Chapter 5
Expectations and Leadership

Very simply put, you need to expect to win every day. It's critical to define winning as not only doing well professionally but also touching people's lives. Expecting to win at least puts the probability of doing so on your side. There are no guarantees, but if you don't expect to win, you have negative expectations, making the probability that you will do well virtually zero.

Before we really discuss the topic of expectations, I think it's important to define winning. Too often we attach the concept of winning only to those people who lead the team in sales, those people who at the end of the year are given awards for being the best. In sport we talk about winning as the team that has more runs, more touchdowns, or more points.

In the context of expectations, I would like you to define winning as executing the process well. As we discussed in the last chapter on goal setting, all you can do is ensure that you perform well; winning is basically out of your control.

Recently I worked with a pitcher who was bothered by his record, even though at the end of the year he had the best numbers of his career. His record was 0.500, but in his mind, he did not pitch very well. We sat and talked about the fact that once you throw a pitch, you don't control what happens afterward. You don't control the outcome, but you can control how well you execute. The rest usually takes care of itself.

The same principle holds true in business. If you're a leader on your team, all you can do is execute correctly every day, have a strong work ethic, flaunt your assets, try to eliminate your liabilities, have realistic goals—and expect to do well as a result.

I would like one expectation of everybody, whether in sport or business, to be to have fun. Have fun at what you do. Not the laughing, screaming, hugging kind of fun, but rather personal fulfillment that you did something well that day.

One thing you can do to almost ensure that positive things happen is to have one of your expectations be to touch somebody's life every day. Success is not about money. It's not about achievement. It's about helping other people. If you set out every single day to touch someone's life and you, in fact, do that, it goes a long way in solidifying your reputation as a leader. Touching someone's life may be as simple as a friendly hello or a pat on the back. It doesn't have to be some magnificent, striking thing that you do. It's just a way to show other people that you care about them.

One of the biggest struggles that I've had to deal with in my career is trying to get clients to expect to do well every day. We basically grow up being taught to respond to negative expectations. If you have children, the question I ask is, “When was the first time you ever said no to an infant?” It probably was when they were two or three days old. It's not a malicious no but it could be in response to trivial things such as lying on their stomach or knocking the mobile off the bed. Once babies get to crawling, they hear, “No, don't crawl here; don't crawl there.” Parents put up the gates. By the time they get into tee-ball, they hear so many negative comments from coaches and parents.

I wrote a book called Let Them Play, which was to help parents and coaches make the environment better for kids. Through research, I'd determined that 75 percent of kids drop out of sport at 13 years old. It has always bothered me that so many kids drop out of an activity that probably teaches more life skills than any other kids can go through—and there has to be a reason. One reason could be they've been in competition eight years, and maybe they've had enough. But another likely reason is the number of times that they've had negative feedback from coaches and parents over those eight years.

Years ago I had two sons in tee-ball; one was four and the other, five. One day I went to the park, which was a pretty bad park. Two weeks earlier a parent had shot at an umpire. And so with that in mind, I sat and watched a game.

I'll never forget what I saw. There was a four-year-old who was swinging the bat. In tee-ball, there is no pitcher. Instead, the ball is on a tee at just the right height for kids, and they swing until they hit it. Well this boy kept missing, but he got tired of swinging, so he went and sat down and started crying. Instead of consoling him, the coach went over and picked him up by his shoulders and literally threw him over the fence. The kid hit the ground on his knees and started running toward the woods, and the coach yelled after him, “Don't ever come back to this park with that whiny attitude.”

I start looking around for the kid's parent because I think we're going to have some action. But the guy next to me nudged me and said, “Dr. Jack, the coach is his dad.” What a fun family it must be! I wonder how many times kids in that family are told no.

The next season I signed up to coach, and I wanted to provide a good environment. I wanted kids to expect to come and play and have fun every single day and walk away with smiles on their faces. On my team I had 14 kids who had obviously never seen a baseball. At that time I worked with the Braves, which really impressed the parents, so they kept telling their kids that we were going to win it all. Well, the kids didn't have a clue who the Braves were.

On the first day of practice, parents brought their kids to the field 30 minutes early so they could claim the best positions. The parents would run up to me asking, “How are you going to pick positions? My son wants to play left field! My son wants to play shortstop!” I just kept thinking that these kids are four and five years old. So I asked everyone to sit down so I could show them how we were going to pick positions. I told the kids to run out on the field and sit down somewhere. And they did. I looked at the parents and said, “That's where they play.” We changed positions every game and we had fun.

I'll never forget the first game. My son, who was five, had come with me to the Braves' stadium a lot and, of course, picked up some habits. He comes up to bat the first time and takes off his warm-up jacket. It's about 90 degrees. Then, he starts adjusting his batting gloves. And, of course, the ball is sitting on a stick right in front of him. Finally, he steps in and he's got a big wad of bubble gum in his jaw, and he's spitting and digging. I'm just hoping he hits it. He does and the ball goes about 10 feet. I was at third base and I started hollering to him, “Run, Hunter, run.” Well, he ran straight to me instead of to first. And he didn't just run—he slid. He got up and was wiping the mud off his shirt. I didn't want to embarrass him because I wanted him to be having fun. So I put my arm around him and said, “Son, I don't know who made the rules out here—it wasn't me—but they're telling me that when you hit the ball, you're supposed to touch that base over there first. That's probably the reason they call it first.”

And he said, “Okay, Dad.” Then, he slid into home. I don't know what he heard, but that's what he did. So I ran down to home plate and got over the umpire and started yelling, “He's safe, isn't he?”

The umpire looked up with this pitiful look and said, “Yes, sir, I guess he is safe.”

The parents on the other team are hollering, “He ran the wrong way! He ran the wrong way!”

And I went over and leaned up against the fence, and I said, “Folks, we're going to worry about direction next year. This year we're just going to hit it and run.”

It was a fun beginning to the year. And parents understood where I came from in regard to enjoying the game and having fun. I didn't care what they did because I wanted them to have a good time. I wanted to see all my kids playing again next year.

After that game, I went over to the field where my other son, Tripp, was playing. I didn't see him on the field, so I asked the coach, “Coach, where's Tripp?”

“Left field,” he said.

And I said, “Coach, you need to look again.”

Tripp had used a rock to prop his glove up facing home plate so it would be caught if somebody hit a fly ball out there. Then, he'd gone to play on the swings with his sisters. I love it when a plan comes together, so I just waited in the car for him after the game. Of course, he had to go back and get his glove.

When he got to the car and he said, “Dad, we won again.”

And I said, “Son, you are a special athlete.”

I always look back on that as one of the most fun experiences I've ever had and I hope the kids on my team feel the same way. From that first team I coached, there are kids who still call me to talk. And that's important to me.

I always ask corporate groups, “How many of you expect to have fun every single day?” Most of the time about 10 percent raise their hands and that bothers me because not enough of us enjoy what we do. We work, we make money, we pay the bills, we raise a family, but we don't really get fulfillment from our jobs.

I think it's the job of a leader to make sure that the people on their team have fun, get fulfillment, and enjoy what they do. I know for a fact that some days are much worse than other days. But I also know that if you work hard enough, at the end of the day you can find something that was good. So you need to understand that expectations are very important.

Now, here's the most important thing to remember about expectations: When you set your expectations, you need to go back and review the last three chapters on assets and liabilities, personality, and goal setting. Because if your expectations don't match up with those three things, then it's very hard to have fun at what you do. So there has to be some coordination of what you bring to the party and what you need to do within the job to flaunt your assets and make sure that you can achieve your goals.

As I mentioned before, it's a fact that most people leave their jobs not because of money or position or title. They leave their jobs because they don't know what's expected. It's critical that your expectations for each role be very specific and clearly communicated.

What we're going to look at in the rest of this chapter is how expectations are formed. Too many times I find that my clients are performing to others' expectations as opposed to their own. When I sit down with clients, the first thing I have them do is list their personal and professional expectations. I'd like you to do the same when you get to the exercises at the end of this chapter. Be very specific. Next, write down what you think other people expect of you, personally and professionally. Then write down what you think is expected of you by your teammates, the folks who work with you in your immediate area of the company.

What happens is, because all of us want to belong to something, we tend to gear ourselves toward the expectations of other people. When you work to please other people, you begin to lose track of your personal expectations because you lose track of your assets and spend more of your time trying to avoid your liabilities. And so it's very important that you understand the expectations of other people and how they fit with the ones you have for yourself.

As a leader, it's critical that you sit down with your team and have them list what they think you expect of them and what they expect of themselves. Then, look at your own list of what you expect of them. You're going to find some interesting results.

Number one: You're going to find that many times people's expectations are not similar to those that you have of them. It's hard to have a cohesive team unless everybody knows everybody else's expectations. Once you get that settled, then it becomes a pretty workable team. At least it becomes a workable team in that the probability of succeeding is shifted to your side.

Because of the social and economic environment, there are so many people who spend most of their time trying to please the people around them because they worry about losing their jobs. One of the most important things we can do—and we can do it through expectations—is to help people understand how important they are to the team success when it comes to winning, not simply survival.

If we get back to the point that I was making about kids and the word no, it's interesting to note that by the time kids are 18 and finish high school, in a normal home they've been told what not to do an average of about 200,000 times. For example, if they get 80 percent on an exam in school, they're criticized for the 20 percent they missed. They don't get the positive reinforcement that was common in past years in education.

I think teachers are now more focused on test scores than learning, and that's created a very difficult environment for kids in regard to expectations about learning life skills, how to recover from adversity, how to deal with other people, how to lead, and how to feel. There's a list that's a mile long of things that kids could learn in school if there were more positive reinforcement and the expectations were conveyed by teachers that success was expected in regard to learning, not necessarily just in regard to test scores.

I have so many pitchers in baseball over the years who have spent so much time trying not to throw bad pitches, trying to not give up hits, trying to not do things, that they almost forget their assets and instead spend their time trying to not fail. And I understand why. When you get into the world, we almost have to experience a major attitudinal upheaval as far as expecting to do well because adulthood is not what we lived with for the first 18 to 21 years. Once you get your team to the point that they do, in fact, expect to do well, then life becomes more fun for everybody.

I've been in sports psychology for 45 years and I can honestly say I've never had a bad day at work. I've had challenging days, obviously, which have made me better. I've tried to learn something new every day. But when I look back at every single day, something good happened. For example, if one of my pitchers pitched a good game but the team lost, to me was not a bad thing. So many times we gloss over the little things that mean a lot in regard to the big picture, and we really lose track of this whole expectation process. To keep the right mindset, you need to do several things: First, you need to make sure that there's some consistency between your goals, your expectations, the probability that you're going to do well, and the possibility that you can do well. Once you've done that and put the package together, you will find that leadership is easier because everybody understands each other better.

I remember years ago when I was with one baseball team, our third baseman was the leader on the team. Every day, he got up and he expected good things to happen. He never talked about it to teammates really, and he never, you know, flaunted his assets around, but his work ethic was incredible, his dedication was amazing, his ability to have fun every day was remarkable, and the teammates around him picked up on his attitude, and he became the leader, even though he didn't necessarily want to be the leader. But he was the leader of the team because of the way he played the game. I've seen the same thing happen with sales groups within a corporate environment.

As a leader, you obviously want to know what's expected of you from your team, but perhaps it's just as important to know what's expected of you from the executive level.

In the corporate environment, I talk about leadership as being from the CEO and the director level not because I think those folks are necessarily leaders. I think they can create an environment so that the leaders can lead and positive expectations are conveyed. And to really enable leadership at every level in an organization, the executives need to let the leaders play the game. Leaders are not developed through micromanagement. Leaders are developed by being given tasks to execute. And they're rewarded for that. Everybody needs to be rewarded for what they do, not necessarily in a grand way but they need some form of recognition.

I recently worked with one person who was an owner of several automobile dealerships in the state of Kentucky. He had called me because he had gotten to the point in his career that his expectations were no longer positive. He would come to work every day and run the company, but he wasn't getting any fulfillment from it. The dealerships were doing well. The salespeople were doing well. He bought a new dealership, and he hoped that would rekindle his emotional flame, but it hadn't done that.

We met several times and talked about a lot of things. We talked about his goals and about how he had inherited the company—we talked about all kinds of things that were peripheral to his work. And it became evident that he had depended on the job to provide him with the fulfillment that should have come from his personal life.

Too many times when I talk with people about expectations, I find that they very seldom talk about personal or family things. Ninety percent of what they list regarding expectations concerns work-related things. And I think it's so important, especially for leaders of a group in a company, to convey what they need to expect success in their personal and professional lives. It really bothered me that he didn't include a single expectation about his personal life. We talked and talked about it, and finally I said, “You know, your job is what you do. It's not who you are.”

It's hard to convince young corporate people of that sometimes, but jobs come and go. When it's all said and done, family is all you've got. And you got to understand that you need to have strong, solid expectations in regard to your personal life so that when disappointments come professionally, you can go to your personal life and realize that there are a lot of positive things that are there because you've expected them.

It's very important that when you do your lists you include personal things. I'm not saying that everybody has to be married and have children and go to church. I'm just saying that for every work-related thing that's significant to you, you need to have something personally significant, meaning that your personal, not professional, life needs to be the reason you do what you do. Your job needs to support your personal life. Once you get to that point, then you understand the role of the professional environment within your personal life and you're able to accept the ups and downs a little more easily because the personal things in your life are good and they're consistent.

I've known too many people in sport and in the corporate environment who, when their professional career ended, they were completely lost. And it's sad to see. I've known people who have made hundreds of millions of dollars in their professional lives, but when they don't work anymore and they're with only their personal lives, they're miserable. That's a sad state to be in. You need to make sure that you're always doing things in your professional work to support the personal side of your life.

The only athletes in 45 years that I've ever worried about were those who were lost after they quit playing because they didn't have anything else. I worked with one athlete who had signed his first contract when he was 15. He retired at 73. By the time he was 73, the sport had become his life and when he retired, he had nothing. From the outside looking in, he seemed to have a lot, but within himself he didn't have anything. It's sad to see that happen, but it happens many more times than not. So I work with those people and try to help them understand that you have to keep the wheels turning.

I am 72 and people ask me when I'm going to retire. Why would I retire when I get fulfillment every single day and I expect every day to be a good day? Why would I leave that? And I tell people that I love what I do, I expect good things every day, and I think that's one reason that, as I said before, I've never had a bad day at work in 45 years.

And so you need to be in an environment with at least the potential for excitement every day. There are some jobs that are tougher than others. There are some jobs that are less fulfilling than others. I know that. I'm tuned in to real life. But I also know that many times we let things fall on the negative side of the ledger simply because we don't expect good things to happen. From this point on in the book we'll deal the work environment, stress, and the peripheral things around your job that enable you to be a positive person.

It really bothers me when I see people spend so much money going to hear motivational speakers who scream and holler at them to “pull your own strings” and “reach for the power within.” I think people feel good after those meetings for about an hour or so, but then they get back to the job and think, “That speaker has never been in my environment.” You need to have long-lasting things that you can hang your hat on. A quick rah-rah meeting or an empty motivational speech is not going to do it.

I have never in 45 years tried to motivate an athlete because, I think, if they're not motivated to play a great game, then they've got issues I can't deal with. It's a privilege, it's a blessing to be able to play sports, and I feel the same way about being in some corporate environments. What an opportunity is the possibility to do well! The team and environment around you play major roles, as we will discuss in later chapters, but you cannot thrive unless you expect to do well every day. Understanding that can be a turning point in your life. If you write your expectations down and look at them every day, it can change your life.

img Expectations: Professional

Use this worksheet for listing expectations to help to help you win every day as a leader.

List five professional expectations you have for yourself.

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List five things your team expects from you professionally.

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Actions to Meet Professional Expectations

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img Expectations: Personal

Use this worksheet for listing expectations to help you win every day.

List five personal expectations you have for yourself.

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List five things others expect from you personally.

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Actions to Meet Personal Expectations

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