Managing & Developing People
Setting Expectations and Accountability
Naming what "good" looks like before the work starts, and following through when it isn't met.
Every other skill on this track — coaching, running a good one-on-one, building a motivated team, onboarding someone well — quietly assumes the person on the other end already knows what they're aiming for and what happens if they miss it. Most managers never say either part out loud with the precision they think they do. Expectations get set once, informally, in passing, and are then treated as though they'd been signed in triplicate. Accountability without a clearly named expectation isn't accountability — it's an ambush dressed up as feedback. The actual skill is unglamorous: define what "done" looks like before work starts, say it somewhere more durable than a hallway conversation, and address the gap the moment it opens rather than at the next scheduled reckoning.
Scenarios
The one-line brief. You assign a direct report to lead a client-facing deliverable with a Slack message: "Can you own the Q3 deck for the Meridian account? Thanks!" No deadline, no mention of who else needs to review it, no sense of scope. Ten days later they present something technically complete but wildly off from what you had in mind — wrong format, wrong depth, missed the internal stakeholder who was supposed to sign off first. You're frustrated in the review meeting. What do you say, and what do you do differently before the next handoff?
The quietly forgiving review. A team member has missed three consecutive weekly commitments in standup — always with a reasonable-sounding excuse, never addressed in the moment because it felt petty to flag any single one. Performance review season arrives and you write warm, generic feedback, because naming the pattern now feels like ambushing them with six months of silence. What should have happened differently back in month one, and what do you actually say at the next one-on-one?
The standard half the team never heard. In a meeting two months ago, you mentioned — once, verbally — that code reviews should turn around within 24 hours. Half the team was in the room; the other half was on leave, in a different meeting, or just wasn't listening closely. Now you're frustrated that "people aren't following the standard," and the people missing it genuinely don't know one exists. How do you fix this without it reading as a punitive new rule dropped out of nowhere?
Takeaway
- Write the expectation down somewhere durable — a ticket, a doc, a pinned message — not just spoken once and assumed to have landed.
- Define what "done" looks like in observable terms before work starts, not reverse-engineered from the first thing that disappoints you.
- When a commitment slips, name it within the same week. Six months of silence isn't patience, it's an unpaid debt with interest.
- Keep feedback specific to the actual gap. Warmth is not a substitute for telling someone what they need to hear.
- If a standard matters enough to enforce, say it to the whole team in a form that outlasts the room it was said in — not just to whoever happened to be present.
- Follow through on whatever consequence you implied would happen. Not following through is itself a message, and it's the one people actually learn from.