I apologize for the downer content I’m kicking off with this time. I’m only doing it because there is such ready antidote, which is mainly what I want to get into. So, with that caveat, here’s the invitation to frowny recollections:

Think of a time you felt let down by a co-worker or partner. It could be a relationship with hierarchical reporting, or a relationship without hierarchy. 

What happened? Is your answer along the lines of “I needed something from this person and they didn’t provide it, or at least not sufficiently”? 

But what really happened? To explore this, think of a time you learned that a co-worker or partner felt let down by you. Presumably they felt like you did when you were let down – they needed something from you and you didn’t provide it, or at least not sufficiently. But in this case, you know a lot more about what really happened. 

• Maybe you didn’t know they needed it.
• Maybe you didn’t know the form or timing or quality in which they needed it.
• Maybe you thought you knew, but you ended up being wrong.
• Maybe under time constraint, and without ability to consult with this co-worker, you had to choose between competing priorities and you chose away from this one.

 

Now, if you care about this relationship and your shared work (and if you don’t, you can read this article imagining the work that presumably you are aiming to move on to) you know that both of these scenarios feel bad. More than that, depending on how important the situation was, and/or how often it happens, the implications can be far worse than a temporary bad feeling. You could be experiencing an erosion of trust. From there you could be avoiding relying on this person, avoiding giving them new responsibility, using workarounds that increase risk or liabilities or that reduce quality even as they increase reliability. 

Are you ready to exit this gloomy contemplation? Great. There is a very straightforward way of reducing these moments in your life, and I’m going to lay it out for you now. It’s basically taking those bullets above, breaking them down into their components, and establishing routine practices to prevent those components from happening. 

How does this stuff even happen?

Consider the scenario above in which you didn’t know something was needed from you. What are some of the ways that could have happened? 

• Perhaps you simply weren’t informed, because the person who needed something from you assumed you would know without being told. 
• Perhaps the information was provided, but not received. Was it emailed same day, however it often takes you longer than that to see all your new emails?

 

OK now what could have kept those two risks at bay? More usefully, what agreed upon practices in your collaborations would consistently keep those two risks at bay? How about spelling everything out at the beginning of collaborations, even the things that you think “go without saying”? 

You can explore all of the ways we disappoint and are disappointed in this way, or go further and diagram it, or illustrate it – whatever mode you enjoy learning in – if you want to gain a deep understanding of how it goes down. For this article, I’m just going to pull out one more, because it’s central in the framework (essentially a shortcut system) I’m going to leave you with in closing.

This one is the time constraint scenario, in which you are unable to consult with each other, and a choice must be made, and you prioritize differently than your co-worker would have.  Now the key here is not really the inability to consult, nor that time constraint. Those are window dressing I added for interest. The heart of this matter is the conflicting priorities. How did that happen?

• Maybe your shared work has competing priorities. If this is true, you’re probably seeing this problem regularly.
• Maybe one or both of you don’t really know what the true priorities of the shared work are. You might see this in top down hierarchies that don’t share strategic objectives throughout the organization, or smaller organizations that haven’t systematized work with shared tools that make priorities clear and easy to find.

 

One of the more common supports Brook and I bring to organizations is an easy approach to reducing these disappointments in shared work. We use a fairly unslick acronym for the elements of this approach, just because it is easy to remember: SAVful. This is how individuals’ expectations of each other – both for what they’ll provide, and for what they’ll need in order to be able to provide it – must be: Strategic, Actionable, and Values-Aligned. For expectations to be actionable they must be Feasible, Unambiguous, and Legible.

Sound like a tall order? It’s really not.

The starting point is actually the last element – the legibility – since we’re going to need to articulate an expectation before we can determine whether it is strategic, actionable, and values aligned. So at the beginning of shared work, as described earlier in this article, you’re going to determine together what is needed from who, and how you want that to be done (analytic? cautious? quick? fastidious?). Then you can modify these starting points into a shared agreement about the work that greatly reduces the chance of disappointment. Here’s where to look for modifications:

Strategic – avoid confusion or differences of opinion about whether an expectation is important or reasonable, by tying it to the overall guiding plan that you’ve all signed onto. And if you haven’t signed onto an overall guiding plan, start there first.

Actionable/Feasible – don’t take this for granted. You’d be surprised how often an intentional conversation about whether an expectation is realistic will result in modification of that expectation.

Actionable/Unambiguous – this is where you imagine every way that you might misunderstand each other. Is my “timely” the same as yours? How should we define “excellent”?

Actionable/Legible – in addition to articulating expectations at the beginning of shared work and improving them in this way, you’ll want to decide on how you can raise challenges you’re experiencing while the work is in progress, and how you’ll evaluate completed work against the expectations you’d set initially. Make these three practices routine, and make them easy and accessible in terms of where and how they happen and can be referenced later on.

Values-aligned – whether or not you have articulated shared values for shared work, values are present. Think “honesty”, “learning”, “equity”, “innovation”. These will be the basis of judgements about how work is happening or has happened, and so, similar to strategic intentions, it’s best to articulate shared values if you haven’t already. Then when you are setting expectations together at the beginning of shared work, you can make sure that they are not only strategic, feasible, legible and unambiguous, but that they are also aligned with your values.