Expectations and Assumptions

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about expectations. In the world of client management, setting expectations is the most important part of our job. In fact, in my world, the next few months will be spent preparing our clients for our next generation product. 

We painstakingly craft messages aimed to not over or undersell our offering, illustrate the “wow” factor to create excitement, and carefully construct documentation and training materials. Even our monthly email communication directed at our Beta user group is written and reviewed by four, yes FOUR, different people before it’s sent.

  

Why do we do all this? From the client management perspective, well, who wants a pissed off client? And, from a business perspective, an angry client is a client a risk. If we lose our client, we lose profits … the consequence is pretty clear.

Yet, in our personal lives, most of us do a shit job at setting expectations. We take for granted that our partners, families, friends understand what we want and need. I know I’m sometimes guilty of this (I can see my fiancé’s adorably evil grin at this admission … Stop it honey! You do it, too!) I’ve also fallen victim to other people's assumed expectations of me to miserable results.

I hear from my friends all the time … I’m so hurt by my boyfriend because he didn’t do xyz … and I think, well, did you tell him that you wanted xyz? More cases than not … no, nothing was said! It makes me wonder why … Is it fear of rejection? Not wanting to seem greedy or needy? Fear the other party will say no or get mad? Or, is it just a simple assumption that the other party already knows?

I know it can be really hard to ask for what you want and need. But the consequences can be just as dire as in the business world. Hurt feelings, arguments, drama, assumptions. This is all just a bunch of wasted energy that can easily be avoided if we were just honest with ourselves and others about what we want and we need!

Let me relay a little story that occurred in my life recently. Someone in my life had an expectation of me. It was never made clear to me … in fact this person never even reached out to me directly. They assumed that I would extract the expectation from Facebook. Two weeks later … I received a scathing text that completely blindsided me. I tried very hard to explain that I never realized there was an expectation, but by this time, it was too late. They decided that I had bad intentions and refused to take responsibility for not laying out their expectations initially. I should have known! 

The consequence? Hurt feelings from both parties, avoidance, and an eventual de-friending on Facebook. (Even at 41, that still kind of hurts!)

I think we should all take a page from the business model. Let’s stop skirting the issue and prepare our people for what we expect of them. Just like we don’t want to lose a client because we assumed that they knew what to do, we don’t want to lose partners, family or friends. In fact we should work harder in our personal lives. After all, clients are replaceable, our people are priceless!

Let's all do a better job of asking for what we want and need … remember, as the old adage says … when you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME!