Attributes and Examples of Clear Expectations

The best expectations are comprehensible, measurable, and actionable. Let's look at each of these attributes.

Comprehensible expectations

Employee expectations are not the place to be hip to all the latest corporate jargon. Telling your employees they need to "synergize with the latest upward trends in disruptive technology paradigms" means what, exactly? Like any agile feedback loop, your employee needs to know what you're expecting of them, and the simpler the expectation can be phrased, the easier it will be for the employees to parse and understand. Remember, you're always there to answer any questions they have, and forcing yourself to write it out simply and clearly in turn forces you to think about what you expect your employees to be doing on a level that you hadn't considered before, either. "Explain it to me like I'm five years old" is a popular meme across social media, and while we generally don't expect to be managing teams of five-year-olds, a reasonable parallel to the meme might be, "Explain it to me like I'm fifteen."

Measurable expectations

This isn't quite the same as metrics (which we'll discuss later in the course), but metrics certainly can qualify as measurable. The key here is to be able to determine how somebody is improving or not without requiring subjective assessment. "Writes good code," for example, is useful only insofar as we can all agree on what "good code" means—and most of us can't. (Try it sometime: Ask your peers what "good code" looks like, complete with examples, and you'll find that once you get past naming conventions, it gets muddy quickly.) "Spends 5% of work time providing input on others' work" is clear and measurable. We can then drill deeper into what that ...