Basic Leadership 101: Travis Johnson

#3 Have I set my expectations? 

I remember early on with my production team, I was getting a little frustrated because they weren’t doing what I wanted them to do. And I had to really assess, I had to really figure out like, Did I tell them what I expected? Did I tell them at what level I expected them to perform? What level of competency is good? Are they doing this on a certain timeline on a certain day of the week?

I realized that I had not set my expectations with them either verbally or in writing. So I spent a few days putting down notes on a sheet of paper to make sure that they understood that I wanted them to be my team. I wanted to grow with them. I wanted to work with them. But then I hadn’t set the expectations of what I wanted from them clearly. So I wrote them down in an email, set them as my expectations. 

Now, what might this look like in your organization? This might be a board member description. This might be a job description. This might be a volunteer description or expectations or even board expectations. If they’re not written down, they haven’t been agreed to and people don’t know what to expect. It’s kind of hard to get out of a person who he would like if they don’t know what you expect of them.

One of the easiest ways we can do this is by writing it down into some kind of agreement and signing it. Now if you’ve been at an organization for a long time, often there’s job creep. You’re in a position but you’re expected to do all these things that weren’t listed in the description. If you are a volunteer or a board member or an employee, and you find yourself doing things that aren’t written in the description be like yeah, I understand, You want me to do these things. Are these things that are in addition to my current duties? Are these someone else’s duties? Do they need to be held accountable? And if you are adding these to my duties, let’s talk about position change or a pay raise. 

You’ll find pretty quickly that you expect more out of them coming from the employee standpoint than they might have been understanding. There is absolutely nothing wrong with clarifying the expectations of the position that you’re in. If you are a volunteer or a board member or employee, whatever it may be, you have the right to know what your boss expects of you. Consequently, if you are a leader in an organization and people aren’t performing up to standards, you need to know have you told them what their expectations are. The best way to do that, again is in writing. 

Set your expectations and give them a chance to work on them. 

#4 Have I given them the opportunity to perform?

Now if all these are questions are a yes, they have been trained, they are capable and you have set expectations. Did you do the three Ds of leadership? Delegate, delegate, disappear. Tell them what you want them to do? And let them go do it. 

There is a concept out there called micromanagement, needing to know every little detail of every little thing along the way and as an employee is super frustrating to get detailed questions of every little thing that you’ve done. As a leader, what that means is you don’t trust your people to get the thing done. I remember being in Bahrain and getting tasked to do something, because there was just so much to do, the leaders didn’t have time to nitpick every little detail. They expected you to do the work to a professional level, bring it to them with any questions or changes or chances for revision, and they would move it right along. They didn’t have the time to get in your business of every little detail. 

If you are an employee or volunteer and you find that your boss is in your business, ask them do they trust them to get the job done? If the answer is yes, then tell them to back off and you’ll give them updates as needed because you’re a grown person and you’ll get them to them at a reasonable amount of time. If the answer is no, they don’t trust you. You have to ask where the trust was broken, which is a difficult question. We have to fix that bond in order to move forward or you might find you need to be in another organization.

If you’re the leader. You need to ask yourself do you trust your people? Now if you’ve been through this list and you know that they’re trained, capable and you set your expectations, you need to back off and let them get stuff done. If you find yourself still wanting to go get in their kool aid so to speak, you figure out are you meeting your boss’s requirements? Are you focused too much on the minute details of them? That you’re not focusing on what you need to be doing as a leader? Three D’s of leadership delegate, delegate, disappear, let your people give them a chance to succeed.