, what you deem to be "important," and how you make decisions, you are articulating the standards you have related to that value.

For example, if one of your values is to not take life too seriously, you probably like to spend more of your time having fun than the average person. You likely don't get stressed by life's trivial details. You might watch more comedy movies. You like to play games. You enjoy laughing with friends and family. You don't define yourself by your career yet you want to do something that is enjoyable for you, not just a paycheck. You get the point.

By sharing this value, and the resulting standards, you're managing expectations of those closest to you. So now, when they begin talking about their concern for the increased polarization of our society, or the wars being waged around the world, or how we have to find a solution to poverty, you're able to lean on your standards to manage their expectation.

If you're still struggling with this, I'll return to the story that was in part one of this article: a pizza restaurant and its standards. This time, however, I'll ask you to make things personal.

Think about the companies, stores, websites, and restaurants where you are a regular customer. My belief is that the primary reason you keep spending your hard-earned money at those places is because they manage your expectations with their standards.

You know what to expect when it comes to value, taste, quality, service, portion size, convenience, speed, hours, etc. The reason is because they set standards and then meet them over and over again...and they communicate those standards.

As any company will tell you, it takes a lot of work to do that. But the point is that it can be done.