One of the most crucial factors that play a role in the success of a business (or life) is the ability to manage expectations. Managing expectations means understanding what can be done and what can’t. Managing expectations means communicating with your team and understanding their current workload and project timeline. But most of all, managing expectations means not lying to yourself, your clients, your coworkers, or your family.
If a client calls you up and says “can you do xyz by tomorrow,” don’t just say “yes.” Check with your team to make sure that everyone is on board and is able provide quality work within a reasonable time. Speed doesn’t always mean quality. It is better to take the extra day or two to make sure that the work is done right, then to get the work done early only to find that it is riddled mistakes.
Don’t set unreasonable expectations for yourself. If you’re working on a new social technology platform, don’t say that you want to make a billion dollars by the end of the year and you want to be the next Facebook. It’s not a reasonable expectation to have. If a client or coworker asks you to redo an entire report and asks for an eta, don’t try to impress them by saying you can get it done tomorrow (unless you really can make a kick ass report in one day). Don’t promise results/products/service/or commitments to anybody, unless you can deliver, and deliver with quality!
Try to under promise and over deliver and see what happens…
Long time ago, I was working at a big co and they ran a study on customer loyalty. The top factor was ‘managing expectations’…and it shows that over promise/under deliver was bad but that also, over time, under promise / over deliver could be detrimental too. The wisdom is to try to be right on the “do what you said you would do”.
Hi Laurent. I think it depends on how well you know your customers. It depends on how you underpromise and how you over deliver. It’s about the extra added value you can provide. The detrimental factor can be that over time your customers will expect more and more over delivering. It’s a balance game.