True confession - I haven’t always been a kind leader.

One of the things I struggle with in my journey to be a courageous leader is setting expectations with my team. Or with clients. And with family members.

The theme of setting expectations has always been a struggle for me. And this is where I know I have a growing edge, and an opportunity to practice.

This idea is really on my mind these days. The quote from Brené Brown in Dare to Lead is:

Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.

Let me explain.

My leadership journey started really young.

It started early, when I was coaching synchronized swimming at the age of 16. I went to Australia when I was 19 to be a state coach.

Those leadership and coaching roles came to me at a really young age, and were incredibly formative (which is another way of saying I screwed up a lot!).

I came back to Canada at 21 and went to university. I ended up in sport management, and had assumed the executive directorship of a small games organization by the time I was 26.

So, leadership has been there. And oh my gosh, I wish I could go back and do a lot of that over again with the tools in my toolbox now!

And I would have learned to set clear expectations.

And when I say expectations, what I’m really talking about in a leadership context are some very simple expectations about:

What needs to be delivered?

What is the final product of a project?

What's the goal of this project?

What does it mean to involve people?

When does it need to be delivered?

I struggled to set clear expectations because I didn’t take the time to get clear in my own mind.

I wanted things done, but I didn’t take the time to get clear with myself and so I didn’t take time to share them with my team.

And so I recognize that while I was maybe a very personable leader and I certainly relied on my relationship-building skills, I was actually not a very kind leader.

Because I left a lot of things in the grey zone.

I held this subconscious hope that people could just read my mind and see things the way I saw them.

And that they would just get on board with it and do things the way I would do them. And deliver them on a timeline or in a final product the way that I would do it.

I didn't want to have to do the work of articulating it, documenting it, tracking it, holding them accountable to it.

That was not an area of strength for me. And what I've learned now—certainly in my leadership and what I observe in the leaders that I work with—is that when we miss that step of being clear, people don't know what we want.

They don't know what success looks like. They don't know how what is expected of them. 

That's another piece of being clear that I know I have not done a great job of is being clear about culture or “how we do things around here” and being really explicit about the inter-personal behaviours and ways of working together.

Again, I hoped people would model my behaviour, and that that would create an aligned culture.

And we'd all be on the same page. Working hard, having fun, supporting each other.

Not everybody can read my mind and show up that way. It's always shocking when I realize this!

So. We need to be clear about the values of the team, how we work together, what we expect from one another in how we'll show up, how we'll collaborate, how we'll share work, how we'll divide work, how we'll honour time, all these seemingly basic things that we're not actually clear about, as leaders.

We need to make them explicit instead of relying on the implicit.

My challenge to myself now is to really pay attention to expectations and be clear about them. Articulate them. Get them out of my head and into the space so that everybody can respond to that.

And we can create the opportunity to co-create those expectations.

Yes, as a leader, sometimes the expectations are fixed, coming from the top. They are what they are, from an organizational perspective.

The way we deliver on those expectations, however, can be a co-created conversation.

How we collaborate. How we work together. How we behave with one another. All of that is the space for co-creation, even if you have some really fixed expectations about deliverables.

So my challenge to you is to notice where you're holding expectations, and challenge yourself to articulate them. Say that thing out loud so that people can know them.

That is kind leadership: to be crystal clear about what you're looking for, so that people can meet your expectations.

Because they want to meet your expectations. But a lot of the time, they just don't know what they are. (And then we get ourselves into some sticky feedback situations, which is a blog for another day.)

Setting expectations may feel uncomfortable. And acknowledging that is important. It's certainly helped me just to recognize, Oooh, this is a little uncomfortable for me…and I need to do it anyway.

Part of being a brave leader is moving through that discomfort. Recognizing it, and doing it anyway.

Nine times out of ten, what's on the other side of that discomfort is something even better than what you were holding on to before.

All right. Go be kind, leaders. You can do this.