Chapter 18

WHEN PEOPLE DON'T MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS, CHANGE YOUR EXPECTATIONS

I sometimes think that all the disappointment, hurt, and anger in the world comes from someone not meeting expectations, either someone else’s or their own. The problem is not that people let you down or that you don’t accomplish all that you ought to accomplish. The problem is that you keep wishing for what you think should be instead of accepting what is.

It’s true that we couldn’t function very well without expectations. When I’m driving to work, I expect that people will stop at red lights and go on green. I expect that other people will get help from me and that I will get help from them during the day. I expect that my family will be there when I come home.

There is nothing wrong with that. Like a dance that we all know, our expectations of ourselves and each other helps us to move easily and gracefully through our day, each adding to the performance and not getting in each other’s way or stepping on each other’s toes.

But what if one of the things I expect to happen doesn’t happen? It should happen. But it doesn’t. I am stopped at a stoplight. My light turns green. I know the other light has turned red. I expect the other drivers to stop. But I look before I go, because I know that sometimes people run red lights. If I don’t look and someone does run the red light and runs into me, it won’t matter very much to me why. I will be hurt just as much if she ran it because she was too idiotically impatient to wait for the next cycle or if his brakes failed. It will be better for me (and them, for that matter) if I accept that sometimes people don’t do what I think they are supposed to do, whether it is because they won’t or they can’t or even because they didn’t know they were supposed to.

I used to have expectations of the people that worked for me. I expected them to come to work every day on time, do what I told them to do exactly how and when I told them to do it, and revere me as the perfect boss that I was. Whenever they did not meet my expectations, I got mad. If they criticized me, I was surprised, hurt, and mad. Anyone who didn’t meet my expectations was defective. The only possibilities were that they would be able to overcome their flaws, at work at least, or they would have to go.

You might think that I would have had trouble keeping people, but I don’t think the turnover was high for an office like ours. What I wanted was perfection. There were actually a lot of people who seemed to want to deliver perfection, even if it was just one person’s version of it. But it was very hard on all of us. It was hard on me because I was disappointed and angry much of the time. It was hard on them because they never could entirely succeed at being “perfect”, though some of them tried very hard. For the ones who weren’t interested in being “perfect”, of course, it was very bad. And we were all on the wrong path anyway. What I thought of as perfection was really just “my way of doing things”. We would have been closer to achieving perfection if I had listened to them as much as they listened to me, if we had all thought about how we were doing things, and if we had learned how other people did them so that we could constantly get better.

I still have expectations of the people who work for me. But if they don’t meet my expectations, I know that being disappointed or angry is just my aversion to admitting I might have been wrong and having to come up with a new plan. Whether the plan is mine or is developed by a group I belong to, my expectations are what I think will work. If I am right, everyone can and will do their part, the parts will accomplish the whole of what we want to do, and we will achieve our goals. If I am wrong, not everyone can or will do their part or the parts will not accomplish the whole, and we will have to review our plan and come up with a new one. That’s the way it is. Getting angry will not change the way it is. It will only waste time and energy.

Sometimes someone won’t meet your expectations because what you expect is not just too difficult for that person, it is too difficult for the situation, or doesn’t accomplish the goal. That happens most often when you decide what other people can or will do without talking to the other people. But sometimes even when the people involved think something will work, it proves to be impractical when they try to implement it. For those times, you don’t need to change just your expectations of a person, you need to change your expectations entirely.

I used to expect that people in the call center could enter hundreds of claims a day and not make any mistakes. I used to get mad at them if they didn’t meet that expectation. I told their supervisor that he should get better people and make them do their work correctly. When I came back to that company a few years later, I had learned that the problem was not that they made mistakes. The problem was my expectation that they wouldn’t. I knew that I didn’t need to find better people, I needed to change my expectations. I still wanted the claims to be paid correctly. So I audited the claims to find and correct any errors. That worked better than getting mad at people. Eventually, our software was enhanced so that it didn’t allow most of the errors we had been making. That worked even better.

As difficult as it has been to rethink my expectations or change plans at times, avoiding those things has always just added that much more time to the process. It is much less painful for everyone if I don’t cling to or try to enforce my expectations. If I adapt quickly, it almost seems as if it was part of the process of figuring out the solution and not a problem at all.