How many times you feel frustrated to repeat ‘ this is not what I have expected ‘ to your peeps that are being led by you. Sometimes, conversations like these can be draining cause you can’t really figure a way what went wrong in the process?

Yes, it might be surprising but many unhappy jobs fulfillments start with mismatch of job expectations. Misalignment of expectations
often makes you feel so far away from your targets you wish your team to achieve, because the picture you have in your mind is simply so different with them. But how could that happen?

This usually a misfit that happens in Impact Fit between you and your team.  In simpler words, your  view on how the impact they should create at work is not the same as what you perceived.

A situation of a misfit of Impact can look like this:

As a sales manaager, for months Sarah has been trying to improve on the sales portfolios for her clients and she has put tremendous amount of effort in in improving them to be able to convince her clients more. She thinks that her main role as a sales manager is to ensure all portfolios are done with quality to gain satisfactions from her clients. Hence, Sarah has spent much time in being a implementor to work on the tasks. However, from your point of view, the main priority of Sarah as a sales manager should be leading her team of 3 to expand her portfolios diversity. In such, Sarah should spend more time empowering the team.

A mismatch in the ‘definition of impact’ can seem to be very simple, but the consequences might be bigger than what you imagine. You member could be allocated in a role that is not playing his/her strength, or he/she is striving for a result that does not give him/her a sense of contribution or significance. In other words, he will not be able to perform simply because of the misalignement.

For leaders, it is important to ensure what you have in mind for the team’s objective and individual’s unique contribution to it are clearly communicated in the whole team. The fundamental of a performing team is to first know clearly, and simply, where are we heading to as a whole. It is critical to have strong alignment for the team to meaningfully create impact. When we consider the areas where they do best and how they can do better, we then have a view of why is your team achieving / not achieving the desired impact. This is especially essential in bigger teams or companies that work with more employees, because we can’t have everyone to work towards their own direction.

In our team report, we also introduced a simple model that many have been using to communicate impacts of a team or a company in a simple yet critical manner, which is the OKR model by Google. ( OKR is a goal management framework, and stands for Objectives and Key Results. An objective tells you where to go, key results tell you how to get there).

We hope this short read could help you to reflect today, when was the last time you spent the effort to check out if the picture your team has in their mind, is actually the same picture as yours? 🙂