A cause of workplace stress

Expectations − Agreement = Disappointment is one of my favorite formulas because it makes so much sense. I was given this gem by my community colleague, leadership coach, and cherished friend Lori Raggio.

So often in life, we come into a situation with a list of expectations. Typically, these are private expectations that are not vocalized. For example, when you go out to eat at a restaurant, you expect to pay money to be served the food of your choice. And the servers at the restaurant have the expectation that they will take an order and that the kitchen will make it in a timely fashion so that they can meet their customer’s expectations.

There is no special policy or arrangement per se, but there is a societal norm around expectations that we generally agree to.

If you go to a restaurant and they’re out of your favorite dish and the server decides to bring you something else without asking, or the food takes hours to make in the kitchen and the server doesn’t communicate to you what’s going on, expectations aren’t met. When this occurs, disappointment and its close friends, anger, frustration, and even rage, often flare up.

Let’s use this formula on a discussion of company culture. I’ll even use a real example from my own experience.

For our long-term clients, we offer a bundle of one-on-one values alignment executive coaching hours for their team members to take advantage of when they could benefit from some additional support. The expectations on my end are that they are scheduled in a timely fashion, that we each show up and end on time, that clients have psychological safety to speak their truth and be heard, and they’re coached from where they are now, not where they need to be. Pretty simple expectations, right?

Wrong! With one of my clients, we rolled out a pilot program that involved coaching a group of their leaders. I had asked the team coordinating the efforts to allow me to see the email that went out to ensure that it was worded in a way that accurately described the expectations for the experience. I also asked that we sync up our timing of the communication.

Well, I had been 100 percent unclear because that expectation of mine was broken. An email went out without my approval. And because of this extensive back-and-forth (over one hundred emails later—I wish I were kidding), the scheduling process resulted in days’ worth of time spent cleaning up and straightening out.

I was frustrated and disappointed that this agreement wasn’t seen through.

But here’s the thing: Many of my expectations were in my head. I had thought they would follow through on showing me the email and then I would talk to them about the coordination of the schedules. When that first step was skipped, it triggered a domino effect of disappointment because I hadn’t articulated my expectations more clearly.

In their minds, they were meeting expectations by getting the communication out. In my mind, they were breaking expectations by not coordinating with me.

Permission to be human. If the people you’re working with are stressed out, overwhelmed, or anxious, it’s very easy for expectations to go unheard simply because they are trying to survive versus being thoughtful about how they go about accomplishing their work. This is at the core of whether values can be lived. Investing energy into values-based mindfulness practices to enable your teams to slow down will get you much further ahead in the short and long term. Otherwise, you’ll constantly have the same disappointments.

This kind of disconnect and the frustration that follows happen all the time. We assume that others know what we expect instead of being direct and transparent from the get-go. It’s our job as leaders to ensure that our values are never assumptions and that we are direct and transparent with our expectations in how they are lived.

Want to learn how to make agreements and set expectations within your workplace culture? This was an excerpt from MaryBeth’s book Permission to Be Human: The Conscious Leaders Guide to Creating a Values-Driven Culture.

Check out this company culture book.