Does your team know what you expect of them?

2 weeks ago I introduced my 4 Pillars of Sales Leadership. Last week we talked about the first pillar, build a team culture where your team members are motivated and empowered to perform their best. For this week’s post we’ll review the second pillar set clear expectations.

Of all the pillars this one is the simplest but the easiest to take for granted. More than taking it for granted I often see sales leaders (myself included) who think they’ve been clear in their expectations while their team has no idea what is expected of them.

It’s that lack of recognition for the fact that your team doesn’t understand what you expect of them that so often gets sales leaders (or any leader) into trouble. The GOOD news is setting clear expectations has a simple formula which I learned courtesy of the US Marine Corps. Successful expectation setting is a function of effective communication which comes from providing a Clear Intent and a Defined End State.

Expectations = Clear Intent + Defined End State

In this post I’ll break down the tactics I use to successfully execute on the expectation setting formula.

The ability to set expectations and communicate clearly is valuable beyond sales leadership. One of my favorite modern business leaders is Axios CEO / Founder Jim VandeHei (he’s from Wisconsin, but we won’t hold that against him). Jim has spent his career trying to communicate clearly and recently wrote an article on The Silent Killer: Toxic Ambiguity which is the perfect prelude to a discussion about setting clear expectations.

In it VandeHei, who literally wrote a book about communicating clearly, confessed that Axios, his current company, consistently scores poorly in internal surveys when their employees respond to the prompt "I know what is expected of me at work.” If VandeHei and Axios struggle with setting clear expectations then it’s safe to say every leader should take a look at the way they communicate expectations with their team.

This brings us back to the expectation setting formula, expectations = clear intent + defined end state.

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” - John F. Kennedy

While I doubt JFK had sales leadership on the mind when he said the above, this quote acts as an excellent framing for setting clear expectations as a Sales Leader. Specifically the first component of the expectations formula, Clear Intent.

Back to the Marine Corps 🪖 Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 5-10 (only the DoD could come up with such an engaging title) describes Commander’s (replace with Sales Leader’s) Intent as, “the (leader’s) personal expression of the purpose of the operation. It must be clear, concise, and easily understood.”

The key word in the above definition is purpose. At it’s core, being clear in your intent as a leader gives your team the WHY behind your expectation. If the expectation itself is to make 50 Cold Calls to prospective customers per day you should be sure to explain to your team why this is the number. Something as simple as, “on average, it takes that many calls each day to book 5 meetings per week which is the number needed to hit quota”.

Being clear on the intent behind your expectation is valuable for 2 reasons:

1. Your team will be more motivated if they understand the why / context around the expectation

2. It gives your team the latitude to improvise when things don’t go as planned in a way that ultimately still gets the job done

Motivation and the confidence to improvise are 2 important characteristics of any high performing team. Being clear on your intent as you set your expectations provides the scaffolding on which you can build that motivation and freedom to improvise.

“Brevity is the soul of wit.” - William Shakespeare

While your Intent gives the context and why around your expectations, the End State is the expectation itself (e.g. make 50 Cold Calls per day). When defining an end state for your team: be brief, be clear, be consistent.

Be brief

When William Shakespeare (constant foil to the 9th grade version of myself) wrote the words above it was the turn of the 17th century. If brevity was important in 1601, what do you think our friend William would say about the ability to be brief 400+ years later in the era of Twitter and the iPhone?

Never have humans been so busy, distracted, and impatient. When setting expectations as a Sales Leader you need to break through the noise. You won’t be able to break through the noise if your expectations take 5 minutes or 5 pages to communicate.

Bullet points and simple sentences are your friend when communicating expectations to your team.

Be clear

In the Marine Corps complex prose is often referred to as, “Million Dollar Words” which is ironic because nothing will sink your team’s quota faster than communicating in a complex manner.

Think common business jargon like, "Break Down the Silos” which can easily be replaced by something like, “Work Together”. Communicating expectations is not the time to show off your Scrabble prowess or win a Pulitzer. Just say what you expect in the plainest manner possible.

Be consistent

This is the one that trips me up the most often. As a Sales Leader it’s tempting to say to yourself, “well I’ve set clear expectations, now my team will go forth and conquer.” The truth is that won’t be the case. How many emails do you think your team will receive this week about a new “critical” Product update? Upset clients who need to be dealt with? Some new prospecting technique using ChatGPT which is sure to help them crush their quota? Worse yet, how about some new idea you bring to them?

Yeah, remember that noise we talked about? If you expect your team to execute on your expectations you need the discipline to stay on your own message and hold them accountable to those expectations. There are systematic ways to bake this consistency into your workflow which we’ll talk about more in 2 weeks when we review the 4th Pillar of Sales Leadership, Accountability. For now, ask yourself each week if you’ve been consistent in your messaging around your expectations.

That’s it! Simple, right? Well yes, but far from easy. If you’re confident that you’ve set a strong culture on your sales team, but your numbers still aren’t where you’d like them to be stop and ask yourself if your team is clear on your expectations of them. If not, remember the expectation setting formula. Expectations = Clear Intent + Defined End State. Don’t forget, Be Brief, Be Clear, Be Consistent. Alright ya’ll, see you next week.