How to stop being frustrated when people don't act the way you expect

When I first started leading others, I did not fully appreciate the need to communicate my expectations to drive the behaviours that would lead to a particular result.

I wanted people to act in ways that seemed like common sense to me, however it didn’t occur to me that it was my responsibility to communicate what my expectations were.

This led to needless frustration, because it wasn’t enough to assume that people should "just know" what I wanted—effective leadership starts with clear communication.

That’s what I’m talking about in this week’s episode of Commercial Real Estate Leadership – and here are a few of the key takeaways.

Communicate Clearly: Your idea of common sense might not be the same as your team's. Take the time to explain what you expect so there’s no room for misinterpretation.

Set Standards: As a leader, you are entitled to set expectations, but they can only be met if you communicate them effectively. Whether it's punctuality or performance, tell your team exactly what matters to you.

Share Your Values: It’s not about creating a book of rules for every possible scenario. If your team understands your core values, they'll be better equipped to act in alignment with them when a range of situations arise.

Join me for episode 190 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership for practical advice on setting expectations and communicating your vision, values, and goals with others.

Episode transcript

As a business owner, it's not uncommon to be a little bit frustrated when members of your team don't act in the way that you expect.  

But as I want to share in today's episode, it's your responsibility as a leader, as a business owner, to communicate your expectations so that people can understand what it is that they're reasonably expected to do.  

We are up to episode 190 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host Darren Krakowiak.  

Thanks so much for joining us for another episode where well into spring in Australia. A little bit chilly some mornings still in Melbourne, but we definitely are in spring.  

And with the seasonality of our industry, that means that we're going to be getting into another busy period again. 

And you've got to have your head in the game and you've got to help your team of course, have their heads in the game. 

And for me it can be a little bit of a distracting time of the year because Footy finals are on, Carlton are out. But still of course got some interest in the final couple of weeks of this premiership season because I did invest a lot of time.  

Oh, I won my footy tipping competition again this year, by the way. I feel a little bit braggadocious for mentioning that. 

But, you know, that's my payoff for investing my time in things that ultimately, I don't have much control over and probably don't really have much influence on my life.  

And whenever it's a leap year, which means it's a presidential year, this time of the year is especially difficult for me to maintain my focus because I'm a little bit of a US politics junkie. 

And we had, of course, the debate last week, which I was very much interested in watching and seeing all the reaction from. 

But I've got to remind myself and I'm taking the opportunity here to also provide you to make sure that you make the most of the opportunities that are coming up over the next two or three months. 

Because deal volumes are down, deals have taken longer to get done and there's a real opportunity that's going to be present over the next two or three months in the run up to Christmas that is there for your team to get some runs on the board to run up the score in the period of the year when there is generally more deals done. 

So, in today's episode I want to talk about setting expectations and communicating your values.  

And I want to share with you just a little personal story before I get into that in a business context, because this actually is relevant to this topic. And it relates to my daughter's kindergarten photos. 

So here in Australia, every year kids get their photo taken and I assume that happens in other countries as well. Of course, you have the school class photo and also the individual photos. 

And at kindergarten, you also get the snapshots of the kids in the playground and painting and doing all these different activities. 

And a little habit of my daughter when she is getting her photo taken is to pull faces. And I've noticed that in some photos, she's making, let's say inappropriate faces at times when it's time to smile.  

So, I sat her down on the day before photo day and I said to her, "Hey, I know you love pulling faces in photos and that's okay. But tomorrow is a special day. Tomorrow is photo day. And these photos are going to be things that we're going to save and look back on in years to come. So, I'd love for you to make a little special extra effort to smile for the camera and not make funny faces." 

And so, we got the photos back and she absolutely nailed. And she nailed it because I shared my expectations with her. 

When I look at the class photo, she's there smiling. There are two class photos. She's there smiling in every single one of them at all the individual photos. 

And all the other kids are fidgeting and not really concentrating and look, maybe the photographer in the individual photos may have been able to get her to stop pulling faces but certainly they didn't get all the kids to do that in the class photo. 

And I think that little bit extra expectation setting helped her nail photo day. 

And I think it's the same in your business. If you want things done a certain way, if you want people to act in a way that is appropriate in that moment, we need to set the expectation.  

I think this is one of the biggest issues I see in people's businesses. 

And sometimes there's advice that is put out there to the contrary, which I fundamentally disagree with.  

And I follow people like Garyvee, Gary Vaynerchuk on social media. And he's got this take on expectations, which I fundamentally disagree with.  

He says that, "If you don't have any expectations of others, then you'll never be disappointed." 

And I want to say to you that as a business owner, you've got a right to have expectations and you've got a responsibility to communicate what your expectations are so that the vision that you have for your business and the financial targets that you've put in place can be met. 

Because you can't do it all on your own. And that's something that I own it as a later.  

And I have to communicate expectations so people understand what it is that I expect.  

And I know that sometimes we can feel like people should just know, or isn't that common sense?  

But actually, when you think about it, people can't just know what it is you expect. You need to tell them.  

Your idea of common sense might be different to their idea of common sense. 

So, we shouldn't assume people know. Because to quote another influencer, Brendon Burchard, he has said and was one that really caught my attention that, "Common sense isn't common practice." 

So, if we have an idea about what common sense is, and we want to see that reflected in our business, then we need to communicate that. 

And you've got a right to have your certain expectations, but you can only reasonably expect those expectations to be followed if you've taken the time to communicate them. 

And of course, I'm assuming that those expectations are reasonable.  

So let me give you an example. Let's say that people are turning up to work a little bit late. And some people have a different idea about what being late means.  

I watched a video on social media recently which just asked random people, "If you start work at 9am, what time constitutes you being late for work if you arrive at the workplace?"  

And the range of views on this was surprising to me. And it just shows that different people have different perspectives.  

Some people said, "Oh, you know, five or 10 minutes is no big deal."  

So, it was said, "Oh, up to 9:30 is okay." There were some people who said, "Well, if you're not there by nine o'clock, you're late." Or some people said, "If you're not there before nine o'clock, you're late." 

The point is that you need to communicate what the expectations are. 

And if you're a stickler for people being punctual and being on time, then just let people know that that is what you expect. That's part of your values.  

And I think communicating values is important because we can't possibly share every possible scenario and have rules for them. So, that's why we communicate values.  

And I did a session last week with a few of my private clients where we talked about how to upgrade your hiring process.  

And one of the things that we talked about was being really clear about what our vision is, where we want to take the business, why that matters to a potential employee and then how we're going to get there in terms of some KPIs we might want to see laid out. 

And I don't know if you can need to go into all that detail with a prospective employee, but you at least want to be clear about where the business is going. So, they can make the decision if they want to help you achieve that vision. 

And also talk about your values and talk about what's important to you. So, people can either choose to adhere with those values or they can say, "That's not something that really resonates with me."  

And when you've been clear about what your values are and then people in the future don't act in accordance with those values, you can have a very clear, honest conversation with them that, "This is something that we've spoken about. I don't believe that this particular action was consistent with those values." 

And just have a very clear discussion if that is something that they're willing to take on board, if it's something that they can actually adapt and adopt the behaviors that you're looking for, or maybe they can't. 

And I used to think about a way to sort of broaden the employment pool. Talking about, you know, we want the right attitude, we want the right attributes. I would also add aptitude to that. We want to make sure that people have the capability of performing the role.  

But again, it comes to the responsibility of the business owner to make sure that we're communicating our vision, that we're sharing our values, so people understand what it is that you're all about and they've got some idea of what the expectations are of them in that role. 

So, if you haven't taken the time to map out what's important to you, where the business is going and what your expectations are, that's something I really encourage you to do. 

If you want to have a chat with me about how you can perhaps get a little bit clearer on that and how you can have those conversations in a more transparent way, just hit me up on Instagram. You can find us @cresuccess  

Send me a DM with the word "GROW" and we can have a conversation about what that might look like in your business. 

That is our episode for today. Thank you so much for listening and I will speak to you soon.