Matt Gjertsen [00:00:00]:

And to do this, you have to create something called a team working agreement. When do we send email? When do we send Slack? When do we call one another? How quickly should people get back to each other on Slack? Are you expected to answer messages after work? What are projects that we are going to do? Hello and welcome to the Leadership Launchpad, where we help technical managers improve themselves, their teams, and their organizations. If you are a technical leader, engineer or technician who wants to become a leader, or someone who supports technical leaders, this is the show to get actionable insights from people who have been in the trenches before and learn how you can improve both your own performance and the performance of those around you. Once again, if you haven't heard, Minimum Viable Manager is now out everywhere books are sold. I can't believe the feedback I'm getting from this. It's absolutely amazing. It hit number one on the new releases for technical project management. I am super proud of this book.

Matt Gjertsen [00:01:00]:

I'm so proud that on this show, the Leadership Launchpad, we're doing a four-part series because the book is arranged in four parts, and so we're doing an episode on each part. Today is part two. If you didn't see it, go back and listen to part one as a reminder of where we are. This book is framed around the concept of first principles leadership, which says a leader has 3 fundamental requirements, right? You have to get people to work together, you have to get them working on the right things, and you have to improve their work over time. And so for a minimum viable manager, the first steps towards becoming a great leader, the things you need to do are the most basic first step for each one of those pillars. So build trust, Set expectations and give feedback. And so today, part 2, we're focusing on setting expectations. So it should be obvious, but it isn't always.

Matt Gjertsen [00:01:56]:

Why do we need to set expectations? Why are they so important? Well, one example of why they're so important comes from the Gallup Q12. Now Gallup has been doing a survey for over 20 years where they've asked questions of 27 million employees to try to identify how engaged they are at work, because they have a lot of research around how employee engagement drives the performance of an organization. They do this through something, the Q12, which is a list of 12 questions. The number one question on their list is, I know what is expected of me at work? They, they think it's that— it's the number one question. They see it as kind of this pillar, this keystone question of if you know what to do when you get to work, it makes everything else better. It makes it that much more easy to be engaged. And that makes sense given the research from the book Drive by Daniel Pink. Now, Drive goes into what he calls the surprising science of what motivates us.

Matt Gjertsen [00:03:03]:

Because I think very often we think of motivation as being driven by, you know, money or power or, you know, prestige. We want to be recognized. There are certain situations where that's true, but in our world, that, that's not really what Dan would say is important. What he talks about when it comes to what makes somebody excited, what gives them the drive to move forward, comes down to 3 things of feeling autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And expectations are required if you want to do all of those 3, right? If you don't know what's expected, then you can't act autonomously because you have to go to your boss every time you run into, you know, a situation where you need to go left or right. I don't know, what do I do? So I go ask. So you're not— you have no autonomy if you don't have a clearly defined outcome that you're trying to achieve. then how do you know if you're achieving it well? You have no sense of mastery if you don't have a clear understanding of what's being expected of you.

Matt Gjertsen [00:04:02]:

You can't get better at it, right? And so, you can't get autonomy, you can't go after mastery, and you certainly can't have purpose if you don't have a broader, like, why? What are we doing here? What's the point of all this? Which is a key part of expectations. But all of this too, I think, plays into why expectations are so hard. We talk about motivation, There are certainly people who have just a lot of intrinsic motivation, and these are often kind of the star players that are out there. And I think that's a big reason why expectations can often be so hard, especially for new managers, especially for managers who are promoted because they themselves were star individual contributors. They had a lot of internal drive, right? So They don't know how to put it in others 'cause they don't know how it was put into them. There's a common phrase out there called great players don't make great coaches. And a lot of that comes down to people who are naturally talented at things don't know what they're doing to be so good very often, right? If you had— now, if you have a great player who started off really bad and slowly and deliberately over time got better, Now, they might make a great coach, but that's not honestly how a lot of people are. Just a quick interjection.

Matt Gjertsen [00:05:25]:

I wanted to remind you that I run a company called Built where we train the next generation of hard tech leaders how to build teams capable of solving the world's hardest problems. If you are an aspiring technical leader, an existing leader, or responsible for training leaders in your organization, please check out builtleaders.com to see if we can support you And your team. If we wanna get specific about like what's the actual action, like what's causing this to happen, there's a thing in psychological or neuroscience called chunking, which is how your brain remembers information. So the human brain is really only able to remember between 5 and 9 things, items of information in short-term memory. The interesting thing is what a thing is. And so what they find— and that's a chunk, right? A chunk of information. So you could say a phone number, or let's use better something like NASA, right? Like NASA, in my brain, I remember NASA as NASA. It's a chunk.

Matt Gjertsen [00:06:29]:

It's one— the name of the organization is one chunk. I'm not remembering N-A-S-A, right? And So that's the fundamentals, these chunks of information, the fundamentals of how we store memory. And then as somebody becomes an expert at things, they are able to store larger and larger chunks at once. We know this from research on chess players, right? So they looked at champion chess players and novice chess players and asked them to memorize a board. They said, you have, you know, 20 seconds, or I forget how long they gave them to memorize the board. Expectedly, as you would expect, the expert chess champions were much better at remembering the board than the novice chess players. But the interesting thing that happened in the study is the first part of the study was done with real chess positions. Like, these were places where pieces could be in a real chess match.

Matt Gjertsen [00:07:29]:

And the expert chess players were able to remember those really, really well. Then they did a second half of the study where they just rearranged randomly all the pieces on the board. And in that case, the expert chess players were no better than the novice chess players. So it's not that they had a, just a fundamentally better memory. It's not that they could memorize more pieces on the board. It's that they were able to recognize a snapshot of a game. And remember it as one single chunk. So for you as a manager, that's where the challenge lies, is that especially for a new manager, when you get promoted for the first time, this is the first time you've had to think outside your head.

Matt Gjertsen [00:08:09]:

Before, tasks that were being done, you knew what you knew, you knew what you didn't know, you knew how to figure it out. Now you have to figure out what somebody else knows, what somebody else doesn't know. Worse, you have to figure out what motivates them, right? This is gonna be really hard. This is gonna be— this is gonna be a challenge because all of a sudden you got to get in somebody else's brain, right, and figure it out. Well, maybe you don't. And so when it comes to setting expectations, there's 2 main things that I like to think about. The first is just getting better at setting expectations using something called commander's intent, where if we think about making sure we're clearly summarizing the ask that we have, we want to use commander's intent, which Because what you need to focus on is you need to focus on the context, the outcome, and the constraints. When you're explaining to someone or working on a project or saying we're going to go this, you have to tell them what's the context of this, what's the why, what have we done before.

Matt Gjertsen [00:09:08]:

Make sure everybody understands all of, all of that stuff. You need to get really clear on the outcome that you're trying to achieve. What's the definition of done? What's a clearly definable thing where at the end of the day we can all say Yes, that is done. That's probably one of the most skipped over portions. And, and so when you first hand off a task or a project, you walk away with different understandings of what the end state is supposed to be. And then finally, the constraints. What's the budget? What's the time? My favorite one here is to imagine in the future, when are you gonna wake up at 2:00 AM wondering on the status of this project? Right. And make sure you have in place a mechanism that they're going to update you on the project before you get to that point.

Matt Gjertsen [00:09:55]:

Right. So when do you as a leader want updates? When do you want them to check in with you? Right. These are all critical pieces of commander's intent. So just from a task and work perspective, that's one thing. The other thing that I think is really important when it comes to setting expectations is how is your team going to work together? And to do this, you have to create something called a team working agreement. When do we send email? When do we send Slack? When do we call one another? How quickly should people get back to each other on Slack? Are you expected to answer messages after work? What are projects that we are gonna do versus projects that we aren't gonna do and why? When you don't answer these questions, everybody has to come to their own conclusion on their own. They have to just figure it out themselves. And it leaves this really wide gray area, especially in today's world.

Matt Gjertsen [00:10:49]:

A lot of my thinking from this comes from an author named Cal Newport. He wrote Deep Work: A World Without Email, and he uses this phrase called the hyperactive hive mind. If you are not clear about when you expect people to work, Chances are they're going to kind of always be on because that's what our world encourages, right? We have phones, we have Slack, we have email. So am I available? Am I not? Am I doing this? Do I need to get back to them right now? Should I be working on the weekends? Now, if you're a bad manager, you like that ambiguity. And I'll be— I'll just straight up say, if you're a bad manager, you like that ambiguity because what it does is it promotes a world where people are always unsure. They're always maybe a little bit scared. And so, Maybe at the end of the day, the people who like work the hardest, who are the most bought in, are the ones who stick around and succeed. And yeah, that's great.

Matt Gjertsen [00:11:45]:

And you, you can run an organization like that, I suppose. I've seen organizations run like that. I think it's a really bad way to run a team because what it means is you are not clarifying outcome and impact. as the most important thing. You're making like access or lack of sleep or hours worked as the most important thing. And those are 2 different things. And so that's why I think these 2 things work really well— getting really good at defining the work that has to get done through commander's intent, and then also clearly defining the way in which that work is going to be done. That makes it really simple, where it allows people to know when they can turn off, when they can turn back on.

Matt Gjertsen [00:12:33]:

They show up engaged and energized, and they can ruthlessly attack the things that you ask them to do. And then that's what you judge them on, not who's willing to sacrifice the most in their life, but who actually gets the most done, which I think all of us are going to agree. Now, you can make the argument that they often line up, maybe, maybe not. But all of— I think all of us are going to agree outcomes are what really matter. Impact are what really matters. And so clear expectations are really, really essential if you want to create that kind of world. Okay, so last episode we talked about building trust, which is about getting people to work together. This week we talked about setting expectations, which is about getting people to work on the right thing.

Matt Gjertsen [00:13:19]:

So next week We're gonna start to talk about how to make that work improve over time, which in Minimum Viable Manager is about feedback. So I hope you found this conversation helpful. Hopefully you got a few really important things out of it, and I look forward to seeing you next time on the Leadership Launchpad.