Are Your Expectations Clear?

Karen's career has taken her through various roles within the extractives industry, with a heavy focus on managing and executing projects involving the characterization and mitigation of environmental risks and opportunities. She offers strategic direction, consulting, training and implementation services in the realms of embedding sustainability goals and environmental assessment requirements into business operations, strategic plans, decision making processes, and project plans and execution.

  Communications Management   Lessons Learned  

Have you ever had a situation where your expectations were not met? Where the person you were engaged with was clearly on a different wavelength regarding the expected outcomes?

On the job, we have the responsibility to ensure that the people working for us understand what it is that we want. Otherwise, what was the purpose of them working for us in the first place? This is something we hear a lot about—clarity of scope, well-defined targets…all critically necessary in order to achieve success.

Well, this is a story where it seems that lines got crossed in conveying information from one party to the next. It is a common story conveyed through a personal experience, perhaps not so complex to require a lot of thought—but it really goes to show how much attention we need to place on clarity at the beginning, and in attaining agreement or commitments to achieving an aligned view of the outcomes.

The Situation
A few weeks ago, I realized that there was dripping water in the mechanical room of my house. An unpleasant surprise, especially given some of the damage that had already occurred. But once discovered, I easily sourced the problem, took pictures of the area and recorded information about the parts requiring replacement. I also isolated the problem and shut off its source of water to stop the dripping and reduce the additional damage it might do.

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