Deliver What You Promise – 4 Vital Stages To Beating Expectations
Deliver what you promise at work, and you will probably be happy and very successful in whatever career you choose. The simple fact is that we all rely on those around us at work to be personally successful. We need what others produce so we can produce our own work. Others need what we produce. These interdependent relationships at work mean that delivering what you promise is hugely helpful to all around you. When you deliver again and again what you promise, colleagues will:
- Trust you to deliver the next time and each time into the future
- Colleagues will like working with you because you don’t let them down
- Bosses will love you because you support their success and you don’t let them down
- People will appreciate and respect you and want you in their team
Deliver What You Promise – 4 Vital Stages To Beating Expectations
- Mentally plan before doing
- Be careful what you agree to
- Negotiate the resources at the start
- Knowing who can assist
Create Your Own Progress
When you become a manager of others, being good at delivering what you promise through the team you lead, creates even more goodwill and appreciation. Rather than impacting a few stakeholders, you positively impact multiple teams and a lot more stakeholders.
Meeting and beating expectations at work is a great way to be given more responsibilities. i.e. promotions will keep coming your way. Businesses nearly always promote those that increase the value they produce for the business AND those who get on well with others and help make others even more successful.
Any manager that wants career progress must focus on helping their team increase teamwork, increase motivation, increase capability and ultimately increase performance. Being good at communicating and managing expectations is a huge part of teamwork and delivering what you promise – personally and through your team.
I have 4 vital stages you must go through to consistently beat expectations – of your bosses, of colleagues and peers and your team. These are:
- Mentally plan before doing
- Be careful what you agree to
- Negotiate the resources at the start
- Knowing who can assist
Working hard, working smartly and doing a great job is one side of consistently beating expectations but not the most important part. Being good at setting expectations or negotiating expectations is, in my experience, more important. Agreeing achievable goals, means you can beat them and deliver what you promise. Accepting unachievable goals usually means you are going to fail before you have even started.
Don’t Say Yes Too Soon
In my second job after university, I was tasked with supporting about 15 senior managers and leaders. I was 25 and had 3 years working experience. They were all in the 40s and 50s with at least 7 times the amount of experience I had. So I had 15 rather intimidating people asking me to do this and that.
I quickly learnt that it was impossible to say yes to everything. I just could not deliver. There were only so many hours in the day. I also learnt quickly that half of what they asked for was not practical to deliver. It is essential to negotiate and educate to be successful. I gained a reputation for delivering what I promised. Not because I worked all night long. I negotiated and I was careful about what I agreed to.
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The first stage to deliver what you promise is to mentally plan before doing
Planning may seem obvious to most, yet plenty of people don’t do this BEFORE agreeing to something being asked of them. The “before” is the vital part. When you don’t think through what you can and can’t do, how can you negotiate realistic and practical goals or set expectations to beat.
If you don’t mentally plan, how do you know if what you are being asked is sensible or even possible to deliver. Far too many people do this stage AFTER they have agreed to something and then have to go back to the other person and negotiate different expectations. This just makes you look bad. Even worse is not saying anything because you are scared, embarrassed etc and then you fail to deliver.
If you need 5 minutes to think through and plan out what is possible, take that 5 minutes. Explain you need 5 minutes to plan the work out before agreeing. In my experience, most bosses are happy with waiting. You, taking the time to plan at this stage, gives them confidence in you and your ability to deliver what they need.
Always think through:
- Your current workload and the timeframes for each work stream
- Compare against your capacity and capability or that of your team
- Check for crunch points or bottlenecks
- Give yourself plenty of contingency i.e. under promise because unexpected things always pop up.
Be really clear in your own mind what you can and can’t do in the timeframes being discussed before agreeing to anything.
The second stage of beating expectations is being careful what you agree to
Saying yes in the moment is really easy. You think it is what the other person wants to hear. In that moment , saying yes avoids any conflict, and you don’t let the other person down. Saying yes is enjoyable and rewarding in that moment.
Who hasn’t said yes and then 5 minutes later are thinking “What the hell have I just agreed to. I can’t see how I can deliver this”. I have been there many times.
Think about the person you most admire at work for always delivering what they promise. Watch and listen when they are being asked to something next time. I bet they rarely say yes straight away. I bet they ask a bunch of questions, to really understand what is being asked of them. Then they might make a number of suggestions to amend what is being asked. Then, when they agree to do the task or project, the expectations or goals agreed to are different to what was originally asked. This change happens by design.
Everyone loves saying yes. I just don’t do it that often. I can’t if I want to deliver what I promise. If you don’t like conflict – a small amount of conflict while negotiating sensible expectations or goals is a hundred times easier to deal with – than the ton of conflict and anger you get when you don’t deliver what you agreed to. Set expectations you can meet.
Be very careful what you agree to. More often than not, you will need to negotiate more practical or realistic expectations with the person asking you to deliver.
The third stage to deliver what you promise is to negotiate the resources you need at the start
Without the right resources, doing a task, activity or project will take a lot longer and be a lot harder. Don’t have the resources you need, and delivering may not be possible.
One of the most motivated people to help you get the resources you need is the person asking you to do work. When negotiating your goals, also negotiate the resources you need or get the other person to help you get the resources you need. Time is the most common resource. Extra capacity, budget, help, advice, access, authority, etc are all important resources too.
Failing to negotiate resources properly is probably the most common reason people don’t deliver what they promise.
Always negotiate your resources when setting goals and expectations. Don’t do this stage separately or later. Always negotiate resources up front, at the start.
The fourth stage of beating expectations is knowing who can assist
Very few of us work in isolation. The most effective people at work are usually the ones that invest time and effort into building good and influential relationships with colleagues, bosses, peers and other stakeholders. When they need help, they get help quickly. Getting assistance allows them to work at speed and to suffer very few delays. This makes them very effective in their jobs.
When you manage a team, this stage becomes ten times more important. Delegating work as well as asking colleagues outside of your team for assistance enables a good manager to deliver a lot more that those that don’t get assistance. This is not about pushing work to others but about utilising the strengths of those around you. Playing to others and your strengths results in work being completed quicker and better. The best workers and managers know this and use this constantly.
Playing to strengths is a brilliant way to deliver what you promise and consistently beat expectations at work.
in summary
The easiest way to deliver what you promise and consistently beat expectations at work is to negotiate expectations that you can practically and realistically deliver. Setting expectations at work that you can beat is far easier than working late each night to deliver what you have agreed to.
When you negotiate and consistently deliver, you gain a lot more respect and appreciation that if you just say yes and work late to deliver. You are also a lot more likely to gain promotion and progress your career with good negotiation and expectation management skills. This has certainly been my experience personally and from observing others working in many top companies.
The 4 most important stages to deliver what you promise and consistently beat expectations are:
- Mentally plan before doing
- Be careful what you agree to
- Negotiate the resources at the start
- Knowing who can assist
As I mentioned earlier, to get a lot better at managing and negotiating expectations so you can consistently deliver what you promise, go to enhance.training, select courses and take a look at our How to Skillfully Manage Expectations course. This course teaches how to say no without offending and how to negotiate realistic goals and expectations. Do take a look at this.
If you have any questions on “Deliver what you promise – 4 vital stages to beating expectations”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Beating expectations (or at least meeting them) is really important to build trust; be competent in the eyes of others; and demonstrate good teamwork to all around.
When you consistently beat expectations, you quickly gain an impressive reputation. It is ten times easier to beat reasonable expectations than to work super hard to try to beat unreasonable expectations.
Always negotiate down any unreasonable expectations. To really master saying no diplomatically and managing the expectations of others, take a look our course on Skillfully Managing Expectations.
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