Leadership and your own expectations

If we take a honest look at ourselves, we see that we have expectations of everything and everyone around us. For example we expect our employees to do their work and realize the vision, mission and goals of the organization. The vision, mission and goals are again expectations of what the organization can achieve, as they have not yet been realized. In essence we expect to carry out our vision, to realize our mission and reach our goals. But is that what really happens? If we look at how many companies have a vision, but never achieve a workforce, where every employee carries the vision, you should start wondering.
So what is the use of expectations, if they do not become real?
Maybe the most important thing about, expectations is not to make them external. You should not expect others to realize your goals, or you could say your expectations. In a sense, the only thing you can expect of others is that their expectations are the same as yours. Or even better, their expectations go beyond yours and support yours
If you really expect others to realize the expectations you have from yourself, those expectations are no longer yours.

But why is it so important to realize your own expectations? Because your expectations energize you. They give direction to your live, based on you subconscious knowledge of your talents. But they also give the motivation, to stay motivated in any situation. Take this quantitative expectation some people have.
- I expect to have enough money, within ten years, to make it possible to travel the world.
Such an expectation can even be realized by cleaning buildings for ten years. If you keep your expectation in sight, you will succeed, while doing all kinds of other fun stuff. And by keeping the expectation in sight, you will endure ten years of cleaning buildings. (By the way, I expect that cleaning buildings is dull and tedious work).
But why do I call this an expectation and not a goal? Because a goal is something that seems to stand outside yourself. It is something that can lead to disappointment, if for example it is not reached. A goal is also something people like te use to settle scores. An expectation however is something, that leaves room for all those strange things that happen to people. Lets be honest, who would have expected forty years ago, that hypertext would become important and you could become a multimillionaire using it. Besides most people who now are multimillionaire thanks to internet, probably never expected that that would happen. They probably expected that they would be having fun with using their knowledge of and skills for internet.

Leadership and goals

Setting goals is a important part of the function of a leader. Often this is described with having a vision, although in laymen terms it is called setting goals. An important point when setting goals is setting the right goals. And to be able to set the richt goals, one needs the right information for the situation. An example of setting the richt goals and having the right information is an anecdote about a basketball player who took up running, because basketball was not really his game. Before he began running, he called a trainer. The trainers advised him to start running eight miles every day for a week and then call him back. After a week he would see results, the trainer added. After a week of running eight miles every day, the runner found he was still running the eight miles in the same time as when he began running. Disappointed he called the trainer, that his time had not improved and that could not have been the goal. The trainer answered with a question: “Are you still out of breath after running eight miles as you were at the beginning of the week?” The runner had to admit, that his condition had improved over the week. And he could only conclude that he had sat himself the wrong goals. So the only difference between the trainer and the runner, was the amount of knowledge. The trainer knew that a better running condition starts with better use of your lounges, not a faster time.

So being able to set the right goals is an important leadership skill. Setting the wrong goals will lead to disappointment and disappointment will lead to resistance. But setting the right goals needs information. Information about the possibilities and abilities and about the situation in which those abilities are to be used. It asks for the ability to tune the available abilities to the situation. To recognize which abilities are needed in a situation and see which abilities are available in yourself and your organization. But it also needs the ability to see the possibilities and impossibilities of a situation and through that set the right goals. Because setting realistic objectives, is more important to create the feeling that reality is manageable, than setting high and lofty goals, that will be forever out of reach. Besides it is more fun to make real small steps, than become disappointed over giant steps you will never make.