Female Leadership: Setting Expectations in Business | Ep #52

Hey, everyone, I'm Chris Plackey and this is how to Lead for female entrepreneurs and founders. Because the best way to grow a business is to grow the person who's running it. Let's go ahead and get started.

Hello. Hello. Hello, gorgeous. How are you today? Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much once again for joining me. I always love when you're here, whether you're putting on your makeup or driving to work or taking a run or driving your kids around, maybe you're sitting in a movie. I had a girlfriend tell me she takes her little kids to, you know, all these terrible animated movies that we all have to punish ourselves through our kids childhood.

She takes her little airpods, you know, now because they're kind of secretive and she, she takes her kids to the movies and she puts the AirPods in and listens to podcasts, which I just thought was so awesome. She has long enough hair, she can cover them up. Her kids don't know. And she's having a great time and she doesn't have to watch or learn about trolls or mountain gnomes or garden gnomes or whatever else these movies are about. So welcome today. This is number three for this month. We're focusing on you as the founder, you as the boss. And today I'm going to talk to you about expectations. I wanted to share with you. I don't do this very much. You know, I do have a testimonials page on my website. If you go to Chrisplackie.com testimonials you can see who my clients have been, some of them anyway, and what they have to say. And Chris, I, you know, and then last year you met a lot of my clients because I've interviewed them and I will be interviewing more this year, which I'm excited about. But I just get to work with some of the most amazing people and it really is, it's an honor, I feel very honored to be able to know these women and experience them and help them. You know, it's interesting. I think we could all kind of wonder about ourselves, like, how could I be helpful to this person, right, who has so much going on and is so successful and yet that those are always the people who all of us need help, all of us need someone else. That's why I'm such a fan of coaching in general, because it's not about me knowing more than you as a coach. Right. My belief as a coach is all I have to do is help reveal more of you to you. And I do that by being Very present and I also believe, very intuitive in the space that I'm sharing with you so that you can really be who you are and figure things out. You're so used to being in charge and the leader and advising everyone else that it's hard to do that without having someone holding that space for you. Can you. Can you show up and be very vulnerable and work it out in a way that you aren't able to do even in, in some cases in your marriage? Right. Just. There's this other place. So that's why I'm just. I hold the space that I provide to my clients is very, very important. But. But I'm always in awe of my clients. And this past weekend especially, you know, I really did have that thought, like how what wind blew that put this woman in my space. I just feel so fortunate to know her and watch her shine. She's so young. She has so much ahead of her. My client Leila and her husband have built an incredible business.

They were recently recognized at an event for being significant donors. They donated a million dollars to a charitable organization. They hit huge strides in terms of revenue in their own business. And she is just this real and humble and gorgeous, inside and out human. So I wanted to share with you what she said about our work together because I think there's a lot of people like her that are listening right now who wonder about the same things. And I just wanted to share with you what her experience has been through the coaching work we've done. Because you might hear yourself in here, and if you do, I. I want you to. I'm hopeful. It's resonates that, you know, like, yes, there's a place to go. So what she says is when she first started working with Chris, me, she. I was running an outside, on the outside, a very extremely successful company. But I awoke every day dreading my work. I had systems in place, but they involved me, and that's in capital letters. I had people in place, but they needed a. They needed to go, and that's in capital letters. Since working with Kris, I no longer feel stuck or anxious for what I confront on a daily basis. I feel confident and able. Chris helped me identify where I was, bottlenecking myself and implanting beliefs that dragged me down so I couldn't take massive action to change it. I highly recommend working with Kris if you are seeing success but not feeling it. And that's in capital letters. It's one thing to start a business and be successful and make the money and help the people, but Is it resonating for you?

And a lot of the times, the reason we have this lack of feeling, this, this unmet expectation, if you will, is because we haven't really built a business that is independent of us. And so we feel still very, very beholden to the business and to the team. So I wanted to share that with you because I want you to know if that's you, that, you know, everyone else is sharing and collaborating and clapping you, and you go home at night and feel vacant and empty. You're not alone. And while I spend a lot of time on this podcast really teaching you insights about leading the team, the woman leading the team is the most important element. And if you're not.

Engaged in your own processes in your own business, Joy, then we need to work through that so that because you turned on is what your business needs most. I know that. Plus, we need you. You need it. Right? So anyway, and I'll throw one more reminder out there. I am going to be doing strategy days, team management strategy days, where we look at you and we look at what's going on for you as a founder and as an entrepreneur. And then we look at the team and we do a team audit. We look at what's working, hiring, firing, managing, coaching, motivating. You know, where are the. Where are we working well? Where are we not working well? What. What needs to change? I love to help you sort of triage your current challenges and then diagnose what's really happening so we can solve them for the future. And then we look at the business. Is the business a reflection from a culture perspective of what you want? Have you built something you want? Sometimes we wake up like, what the heck happened? Right? I'm going to be doing a select number of these strategy days, if you're interested. Right now, there is nowhere else to go. Look for this. You have to email hello at Chris Plackey. If you want to be considered, get on the short list. We'll let you know where and when and what your opportunities will be here shortly. Thank you to those of you who've already expressed interest. I'm super excited about what the future holds with this. So let's switch gears now. I want to talk with you about expectations, and we use that word very broadly when it comes to leadership. And today I want to talk with you very specifically about what the really, the five key kinds of expectations are that you have and should understand as somebody who runs a business. So I'm going to go through all five, and as I've Mentioned in the founders Lab, we do a deep dive into this work. So if this appeals to you, if you recognize, like, okay, these are all little money for me. I really would like to invite you to join me in the Founders Lab. We're going to be talking about all this and so much more. So let's talk about the five. The first one is what we call the manual. This is a tool that I learned through the life coach school a long time ago when I was certified as a life coach with Brooke at the Life Coach School. And we call it the manual. The manual is basically a set of rules that you have for other people or society or the weather that you believe first of all are true and that you hold other people to. So this could be as simple as, you know, it shouldn't rain in June, or people shouldn't stand so close to me, or people should listen when I talk, or people should just understand what I say.

Or people should make eye contact with me when I talk to them.

So whatever the rules are that you have for people, I actually have a. This is a not leadership story, but it's so hysterical. So I used to have a coach who worked for me, and we were teaching the manual. We were learning about it. I was teaching it to them. And she had this experience that day when she flew in from out of town to meet me for this meeting, and she was on an airplane. And, you know, when you deboard an airplane, there's rules, right? Like, everybody follows the rules about how you get off a plane. So rows one, you know, the first row and the rows are kind of staggered, right? So whichever row is, you know, four inches ahead of the other one, they go first, and then the next row goes. And you wait for people to get their bags, right? Like, that's how it works. We all agree that's. That's the rules. That's the manual that we've all been taught. Well, apparently on this plane, there was somebody who didn't know the rules, and they just started marching up the aisle past everyone, trying to get past them while they were getting their luggage. And so somebody came and tried to do that to her. She was trying to get her bag down, and someone's, like, trying to push her out of the way so they could pass her. And she literally took her hands off her bag and she put her hands up in the air and she just yelled, there are rules here, people.

It was so classic telling this story, but it was such a perfect example, right, of our manual. The rules that we have, like not everybody knows the rule. Does that make them wrong? And you. Right. It's not like it's a law.

And even people break laws. You've heard this, right? So as a leader, though, you have to know your manual. So what I do with my clients is we go through, like, the rules we have for others, and we have to pay attention to how those are surfacing in the way that we think about people, the way that we treat people, the way that we talk to people, and we don't even know it. Okay? So the manual is this. This list of things we. We believe are right and that everybody else would agree with us. And we hold people to them, but we don't really tell them. So I actually have this rule that you're not supposed to stand that close to me, but I don't really tell you that rule. I just keep backing up and you keep getting closer to me. Right. I have this rule that you shouldn't talk so much. And so you're driving me crazy, so I'm going to avoid you. Like, what are the rules that we have? That's the manual.

The next. Expectations. Expectations that we're going to talk about are what we are. I actually call expectations. So there's the manual and then there's expectations. Expectations, in the way that I define it, are those behaviors that you expect of people who work for you that are based on the values of your business and you do communicate them.

So an expectation might be.

Tell me first, focus on solutions, not problems. Be. These are very generic, but be a team player. Right. They are clearly communicated. And the value of an expectation is it is. It's like an umbrella. Umbrella for you, for all sorts of other things people could do. So if I have this umbrella around, be focused on solutions and not problems, and somebody in my company is gossiping, I don't have a policy on gossiping, but that behavior falls under the umbrella of that expectation. Right. I have an expectation of my team to be impeccable with their professionalism. That's an expectation born out of a value of impeccability. And so if somebody. I may not have a dress code, but if somebody comes to work in a pink plastic jumpsuit and it's not aligned to the brand, then I can hold them. I can have this very reasonable conversation about that not meeting the expectation of impeccable professionalism. So we. We basically want to put words to these behaviors. Because I'm going to tell you, if you haven't learned this already, the majority of the issues we have in a Business when it comes to team is behavior, not skill set.

The maj. I'm going to say that again. The majority of issues we have in the team related to performance are related to performance, to behavior issues, not skill set.

And so if we haven't really thought about what we expect from a behavior perspective, see what happens is most of us think about what we expect from a production perspective. And we don't define behavior and we don't communicate it and we don't talk about it. But that tends to be the stuff that gets us in trouble with people. Like people do really, really inappropriate, not constructive things at work. But we've only really set goals or set expectations for what they're supposed to get done, not how they do it. So then we feel very paralyzed for how to address that issue. So you have to set expectations regarding behavior because that also sets the tone for your culture. The next one is our standards. Standards are born out of expectations. But standards are measurable policies and rules. They are much more black and white. They are typically measurable. Return calls within 24 hours, be on time to work.

Follow this dress code, follow this computer use policy, follow this vacation request policy. It's defined based in more measurable outcomes or results. But they're born out of the values and expectations. So it all flows, right? So somebody who has a behavioral expectation, let's just say of, you know, be a great team player and practice kindness. I don't know. You may not have a vacation policy. Maybe you just, you might, you might believe that people can get done what they get done, and you believe you trust people to get their work done. So you don't even have a PT policy because that isn't in alignment with your values. Whereas someone else really does believe in a focused effort, effortful day, and they like to have policies around the time that they work the vacation use that they have all of it. So those, those policies are not required. A lot of you as entrepreneurs, you never worked in a real company, right? Like a corporation. So you don't even know what policies, so you start copying what other people have. It doesn't really apply to you. That's why I like to work with each of my clients individually. Your policies can be whatever you want them to be, but I think they're only effective if they're aligned to who you are as a business. Okay, so we have manual, we have expectations, we have standards, and then we have two others that we use the word expectations a lot, but they're, they're different. They're more those Three manual expectations and standards apply sort of to everybody. Then we build some expectations around positions, roles in your company. We have key performance indicators, which I know everybody gets annoyed, like, ew, Kris, that's so boring. You gotta talk about it. What are the key measures you think about to assess the performance this person is producing in the job that they're in? But it's based on the job, not the person. So a key performance indicator is based on a project manager, an executive assistant role, a sales role, a IT manager role, a marketing role, a social media person role. The role itself has key measures that we want to evaluate because the role should be contributing to a result. Right. So every role should have some key measures. It's not going to be complicated. But when we talk about expectations, you have to think about the roles in your company, not just the people. Then we put people in roles and that brings us to our final expectation, which are individual goals. So key performance measures are for the role. Individual goals are for Janice in the role, are for Joyce in the role, are for Kevin in the role. And those can vary based on experience and tenure and knowledge base and projects. So when we use the word expectation, you can see it gets very broad. So I like to make sure we know what all these definitions are. And as the leader of the business, you're very clear about when you use that word. So a lot of times people will just say, well, my expectations weren't met.

Which ones? The manual that you never told anyone, the expectations that should be written down, the standards that are in a policy guide, the key performance measures for the job or the goals. Here isn't to confuse you, it's to clarify. It's to make sure that when you communicate with team members, you're clear. But it starts with you understanding the rules you have for other people that you never talk about. What are the expectations you have for behavior based on your values? What natural policies are an extension of that? What does each role need to contribute to your company? And then what does each individual contribute based on the role? Hopefully you got all that.

Right. Good job. Have a great day. Thanks for tuning in.

Hey there, gorgeous. Are you ready to take everything I teach you in this podcast and put it to work in your business and really learn how to master leads, your team? If so, I'd love to have you as a client in the Founders Lab to learn more about how we can work together. Head over to Chrisplackie.com.

Join there. You'll see everything you need to know about the Founders Lab and how to get started. See you there.