Hopefully you have read my first five blog posts and enjoyed them. That creates an expectation for this blog and thereby a conundrum for me; the higher I set the bar on any given blog post, the more is expected from the next one!
This process of constantly increasing expectations is a constant theme in life; a child does well in an exam and immediately the expectation is that they will do well in the next exam; we shoot a good round of golf only to find our expectations of a similar following round are the opposite of reality!
The Japanese word ‘kaizen’ refers to the business philosophy of continuous incremental improvement, whether applied to business or personal matters. The philosophy is sound and an admirable pursuit, however at a humanistic level it is clearly unrealistic to expect constant improvement, there will be occasional dips. Not every blog post will be as compelling a read as the previous one unfortunately.
So how do we take this insight and apply it to our communication?
The driver for me to write a blog post on this topic came from a recent automated customer survey email I received after calling the customer service hotline of a large airline. You can see the wording below.
I use this airline regularly and their customer service is excellent. In this particular case, I had called to change a flight return date and the whole process was completed within 60 seconds. I then received the captioned customer survey asking my opinion of the service relative to my expectations.
Obviously, the airline is looking for me to click the happiest green face to the right. The problem is that based on the wording of the question, I should click the orange face in the middle because I got what I expected; excellent service.
Using expectations as a baseline is the mistake here. The airline should be focused on outright customer service level which definitely merited the happiest green face.
The framing of our communication is therefore key to receiving the response we are looking for, and it turns out, to managing expectations.
When I stand in front of a class of students at the beginning of a day’s training, I say something like this to frame the day ahead and set expectations;
“You will all have a different perception of me based on your personality type, your values and beliefs, and the way you filter information. My objective is to trigger enough insights for each and every one of you so that by the end of the day, you will all take value from today’s training and leave with a positive impression of our time together.”
By framing the day ahead in this way, I am actively managing expectations.
The key to this approach is to do the framing before you ask your question or make your statement. It’s too late after you’ve said it.
And that very simply is the takeaway for this weeks blog.
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Finally and as mentioned above, there are 5 previous blogs. To catch up and make sure you’re not missing out on some great insights, check out the archives here.