I was facilitating a session on expectation setting recently when we landed on a question that made the room pause: How many expectations do we have that we’ve never actually communicated?
Not partially communicated. Not poorly communicated. Never communicated.
The more we talked, the more I realized that expectation setting isn’t really about words. It’s about awareness.
Most expectations don’t start as clear statements. They start as conclusions we’ve reached over years of experience. Maybe you’ve worked for leaders who responded to emails immediately. Maybe you’ve spent years in environments where punctuality was non-negotiable. Maybe you’ve learned that preparation earns trust, that initiative gets noticed, or that follow-through matters more than intention.
Over time, these experiences shape our definitions of professionalism, accountability, ownership, communication, and leadership. Eventually, those definitions become so familiar that we stop seeing them as our definitions and begin seeing them as the definition. That’s where things get interesting.
The Gap Between Expectations and Understanding
A leader sits down with an employee and says, “I’d like you to be more professional.” The leader feels clear. The employee genuinely wants to improve. Yet both walk away with a completely different understanding of what just happened.
The challenge is that “professional” wasn’t actually the expectation. It was the label attached to the expectation. The leader may have been thinking about preparation, responsiveness, meeting etiquette, initiative, or follow-through. The employee, however, can only interpret the feedback through their own experiences, values, and assumptions. What sounds clear to the person speaking often sounds incomplete to the person listening, and that gap matters more than we realize.
I’ve seen leaders become frustrated because someone didn’t meet an expectation they believed was obvious. I’ve also seen employees work incredibly hard to meet expectations that were never fully defined. Neither side is trying to create the problem. They’re simply working from different definitions of success.
How Expectations Are Formed
One of the most helpful insights from our discussion was recognizing how expectations are formed in the first place. Every expectation we hold passes through a unique filter made up of our values, experiences, previous leaders, successes, disappointments, and preferred ways of working. By the time that expectation reaches the surface, it often feels so obvious that we forget it was shaped by our own journey.
The challenge is that we often communicate only the final conclusion. We skip the context, the translation, and the part that would help another person understand what success actually looks like.
Instead of describing the behavior, we describe the judgment:
“Show more ownership.”
“Communicate better.”
“Be more professional.”
The result is that the other person is left trying to solve a puzzle without seeing the picture on the box. We then wonder why accountability feels difficult.
When Accountability Starts Earlier
The reality is that many accountability conversations aren’t accountability conversations at all. They’re expectation conversations that should have happened earlier.
This becomes especially important because our expectations influence much more than feedback. They shape the opportunities we offer, the responsibilities we delegate, the people we identify as future leaders, and the individuals we trust with the next challenge. When we’re not aware of our own expectations, we can find ourselves evaluating people against standards that only exist in our heads.
That isn’t fair to our teams, and it isn’t particularly helpful for their growth.
The goal isn’t to lower expectations. The goal is to make them visible.
Clear expectations don’t restrict people. They give people a fair chance to succeed. They create consistency, reduce unnecessary frustration, and allow accountability to be grounded in shared understanding rather than guesswork. Most importantly, they force us as leaders to examine our own thinking.
Before we ask whether someone else understands what’s expected of them, we may need to ask ourselves a different question: Have I actually defined it for myself?
Ask Yourself
- What expectation do I currently have that may only exist in my head?
- Where am I relying on “common sense” instead of clarity?
- What feedback have I given recently that could have been more specific?
- Who on my team would benefit from a clearer definition of success?
Leadership is not helping people guess what we want. Leadership is helping people understand it.
To learn practical strategies for setting expectations, fostering accountability, and leading more effectively explore our People Leader Series.
