The importance of setting expectations for your team

People want to know what to expect. No one likes to be surprised. As leaders, this includes the team we support. It is a simple concept, but sometimes we make certain assumptions in our work and miss some key foundational elements of leadership.

I was reminded of this lesson a few years ago: I was still relatively new in my current role at American Airlines and our entire workforce took our first team member (our term for employee) survey in at least a dozen years. As you would expect, the results showed some things we did well, but it also made it clear that we had some things to work on.

For instance, the speed of our work left little time for recognizing what we had accomplished—both as a team and individually. We also needed to be more intentional about making sure our up-and-coming team members had access to the proper learning and training options available to them.

These were items we could fix and needed to fix. However, the most important lesson didn’t come with a simple review of the results. After the survey data came out, our communications leadership team held a series of listening sessions with the broader team to dig deeper into the issues we needed to address.