How to Set Expectations When Managing a Project…

Managing the expectations of a wide range of stakeholders is one of the biggest challenges you can face as a project manager. But it’s a critical skill to develop—directly addressing misalignment of expectations can have tangible benefits, including reducing safety incidents and increasing productivity. Here are some strategies you can use to close the expectations gap.

  • Consider the root of everyone’s expectations. To prevent conflict and confusion, collectively set goals at the outset, and understand what it will take to meet key performance indicators (KPIs). Equally important is continually reevaluating these goals as the project moves along.
  • Don’t take sides. As the project manager, your job is to find the common ground of all your stakeholders.
  • Foster relationships with your team. Project management requires a significant level of emotional intelligence. The more people trust you and feel psychologically safe, the more comfortable they’ll feel to speak up when issues inevitably arise.
  • Build a project structure that’s sturdy but flexible. Even the most well-organized projects can go awry. A project’s structure needs to be sturdy enough to move forward, but nimble enough to adapt when timelines and expectations shift. The easiest way to do this is to break projects down into small, functional steps.
  • Keep the team grounded in an overall vision. Collective purpose is one of the strongest human motivators. Establish it early and keep it top of mind—especially if competing stakeholders lose sight of that overall mission as the project progresses.

Expectations shouldn’t run your daily chores…

We should not run our daily chores based on expectations but should run them based on our habits, our dreams, and our goals. 

Expectations are flimsy, they are whimsical, and they are like half-cooked dreams which don’t give us proper direction or allow us the path.

I am expected to write daily, nope, I write from 7 am-8 am daily. I am expecting it will happen, nope it didn’t happen, need to make it happen.

Another problem with expectations is it cascades failures, if you fail in one, you fail in the next and kind of keep failing next to next till the day is over. 

The action of doing with a routine is much more powerful than expectations, expectations deter us with questions, if I write will it help? Why it will not help? etc

So don’t keep expectations, keep goals, keep habits, keep actions, just do it daily, weekly and monthly.