[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness not just the obvious symptom, our hosts James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]: Hey thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James. Let’s get started with a question. What is the most overlooked management skill?

[JAMES]: So, the first thing that I want to actually do is talk about the difference between management skills and leadership skills. Because we often use them interchangeably, even though they’re two distinct skill sets. So leadership skills are really about who the person is and how they make us feel. It’s their confidence, their presence, their patience, and their character. And this is really about the people skills that we want and need from those in authority. Whereas, management skills are about how well they can organize and manage people to do the work. Management is really it’s about the competency of organizing and executing and using the resources that you have available to you. So if you are in a people management role, it’s using people effectively. So with that caveat, the most overlooked management skill is the ability to set realistic expectations. Which is kind of a… well the reason why it’s overlooked is because it’s not often thought of as a skill. Setting expectations is not something that’s often talked about, but it affects everything that you do. And not only is it the most overlooked management skill, but it’s also a skill that will improve your leadership.

[COBY]: Yeah, no, that’s actually… Thank you very much for actually going into those definitions. First because again, that is something that’s actually a great takeaway on its own from this conversation.

[JAMES]: This podcast is done.

[COBY]: So the difference between leadership and management skills is a fantastic takeaway for people to… so someone just to take away in general. But absolutely, managing and creating realistic expectations is something that is so undervalued, but so important in so many aspects of our professional lives, that it is something like…. If you’re a professional who wants to kind of set a goal for yourself this year, being better at managing and creating realistic expectations will serve you exceptionally well. Now managing expectations, when we say that is also really important for us to be clear that when we say that to be… to manage your expectations as a listener, is that they need to be realistic, transparent, and clear. Because like as you said, kind of in management as a skill when you manage realistic expectations, you can do, you do that by identifying outcomes, by setting the realistic parameters of work, timelines, budget expectations, and you clarify what success looks like to you, or what the either this objective identification of success, or the objective industry or organizational expectation of success. And that is fundamental to being a good manager. That is that you’re so transparent and you’re so realistic about what you expect from people, when things are due what they should look like, all the kind of stuff, giving that all to them and not leaving it up to them to figure it on their own. But in leadership, as a leader, going back to what you were saying about confidence and presence, and how people people feel, when you can manage realistic expectations that is the fundamental, like secret sauce, to building trust, and creating autonomy, and establishing a good rapport with your employees.

[JAMES]: And for me, I think if I look back on many of the… I’ve had many managers over the years and it’s probably not going to come as a great surprise that it was identified to me that I am not an easy person to manage. I am great with, I do really good work, I’m not the easiest employee to have. So having our own business is definitely the the right call for me. But anyways, the manager who… there’s one manager who I’ve had who always sticks out in terms of the best manager that I have had the privilege to work with. And what she did better than anybody else was she was very clear. What I was not allowed to do, she set the box around what my role was. And was very clear that… here are, “here’s the limits of your authority, here’s where, here’s the line that you can not pass. If you pass it I’m gonna get in trouble, and you’re gonna get in trouble, so don’t pass it.”, Right? Very clear expectations, which helped me professionally, because I knew that as long as I was within those bounds, I had the support of my manager and the relationship that we were able to build was far stronger than any other manager, employee, supervisor. Like it’s the one of the better, it’s the best experience I’ve had in being an employee, and being managed. And a big part of that came from their ability to set realistic expectations, and understand that as somebody who naturally likes to push the bounds, there’s a very clear cut off line.

[COBY]: Yeah and I mean, and that really kind of goes to a lot of what we talk about when we do some of our programs about building autonomy, and building responsibility, and internal motivation in employees. Is that when you create that box, or we use analogy one of our other courses where we talk about lanes, and you make it clear kind of where the lane, or the borders on the box that you’ve been provided. It then, it allows the person to use their professional judgment, to kind of have some autonomy to, and to be able to do the job the best way that they can. And when it’s, when you’re really clear about the expectations placed on the natural and enforced consequences that come with going outside your lane, or outside your box, then that makes the… that’s creating those clear expectations. And it kind of even goes back to, we talked about this in another podcast, about Rules That Empower and Rules That Restrict, and when managing expectations is one of those fundamental elements that’ll that create Rules that Empower. So rules, just as a quick refresher, Rules That Empower are when you tell people what they CANNOT do. Meaning that, like your manager did, you cannot cross this line, you cannot go past this, you cannot go over budget, you cannot miss this deadline, but everything else is on the table. Where Rules That Restrict, tell people what they CAN do. You can only do this, you can only, success can only look like this. And again, there’s still… Rules That Restrict are not necessarily bad, but when you have those rules that are clear, both to restrict and to empower, it is about managing expectations. But when you use it in more of a… and we’re trying to create more autonomy and more independence in employees, managing expectations to create those Rules That Empower is fundamental.

[JAMES]: You’re right, and if we look at what, we hear as some of the big challenges that businesses experience in relation to their employees, or their Human Resources, it’s how do I retain good employees? How do I attract good employees? How do I motivate people? How do I build… like we’ve had a lot of conversations with people about you know avoiding the pitfalls of micromanagement. You know, how do I trust my team to do what they’re supposed to do? How do I make it so that people I don’t have to constantly be hovering over people and watching every single thing that they do? Well managing expectations is going to be essential to all of those things. All of those major problems that we’ve heard people talk about time and time again, and that we’ve talked about either in our podcasts, or in our training. This is why I really believe the ability to set and manage realistic expectations is the most overlooked management skill. Because it if done properly, it will help you with your retention, it will help you with your attraction, it will help you build autonomy, and self-reliance in your staff, and it will allow you as a manager to get out of the weeds, and actually focus on supporting your team, not micromanaging your team.

[COBY]: Yeah and I think that the main consequence of not setting and managing expectations is it allows for assumptions to take over. It allows for people, it allows for miscommunication when one person assumes that they understand, or the manager assumes that they’ve explained it well enough, or they assume that the person is on the same page with them. And then, when the assumptions, when the assumption isn’t met, when it falls through, that’s when micromanagement steps in. Because, “well I can’t trust you to do the job because you didn’t meet my unspoken assumption”. Then you know, then that’s when all this stuff kind of snowballs. But the thing is that, you know, if we let assumptions take over, and that people, we hold people to those unspoken assumptions, that’s a fundamental management mistake. And that lack of clarity and trust, that it hurts… becomes a fundamental leadership mistake as well. Now I’ve got, I’ve done a lot of interim and term leadership roles. Interim executive, interim department head, and all this kind of stuff. And one of the things that was, when I would go into a company or an organization that had… that their leader was considered, that was let go, or left suddenly, or for whatever reason. One of the biggest mistakes, what I had to do early on that became my kind of go-to first move, was to make sure that realistic expectations were being set. Both up, to those who I reported to, the Boards or Partners or Stakeholders. And down, to the employees. So remember I had one role where I stepped in a very political role. And basically one of the most fundamental mistakes that that the CEO that I replaced did was they were terrible at setting expectations. Staff had no idea what was going on, and had no idea what was expected of them, and they were horribly micromanaged. And the board and the stakeholders really were were out of the loop and had no idea what success should look like. So this was an economic development entity, and what was funny was when I stepped in, one of the first things I did that paved the way for clear expectations from the board and the stakeholders, was I defined the difference between contribute and attribute. Where I said that, you know, we can’t, as an entity, we cannot increase the GDP of the province. But our efforts of supporting small business, of building strong relationships, of helping, you know, inspire new innovations, and strengthen key industries, that you can attribute the success of those efforts to us. And those efforts, contribute, to the regional prosperity, and all that kind of stuff, towards the GDP. And then once those were kind of clear about setting expectations about what they could expect from us as an entity, and what the staff’s actions daily, how they can be… they had contributed to the bigger picture. It’s just that simple explanation, done well, and far more than this little quick summary, but that was fundamental to setting everything up, and turned the whole thing around. And then it was a matter of just following through, and being transparent, and being clear, and those actions are one of the, or one of the things where if that was done by the the previous CEO, who was quite skilled and experienced and had lots to offer, but not doing that, was their first step towards setting themselves up to fail. And I think that this is something that if, again if, somebody is aspiring to be a strong leader, or is currently in a leadership role, and they don’t feel that they’re getting the momentum they want. Becoming committed to managing expectations will be a major boost for them if they commit to it.

[JAMES]: Well the big thing.. So we’ve talked a bit about why managing expectations is so important and it’s really some of the core things from a leadership perspective, from your example is the ability to create trust and rapport, right? We want our leaders, we want to be able to believe what our leaders say, right? When the leader of an organization, leader of a whatever leadership position or role you are taking on, people need to be able to trust that what you say is rock solid, right? To the best of your knowledge and understanding. And you know, your word is your bond type of mentality. That’s a really important aspect in leadership to being able to, being thought of as somebody who acts with integrity. So those from a leadership perspective, managing expectations will go a long ways in terms of building your credibility and helping to provide trust in what you put out there. I want to go back to the management side of things, because there’s a lot more to say about, not only why managing expectations is so important in management, but where and how you can start to manage expectations. So I talked earlier, I mentioned that it helps in terms of your retention and your attraction efforts. And I’ve seen this, we both have done a fair amount of hiring over our careers. One of the biggest things, one of the biggest problems that I see in recruitment efforts is a lack of clear… the people don’t manage expectations well in recruitment. So a few examples of how you can actually accomplish this. One major expectation that people will come into a recruitment setting with is around salary. If you can clear that up, I know I’ve harped on this point many, many times. But if you can set those expectations up front, it will help to alleviate a lot of, a number of problems. Not all of your recruitment problems obviously, but there’s nothing like, there’s nothing worse than going through, like writing and tailoring your resume and cover letter for a position that sounds really interesting, and that you’re excited about. You know, going through a phone interview, and a in-person interview, and making it through multiple rounds of screening, only to find out that the salary expectations are far below what you were anticipating. Or they’re not meeting your expectations, right? From a business perspective, it is a tremendous source of frustration and a waste of time to go through and identify somebody who you think is going to be a good fit for the position, only to find out at the end of it, when it gets to negotiating the salary, that you go… that your expectations are way off base, right? You can alleviate that entire frustration by just making clear what your expectations are in the recruitment, in the job posting.

[COBY]: Yeah and I mean, and again we’ve harped on that number of times but that is such a fundamental, essential piece to managing expectations in recruitment.

[JAMES]: Yeah not the only way to manage expectations in recruitment though.

[COBY]: No, no. But it’s a it’s a big one.

[JAMES]: It is so, I mean some of the other big things that we’ve talked about before, and that I know that you did in some of your interim roles, was managing the expectations around the timelines for your recruitment and that can be huge. The unknown create anxiety. There’s a lot of anxiety wrapped up in applying for a new job anyways. If you can alleviate some of the anxiety that people are experiencing, then you will see their truer self, and you will create a much better experience for you as the recruiter and for the person who’s going through the application process.

[COBY]: Absolutely like when I would, again I couldn’t do this in all the roles that I was in, but I always strive to manage expectations as clearly as I could, and provide as much transparent information, you know, as possible. So I would even put in many of the job postings, the timeline on when we were making decisions, on when we especially the first round of interviews to be. Again, putting a caveat of these are anticipated timelines, subject to change, but at least putting them on there. Then when I would contact people for the interview, or for the first round, I would give them… it would often be either I was either to be solely through email or follow up with emails, so they had a written documentation of it of everything, and I would tell them the interview times, and I would tell them the length of the interview, often we would try and do, we give them like half an hour before the interview with some questions to prepare some more longer, more intentional questions. We would tell all that to them for the interview. So that when they came in, they knew where to go, they knew what it was to expect, and then in the interview, we would try and make sure that the expectations were clear on both sides. And that we would follow up with them afterwards, whether they moved on to the next round or not, and if they didn’t I would usually emailed them to say “thank you very much for your time, we appreciate you coming in, however we’ve moved forward with candidates that met our needs more specifically. But we appreciate your time and effort, please feel free to apply for us again”. You know no one loves getting the turned down email or message, but the fact that they knew that it was, that it was over and that it was just that they weren’t the right fit, was something that… I remember having someone come in for a multiple interviews and they got the job on on their third, on their third time applying, and they said honestly that why they kept coming back and wanted to work for us was because of how transparent we were in the interview process. Like “that is the kind of company that I want to work for”. And again, most of the time we were turning down phenomenal candidates, just because we had, we could only pick one. So you, so that was part of also building the brand for the Labor Market.

[JAMES]: Building the brand is a huge and important aspect and we’ve talked about kind of how, and building your brand in the Labor Market in previous podcasts. What I wanted to jump on there if I can actually remember now because I interrupted you to say something, and then I’ve immediately forgot what I was going to say. But yeah, managing those expectations in the recruitment process. I think one reason why people don’t do that is that they’re worried about getting the question back of “Well, why wasn’t I successful? What did I do wrong?” You know these types of… like people wanting feedback or whatever. People wanting feedback, which is totally natural and sometimes you can provide feedback, you don’t have to though, And the key with the managing expectations is you don’t necessarily have to divulge every piece of information. You have… being transparent doesn’t mean that you have to give away every piece of information you have. It’s about giving away the information that is relevant to the person that you’re speaking with. And what’s relevant in this situation is, “you know what, we have a great slate of candidates and we have chosen to move forward without, you have not been selected to move forward in our process. We encourage you to apply for future openings”. It can be as simple as that, but that still helps to provide that closure, and it still helps to manage those expectations. And like you were saying Coby, it helps to build your brand in the Labor Market.

[COBY]: Absolutely and I mean… So that’s one example of the value of managing expectations in one aspect. And one thing, I think, I want to give a few more. Before we do, I want to also make it very clear managing expectations as a manager to your employees is what we’re really talking about. But there is also tremendous value if you create a psychologically safe workplace, we’ve talked about psychological safety one of our other podcasts before, so check that one out. But if you create psychological safety in your workplace and you allow for managing expectations to be a two-way communication, where employees like can manage your expectations as a manager, and be able to say, or use their professional judgment. Say you ask them something and they can counter to say “Well, due to these things you may have not foreseen, this actually might be a more realistic timeline, expectation, budget, whatever it is that you’re sitting the parameters on”. If you can allow a culture that allows for that two-way communication of managing expectations, then there is an even exponentially greater value that you will bring to the workplace and into your management style.

[JAMES]: Because just because you are managing expectations doesn’t mean that you have set realistic expectations. And this is a mistake that we can all make, that we all fall into. So I think the piece that I want to… like yeah I agree entirely that if, you know, if you can create almost a collaborative approach or create an environment where people actually feel like they can push back and talk with you about what those expectations are, that is a huge value. But that doesn’t happen by accident. And you mentioned, it already, that it only… you need a psychologically safe environment. Psychological safety is not something that just naturally occurs in our workplaces. It is something that needs to be done with intention, and yeah people can go listen to old podcasts or previous podcasts, but psychological safety in a nutshell is how safe somebody feels to be able to speak up to share their opinions, to voice their concerns, without fear of retribution. It’s not about confidence, how confident somebody is to talk, it’s about, are people given the ability to push back, to share concerns, to speak up for what they need without that being held against them. that is the core of psychological safety.

[COBY]: And I think if we go back to the difference between leadership skills and management skills, to have the success as a manager, allowing for that two-way communication to manage expectations. The building psychological safety in your employees is more of the leadership skills that will empower that management approach. Because as a leader, if you make people feel safe, and make people feel heard, that’s very much a leadership quality. So this is when we say that the management skills and leadership skills, they’re separate, they’re distinctive, but they’re very complementary, right? And that’s a great example of it that. If you want to have the successful management practice of managing and setting realistic expectations to allow for two-way communication, then you need to have the leadership skills to provide people the psychological safety in how they interact with you. So I think that that’s probably a good way to kind of tie those two things together. So let’s actually, now we kind of covered those things, let’s kind of give some some great uses of the managing expectations in a very practical productive way. The first thing I want to mention, and you kind of alluded to, talking about recruitment and the anxiety piece, is actually managing expectations is a phenomenal addition to a wellness strategy. Because anxiety and reducing anxiety is something that is can be very useful to manage expectations to reduce anxiety, and that can be everything from big things, like organizational change, to small little interactions. Like a great example is, if you’re a manager and you have to call, and you have to meet with a member of your team, you’re calling them to your office or setting up time to meet with them, and you send them an email, and it’s like and you want to say can we have a quick meeting. If the person is someone that you know may be very anxious about that meeting, “what does that mean? Am I in trouble? Is there’s something wrong? What what’s wrong?’. And especially if someone suffers from anxiety, it could be a horrible situation. But if you instead in your subject line say ‘quick meeting – good thing’ that simple little addition could be a powerful way to go “Oh okay, I don’t have to worry about it, I’m going to have a good meeting with my boss, great”. That’s

very helpful, and be a great way to, be a good practice to put into most of your communications to set those expectations in the subject line. And going back the other way, if you’re an employee and you need something from your manager, like let’s say you had a question, I mean you need them to give you kind of some advice or recommendations. When, you know, in your subject line you could say ‘question – need recommendation’. Then you, in your emails, that way they know when they’re reading the email what you’re asking of them. You don’t have to go back to them if they don’t fully understand, or they miss something, and then your managing expectations both ways. And that allows everyone before they get into the email, or before they get into the actions, to know what’s expected of them, or to know what to or to know what’s going to happen, or what’s needed. That’s clarity. It could be such a powerful thing.

[JAMES]: There are a lot of simple ways of managing expectations and really at the, at its heart it’s just about clear and transparent communication, right? Most of the, well a lot of, not most, a lot of what we talk about is communication skills, right? How do you effectively… managing expectations is how do you effectively communicate those to people. And I love simple. I love simplicity. And you know, those are great examples of short simple ways to manage expectations that can help somebody alleviate some anxiety around ‘being called to the principal office’ type of fear, right? Especially if the environment if you’re just is starting your journey to create psychological safety, and it’s not naturally present in the workplace. It can go a long ways to kind of building that trust and building that rapport that you know not every conversation, not every time that I set a meeting with you, that your manager sets a meeting with you, or a higher upset’s meeting with you, it’s going to be a bad thing, right? You don’t need to stress, you don’t need to spend the next two days worrying about what your manager is going to spring on you, right? Which can be huge and not only for general wellness but this can be a really important piece in managing people who are neurodiverse. Because being able to clearly state what is expected, will make a lot of things a lot easier. And how you communicate, how people then in turn perform the tasks that you have for them, and how you build that rapport and relationship.

[COBY]: Yeah because a lot of fundamental mistakes that happen with people who are neurodiverse tends to kind of stem from assuming everybody is on the same page. That words have this exact same weight or meaning, or the stuff that you think is too obvious to mention. That’s often, that miscommunication, that on different page, or that you know incompatibility of assumptions, is really where it’s a big part of some of the challenges, or some of the the issues that arise when working with people who are neurodiverse. Because part of that, they think about things differently. So if you are very clear in telling them how they’re gonna be measured for success, or what task completion should look like, or you put clear boundaries around things like…

[JAMES]: Setting that clear box, right? Like setting the clear expectations of what… like here’s the things that you can’t do, here’s what we need accomplished.

[COBY]: Yeah here’s how long things should take, here what resources you should use, here’s the people that you should going to if you have questions or need help. You know those types of very clear, you know breakdowns descriptions. One, allow you to as a manager to make sure that your making, providing enough resources and support to have the job done well. But two, you’re also not leaving anything open to inference or assumptions or anything like that. That you intentional in how you communicate. Because, and the other thing too is that if you create that psychological safety, and allow for that two-way communication, and if the person that is neurodiverse can almost repeat back what they understand, or set expectations on how they may see a problem, or a solution, or approach that you didn’t think about. Then that can allow them to bring more to the table too. Because there’s a lot of power that can come from the neurodiverse in their unique way of thinking, because it’s, I think, it’s often unconventional. So there’s. you know. so there’s great opportunities to listen. But I think the fundamental piece with both managing the neurodiverse and the wellness strategy is this the clear fact that the unknown creates anxiety.

[JAMES]: Yeah and that’s that’s a big one. Like I’ve experienced that myself, right? Like I have struggled at times with in the face of unclear parameters, when you feel like you can almost do anything, it can be overwhelming, right? But putting a little bit of a box around what can be done, what should be done really. I can’t stress how much… like I mean for me that is one of the core productivity tips that I have to adhere to. Whenever we, whenever we’re working on something, whenever I’m developing, whenever we’re developing something, I need to put that fence, I need to create the fence, first. And set, make sure that I have clear in my head where the boundaries are. So I have to set realistic expectations with myself in order… but I mean it’s something that I find… something that I need from a manager, but I’m not managed by anybody anymore, it’s still something that I need. Because it’s what allows me to be very successful. So I need to almost provide, I need to manage myself, I need to provide that to myself. And it can be a really powerful self productivity skill. It can be a very powerful management productivity skill, it can be a very powerful leadership productivity skill, It is the most overlooked management skill in my opinion. And it is incredibly valuable and in almost every situation. You even mentioned before about managing change, right? We have all been experiencing a buttload of change over the last couple years. Several, you know, just minor tweaks here and there, nothing major, no Global issues. Being able to set realistic expectations is a core piece of what we talk about in our Organizational Change Management training, and we provide this training to HR professionals across Canada, right? This is a… Realistic expectations is part of our DReAM Method, which is part of our approach to everything that we do. Managing expectations needs to be front and center, whether it’s managing expectations with clients, whether it’s managing expectations with partners, whether it’s managing expectations internally, it doesn’t matter. It is such a valuable skill to learn.

[COBY]: Yeah I think one thing that I want to touch on that you mentioned, or you’re saying about the self productivity piece, about kind of self-regulation side of it. Because one thing that I think is something that we talk a lot about, and I used to teach a lot about, was the psychology, and the cognition, of what’s called Choice Overload. When you’re provided with too many possibilities, or unlimited choices, you can actually make no choice or create no action. Like a great, a funny, example I used to use when I used to teach this, would be going to… your spouse tells you to go pick up some paint for the new room, or for the bedroom that you’re painting. And you go to the giant display in the hardware store of like a million swatches of paint. And you’re just overwhelmed by the choice, and many people actually just leave, they don’t actually choose one. Whereas, when you set the parameters, and the realistic expectations, like if it’s for me, my wife will say “Go get a, you know, a teal in these, from these numbers and pick one”.

[JAMES]: She would probably just pin the swatch to your jacket.

[COBY]: Maybe I’m not a great example of making choices like that. But the idea is, but if you give someone the parameters, if you shrink the choice from unlimited to a clear manageable expectations of what success looks like, then it reduces Choice Overload. It reduces the anxiety and actually creates better action and better outcome. So this idea of expectations goes beyond the workplace, but it’s something that is vital when it comes to management skills in a professional setting.

[JAMES]: Absolutely, I mean I’m gonna throw a very nerdy example. I love open world video games, love playing them always have. But I also like, I’m replaying Skyrim for the 400th time. But these games, they drop you into an environment and you have full reign, you can do virtually anything. So oftentimes when I play these games, I’ll start like 18 different quest lines and then drop the game because there’s so many things to do. It’s like where, do you begin? And get I all scattered. So what I’ve been doing is; okay this playthrough I’m going to focus on this questline, this questline, and this questline. I’m going to get them go through to completion and so I’ve actually… I am such a nerd that I have to put a fence around my video game playing. Maybe I should just stop talking now.

[COBY]: But no, but I think that as funny as that example is, you know this really does speak to the versatility of the skill of managing expectations. And how it’s something that can help you as an individual, both professionally, but also there’s also value to your personal life too. I think the one last thing I want to just kind of make sure that we’re clearly mentioned before we kind of wrap up this this conversation is that when we’re talking about managing expectations both down to your employees and allow employees to kind of speak back to you we’re not initially just talking about high level positions with high expertise. Even if you’re like managing you know entry-level employees, in the stock room of a grocery store. You know, the delivery is here put this away, you know, you two put this away. Then you’d be disappointed if they take too long or whatever. but if you’re again, clear and say “okay you two, this should take you x amount of time, and then you should be able to be back on the floor”. But if you allow the employee to even speak back to you and say “Well we’re short staffed up front, we may get called up a lot. So if that happens it may take longer than you expected. But we’ll try and get done by X time if that happens.” Even that simple conversation could be a powerful way to improve how you manage, even in entry level positions. Like there’s a lot of versatility and value that this concept brings.

[JAMES]: It’s a skill that spans every type of job, every industry, your personal life, your professional life, your management skills, your leadership skills. It is just an incredibly versatile tool that when you develop the skill, because it is a skill that needs to be practiced. You’re not going to get it right every time right out of the gate. You’re well you’re not going to get it right every time full stop. But if you continue to practice the skill of managing setting and managing realistic expectations, you will be a better manager, you will be a better leader, and if you can learn to use it for yourself, you can also be more productive.

[COBY]: Okay so I think I’m going to just kind of wrap up this conversation with a quick summary. Okay so again the most overlooked management skill is, as James said, is setting and managing realistic expectations. And this can be a powerful way to how you lead people. And because again, leadership skills and management skills are separate, they’re distinct, but are very complementary. Leadership skills are about who the person is, and how they make how they make us feel as a leader or someone in authority. And management skills are about how well someone can organize and manage the people that work for them. So when we set and manage realistic expectations, they have to be both clear and transparent. Because when we don’t set expectations clearly it allows for assumptions to take over and then people are holding each other to their unspoken assumptions, which causes a lot of issues and conflicts. Managing expectations in a two-way communication can build trust, autonomy, and rapport both ways. But it requires psychological safety. When you manage expectations it can be a powerful addition to a wellness strategy, reducing anxiety on everything from big change to small interactions. It can be a personal productivity management tool that can help you individually self-regulate, but also help how you assign and describe work with intention to those that work under you. It’s a fundamental component to having success managing the neurodiverse, allowing for a clear understanding of how success is going to be measured, and what task completion should look like, and both of these as part of a wellness strategy and in managing the neurodiversE, it’s it’s critical to understand that the unknown is what creates anxiety. Recruitment best practice is can be increasingly leveraged by managing expectations with candidates in everything from the job ad all the way up to communication after the final interview. And it’s something that we at Roman 3 have as a component to how we teach and certify people in Organizational Change Management because managing change fatigue, reducing anxiety, and normalizing the stress of change, is best done by managing realistic expectations at all stages. Okay I think that’s all anything else to add James?

[JAMES]: Uh no I think that’s a good summary and I have talked enough.

[COBY]: All right so that about does it for us. So for a full archive of our podcasts and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel visit our website at roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

[ANNOUNCER]: For more information on topics like these don’t forget to visit us at roman3.ca. Side effects of this podcast may include improved retention, high productivity, increased market share, employees breaking out in spontaneous dance, dry mouth, aversion to the sound of James’s voice, desire to find a better podcast…