Expectation Rubrics

In many cases, you will be asked to hold somebody accountable to an expectation that you (and/or your employees) don’t find particularly clear. Perhaps it’s the “writes good code” example mentioned earlier, or it’s something like “communicates clearly with senior executives.” Although the best scenario would be to rewrite the expectation to be more clear and/or objective, doing so often requires pretty serious effort. Rewriting expectations for a Software Engineer on your team often means you’re changing the expectations in the HR system for all Software Engineers, and other managers throughout the company are going to have opinions on what that should look like. (Perhaps you will be unsurprised to learn that writing good job expectations across a company of thousands of engineers is not easy.)

The next step, then, is to create a rubric for a position’s expectations: an answer key, if you will, that describes what you expect to see—actions and behaviors—for each of the expectations. The rubric should be as objective as possible: the actions and behaviors should be observable, related directly to the heart of the expectation, and organized into “levels” that correspond with a “grade” or “acceptability” that corresponds to the larger performance review system.