How To Communicate Expectations To Your Team

Performance reviews tend to be the event that employees and employers dread the most because of the uncertainty of the outcome, but there are ways to navigate that tricky situation. If managers and leaders understand and implement these steps right, you may find that it is actually not as daunting as it seems.

The very first thing every leader needs to do is set expectations right from the beginning. Have a detailed list of these expectations laid out and go through them with your team. What values does this team stand for? What are the key metrics of good performance? How is their performance going to be measured? This is extremely important as it will set the tone for the way your team works and grows, together and individually.

When you set these expectations with your team right from the start, all of you will be aligned to a common understanding of the values and goals that you want to gun for.

There are two main types of expectations. Quantitative goals are straightforward and easier to manage ‒ these are your sales targets, profit margins, returns on investments, and so on. These are clear indicators of whether your team is functional, effective, and serving their purpose in the organisation.

However, people are much more complex than that, and whether individuals are able to hit their quantitative goals depends on how they manage themselves on an individual level, in a relationship with another person, in a team dynamic, and in a larger organisational setting. In a nutshell, soft skills such as active listening, communication, reliability, accountability, adaptability, and conflict resolution are key to performing well.

The downside is that these skills are largely subjective ‒ everyone has different interpretations of what a good communicator is, and there is no way to put up a general numerical scale and expect everyone to have the same interpretation of it. So how, then, does one go about measuring and examining how good their communication is, objectively?

This is where managers and leaders come in. Due to the subjective nature of these skills, managers tend to shy away from dealing with this aspect of performance management, but it is extremely important that you incorporate this into your performance evaluation.

The big question managers tend to have is “How do you quantify and measure qualitative expectations?”

The key here is to have a good understanding of what you want your team to stand for and get to know your team on a personal level. Understand their background, where they are right now, and where they hope to be. See if you can set targets and expectations that are aligned to both their personal and work lives.

Do they aspire to be the general manager of a company but currently struggle with handling multiple tasks on their plates? Perhaps time-management and efficiency would be a key focus. Do they eventually want to move on to leadership positions but currently struggle with people? Perhaps interpersonal relations and communication skills would be a key focus for them. Be as clear and descriptive as you can with each of these traits. Outline exactly what it means to have exemplary time-management and illustrate it with examples and anecdotes of real-life scenarios. This is important because there is always a high chance of somebody misunderstanding what a soft skill entails, whether it is intentional or not.

Once you have that mapped out, schedule weekly one-on-one meetings with each of your team members individually to review their performance. Formal peer reviews and 360 reviews tend to be conducted quarterly, but that shouldn’t stop you from having your own individual meetings. These regular reviews will set up a continuous feedback loop between you and your team to ensure that misunderstandings are eliminated and that everyone is on track with their growth and development relative to themselves and your expectations of them. You could even modify your expectations along the way. This is a great way to not only catch your team if they are falling behind, but also to get to know your team on a more personal level and form a deeper relationship with them.

One of the hallmarks of a great leader is the ability to bring out the best from each team member according to their individual qualities. It is the ability to mentor and groom them into the people they aspire to be. People who can achieve their individual goals and dreams and live their best life, ready to take on the challenges that come, and enjoy themselves along the way. If you are able to assist your team in growing holistically, you will be able to form a much deeper bond that strengthens your team’s ability to work under pressure, triumph over trials, and reach greater heights.

So get to know your team on a deeper level. A team that trusts is a team that triumphs. If you are able to let your team members be vulnerable and open up about their fears, support them in overcoming it, and move them closer to their dreams, you will gain a valuable team player and a loyal friend.

Key Elements of Effective Performance Reviews

Having regular reviews is one half of the equation, but setting up proper systems that ensure the feedback received is constructive is the other half. Formal 360 reviews and peer reviews are commonly used to measure a person’s performance. But if conducted carelessly, these can lead to popularity contests and heated venting, which are neither constructive nor beneficial.

The key is to plan your questions thoroughly and make sure they are relevant. Think about the outcome that you want to achieve after the review ‒ how do you craft questions in a way that gets the most balanced and objective answers from your team? If you leave it too open-ended, one can be overly generous and give everybody a positive review, which contributes no value, or one can be extremely critical, bringing down the team morale and causing segregation within the team. In a 360 degree feedback, you certainly want to avoid the possibility of your questions sparking gossip or multiple people gathering agreement against another person.

Here’s a way to reduce the likelihood of that happening: require everyone to give examples and anecdotes that justify their evaluation of their peers. It is nearly impossible to be completely objective, especially in work environments where conflicts are sure to arise, but this will give you an easier time weeding out the evaluations made from personal grievances.

Remind everyone on your team to leave any of their personal grievances out of this conversation. Explain that the purpose of a performance review is to have a constructive evaluation of everyone’s successes, failures, strengths, weaknesses, and room for improvement in the ways they can professionally contribute to the team and the organisation.

How to Structure Questions

There are several different frameworks that you can craft your questions around. There’s another element of your leadership that comes into play here: what do you want your team to stand for? If your goal is to lead a team that stands for teamwork, your questions might be crafted to focus on that area.

Bad questions are simply those whose answers don’t help in making an evaluation of the employee, or help in creating guidelines on how the employee can adjust and change for the better. For example, “Is this person a good team player?” is a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ question that requires neither accountability nor justification from the people answering. Ultimately, it provides no value and should be modified.

An example of a good question that is deliberately crafted with clear descriptions could be:

A good team player is someone who can carry his own weight, resolve conflicts effectively, and build strong relationships with his team members. Is this person a good team player? Why? Please give examples of instances when you have witnessed this person exhibiting this behaviour.

Incorporating this element of justification also gives you additional information on what goes on within your team during times you may have been absent. Is this person a good team player because he buys everyone ice milo every day, or is he a good team player because he shoulders everyone’s work and has become the team’s punching bag? From a leadership perspective, such responses would be telling of a dysfunctional and ineffective team dynamic as you would want each team member to be carrying their own weight to maximise output and efficiency. Answers like this would raise red flags about mindsets and behaviours in your team that need to be addressed.

Another question type that you can introduce is the ranking question that forces people to be truthful. Whichever option you go with, ensure that they are relevant and evaluate the key aspects that your team is focusing on. Make sure that your questions are as specific as possible, focused on the organisation’s needs, and illustrated with examples so that there is a clear benchmark that everyone can follow. This is useful in dealing with people who are overly generous and give everyone a good review, and people who are overly critical and give everyone a bad review.

Reviewing The Feedback

The next part of the process deals with how you handle the various feedback you receive and integrate them to form a complete picture of an individual. There will inevitably be anomalies and outliers in the form of venting or personal agendas that wedge their way into the review. Apply some discretion, common sense, and knowledge about the relationship dynamics, interactions, and altercations within your team so that you can weed out these types of answers and not let them factor into your evaluation about an individual’s performance. This is where the importance of the questions come in. By ensuring that your questions zoom in on actual work, results, and require ample and reasonable justification, you can deduce whether a review is genuine.

Once you have compiled and integrated the feedback, it would be a good move to share it with your team so that they become aware of their progress and how to get back on track or accelerate their growth. The challenge is that everybody’s good or bad is relative, so it doesn’t make any sense to simply share an evaluation that only says “good” or “bad” and doesn’t speak of why and how one can improve. 360 reviews allow individuals to receive feedback from different categories of people (peers, subordinates, superiors) which gives them more data on where their challenges lie and how to improve in different settings with different groups of people.

The goal is to present your team members with an evaluation that empowers them to do better by acknowledging their strengths and constructively highlights their weaknesses. If you can light a fire in them to want to evolve continuously, you will create a team that is internally driven to seek greater heights and master the next level of their game.

Communicating Expectations

The worst-case scenario that could happen is when an individual thinks he has met expectations, and that that in itself is sufficient, only to feel betrayed, disappointed and taken aback by a less-than-stellar evaluation that shows him that he has not, in fact, exceeded expectations.

This is another aspect of communication with your team that you must take care of as a leader. If your team members are not aware of the bar that is set for them, it is on you, and you may only end up disempowering them and creating low morale if you don’t do this right.

There are two ways you can go about doing this. Firstly, you want to make it clear from the beginning that you expect them to exceed expectations. When someone meets the objectives set, it is important to acknowledge that they have met expectations but not exceeded them to avoid misunderstandings at the year-end performance review when employees think they have done excellently.

This is where the constant regular one-on-one reviews on where they are throughout the time of assessment will help. If you can journey with them along the way till the end, you can help support them in achieving far greater heights than they would imagine necessary and avoid unpleasant surprises during the year-end performance review.

Or, secondly, you can hire people who naturally want to excel. If you are hiring people who really want to excel, they will think that there is nothing wrong with setting an unspoken rule that expectations should be exceeded.

Communication is much more than just your daily interactions with your team. There are so many aspects of communication that are non-verbal. It is the whole journey from the moment you form your team till the moment where you part ways. Communication is embedded in every word, action, thought, and effort that you make towards conveying something to your team. So make the journey a great one, and you will have created a team that can withstand the test of time.

1. Get on the Same Page

Not rectifying the first mistake is making a second mistake. You want to make sure that there is a common understanding between you and your team so that all of you are aligned to the same set of expectations, objectives, and goals.

2. Set Up a Review Schedule With Each of Your Employees

It is important to establish a relationship dynamic and workflow that incorporates regular performance reviews with each of your employees. This is the best way to make sure each and every one of them are on track relative to their own stage of evolution.

3. Start Preparing Effective Questions for Performance Reviews

These questions will make the difference in whether a review is going to benefit an employee or not. Make sure to take the necessary amount of time to examine what your expectations are and craft out questions that will allow you to evaluate if an employee has failed, met, or exceeded them.