Ep 5 Dereks Playbook on Clear Expectations

You’ll get more done, waste less time, and your team will love it.

This was the first episode with no guest. Clear expectations is something I got right on accident, then got wrong, then figured out.

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Welcome to the next level leadership live podcast, episode five. Every few weeks, we’re going to have an episode like this one we’re about to have today. Focused on one specific topic. Today’s episode is about setting expectations with reps, because many of my mistakes as a leader have come from times when I did this poorly.

[00:00:25] If you get this right, your job will feel so much easier. And actually it will be easier in a way as I’m gonna tell you about in just a minute. The first thing to keep in mind is that reps want clear communication, clear expectations.

[00:00:46] And think about that. Didn’t you, when you were a rep, didn’t you prefer the times you knew exactly what your boss wanted? The company expected of you even as a leader? Don’t you prefer those times? we rolled out expectations for one of the teams on managing now consulting gig. It was just a page and a half and included as we’ll talk about shortly what we expected each day.

[00:01:16] In terms of, inputs with what we want them to do, dials things like that, what we expected in terms of expectations and also behavior. And it talked about what a rep should expect if those things don’t happen. What does getting fired look like? Hopefully nobody gets there, but that’s going to happen inevitably.

[00:01:42] After the meeting, the reps thanked me and said it was helpful and that they appreciated knowing what good looked like, what a good day should look like and what we expect of them.

[00:01:59] So what are the results of doing this proactively versus reactively? Meaning setting out expectations before people start doing things you don’t like, you’re going to get lower turnover in your org or more less involuntary turnover, but also are involuntary turnover. The people you want because of the clarity are more likely to stay and the people who might go on and do the things you don’t like.

[00:02:31] Because they know what you expect of them are more likely to do it. You’re going to get fewer bad Glassdoor reviews because nobody will be surprised. You, the leader of the team are going to be less frustrated. Your reps are going to be happier and conversations about violating expectations become 10 times easier.

[00:02:57] We’re afraid to set them. Why is that? And as far as I can tell, the reason so many managers don’t practically set crystal clear expectations is that we don’t want to appear mean, or we don’t want to talk about how someone can get fired. That very topic by itself as kind of a faux pas. You don’t want to make people think about that.

[00:03:21] We are, we’re afraid of creating that culture of fear. The thing is that, it’s not those things. It’s actually the nice thing that you can do. And if you do it right, you’re not creating a culture of fear, just a culture of knowing what the job is like. The other part of that is knowing how to get fired is something you should tell someone before the time comes.

[00:03:44] You know, Kim Scott covers this a lot in Radical Candor. At least a couple of her stories were about somebody who got fired without even knowing they were doing a bad job. And if you set expectations, well, people will know whether or not they’re doing a good job without even talking to you about it. On the flip side, if you surprise somebody with a PIP and action plan or terminating them, that is a sure fire way to get terrible Glassdoor views while creating that culture of fear.

[00:04:22] So, what do you? You want to make sure you set your expectations early. If you already have a team and they don’t have clear expectations, go create them now, or at least at the end of this podcast. When you hire someone new, make it part of onboarding to review them and make sure the other person understands them.

[00:04:45] You want it absolutely want to make sure that it’s in writing and part of your team’s playbook. Something, everybody should have, a document that’s bookmarked and you can pull it out when people are violating something on it. So here’s what you include. You want to make sure it has all of your expected results.

[00:05:05] So that means quota. What is somebody expected to hit each month, but also their minimum. Those aren’t always the same thing. What is the minimum somebody has to hit in a month to not be moved towards whatever your manage out process is. You might actually be okay if reps are delivering 80%, it might be okay to do that indefinitely.

[00:05:33] I’ve seen it works like that. It might be okay if they deliver 80% for one or two months in a row and not indefinitely, whatever that is. Make sure that’s in your expectations document. You want to define expected inputs. This is particularly important for new people. How many dials, how many meetings set meetings run?

[00:06:00] What does that look like? Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly. However you want to measure it. You want that in the, in the document. And then I know what I hear from a lot of the reps is, well, what if I’m crushing my quota, but not hitting the input metrics. That’s okay. Put that in your expectations document.

[00:06:19] It’s absolutely okay to tell somebody that if they deliver the results consistently, you won’t hold them as much to inputs. You do want to be careful though, because inputs drive for results. You don’t want to be in the situation where you have a person who misses on both. You don’t want to be in a situation where somebody doesn’t do the inputs.

[00:06:43] They’re not getting traction. And then the month they say, well, I didn’t do the inputs because I thought I was going to hit. That’s a worst situation. Somebody is not bringing in results. They should be doing the inputs part of it. The third thing you want to include in your expectations is behavior. And it feels like you shouldn’t have to do this, but you do, especially as you, your team gets bigger, your org gets bigger.

[00:07:09] Hopefully–we all hope that we just, if we hire right, that we don’t have to worry about this. It’s just, it’s not true. And I’ve actually never seen it be true beyond maybe like 10 or 15 people. So pull out the most important behaviors that you’re seeing from your team and codify them, but those in your expectation document and make sure people understand what’s good.

[00:07:36] What’s bad. If you don’t talk about it, then it’s acceptable, but perhaps not promoted anything else that you expect from people should go in there. I actually like to include that I expect people to communicate proactively to me. When you’re gonna be late, I should have a text or a Slack before you’re late.

[00:08:02] Those kinds of things just communicate well. I like to communicate approximately it’s my boss. I want to make sure people are communicating proactively to me. Every person should manage themselves. That’s what I believe. So I include that. I also like to include what people should expect from me. That’s a total, that’s a different document.

[00:08:21] I can do another episode on that if y’all are interested, but expectations do go both ways. And then absolutely make sure that you include what happens if somebody doesn’t do what is expected of them. So what does that mean? Well, if somebody misses one day of calls, is that a big deal a week?

[00:08:44] But they don’t put up demos for a week. Is that okay? A month? Whatever the line is, that’s not okay. Make sure that’s in your document with whatever event it triggers. The following are the steps that I like. The first step is a conversation. Some people like it call it a warning. I don’t like that word.

[00:09:08] It sounds punitive. Whatever works for you. It’s pulling somebody aside. I would, I like to make it separate from a one on one, if possible, and talking about which expectation the person is missing, why it’s important and trying to understand why they’re missing. It’s possible, but they don’t actually know how to deliver that.

[00:09:35] It’s possible they’re prioritizing something else. It’s absolutely been the case where reps prioritized learning the next role and dropped the ball on completing the role that they’re in. At the end of any conversation about this, you want to make sure you’re sending a, an email summarizing the conversation so that you both walk away believing the same thing happened in that conversation.

[00:10:06] Clarity is absolutely the key. If you don’t do this, you will inevitably end up in a situation where, when you take the next step, the action plan that we’re going to talk about in a second, when you get to the action plan, the rep feels like they’ve been blindsided because they thought they explained away this behavior and the previous conversation that it wasn’t a big deal.

[00:10:34] Now we’re in the action plan and the action plan, the way I describe it is it’s sort of a micromanagy document detailing specific inputs, outcomes, and behaviors. And yes, in that previous conversation, if I’m not absolutely convinced that the behavior is going to go away, I’ll point out. But they have to turn it around or we’re going to be talking about an action plan, which is a micromanagy document detailing specific inputs, outcomes and behaviors? That’s its own conversation. 20 minutes, you’re writing up the document, probably printing it out. I liked to just email it to them in Google docs, outlining things like. How many dials are expected to make. Really it’s the same behaviors that are in the expectations doc.

[00:11:31] And it may be, you have to lower some of the expectations for a bit in order to help them get there, but you definitely want to make sure the rep is responsible for improvement and getting the reading to them to go. And you should be responsible for something as well. What are you going to do to help them get there?

[00:11:51] The actual plan says that if you don’t achieve these things by the designated date, we’ll be moving into a PIP, performance improvement plan, which is a very micromanagy document. And at the end of a PIP, it does lead to termination. So those are your four steps, the conversation with an email followup, action plan, PIP, and then termination.

[00:12:22] And it’s the tough part of the conversation. You do want to make sure that that’s all in there and well understood. So when you start having those conversations, nobody’s surprised. They see the writing on the wall. They know that you’re serious. They know that they have to do these things in order to stay on the team.

[00:12:40] Alright. So here are a few mornings, as you think about doing this, make sure that whatever you put in your expectations document are the real expectations, not the aspirational expectations. If you’re not going to manage someone out who misses some number, you’re going to lose a ton of credibility with the team.

[00:13:05] It’s okay if your expectations that you’re setting forth are higher than the team does now. And that you agree with the team to give them a little bit of time to get there. You have to enforce them. And you have to be clear on this. I’ve seen a lot of times that I’ve made these mistakes myself, where I want people to get to X activity and the people don’t and.

[00:13:34] But one of those reps is still producing, but everybody’s looking at that, seeing that, and they don’t take away from it that if you produce, you don’t have to hit the dials, they take away from it just that you don’t have to hit the dials. And when you have that first conversation, they will point that person out to you and tell you that you’re not being fair.

[00:13:55] Really want to make sure this is in your document. So the second warning I’m going to give you all is, With probably with a few exceptions, if you’re going to put expectations in front of your team that are more than what they’re delivering right now, you do want to give them some time to figure out how to do that.

[00:14:15] So make sure you tell them how long they have. Next part is. Think through how specific expectations might go wrong. Assume that people will either misunderstand what you’re trying to do. And also assume that some people will try to game the system. Which means technically playing inside the rules, just not in the way that you expected.

[00:14:42] If they do those things, how does that change your document? How does that change your approach? You’re not going to catch everything. You’ll have to update it over time, but spend some time thinking through this and you’ll get ahead of it. For example, when I ran an inbound team, we had a specific asset and people had to have a lead to demo scheduled conversion rate in order to continue getting those leads.

[00:15:08] We had people scheduled demos that were never going to happen. On the AE side if you measure somebody on win rate, you will absolutely see a disqualifying, a lot more meetings than you want them to disqualify. So keep those things in mind and build in for those. The next warning is, as you think through doing this, how can you present it to the team in a positive way?

[00:15:40] This is not something you’re doing to punish people. I like to present it as a roadmap to success in the role. This does a couple of things. One. It helps people buy into the document because they understand that if they do the inputs, they’re much more likely to get the outputs. It also sets sort of a North star or purpose behind the document so that when you refine it a bit later, everybody understands that it’s a refinement of the goal, not a change in the expectations.

[00:16:13] And then you really want to beware of the person who crushes quota, but just sucks as a, as a person, maybe they show up late every day. They’re rude to the team, something like that. Three times that was my career I’ve seen a person like this get terminated and all three times the teams have produced more after that person has been gone, that person is destroying your team’s productivity.

[00:16:43] They’re destroying your team’s morale. They’re encouraging other reps to find jobs somewhere else. So this is a key reason why you want to be sure to include behavioral expectations in your playbook. And then the most important thing is praise the heck out of people who deliver on the expectations well. It’s so easy for us as leaders to give out praise to the top producers, the people who bring in the most dollars, the most logos, the most seats, whatever it is, but the person who delivers the most meetings or makes those dials or most lives up to the behavior is just as important. I would even argue they’re often more important.

Because the person who crushes quota is probably in many cases, not replicatable, but the person who puts in the work who learns, who works at the top of the funnel works to get better at each conversion is the person that is willing to help others on your team do those things as well. They’re setting the example for your entire team, how to do the job,

[00:18:14] they’re communicating to the rest of your team, that most people need to do those things in order to be successful. That’s all I got for you this is a super short episode. 

Email me your questions. You can always email me at Derek at DerekJankowski.com. Hope you enjoyed this. Thanks.