Expectations are what most managers keep hidden in deep, impregnable underground siloes that grind open painfully slow once a year, during review season, to nuke any last vestige of hope that you might get a raise next year. It's a popular approach that gives them lots of optionality in exchange for very little effort.
Here, we provide a variety of recipes on how you can set expectations with your engineers. These recipes often become ingredients to other parts of 'Increasing the Capacity To Win', for example the compensation recipes, coaching recipes, mentorship recipes, etc.
- Scorecards: the most detailed type of expectations, usually tailor-made for a given role.
- Ladders: expectations for a given 'job family' and how they change at increasing 'levels'.
- Onboardings: specialized expectations targeting employees new to a role.
These are raw notes right now. Will turn into a recipe in the future.
- Defining 'winning' is almost half the battle!
- Most great people will figure out how to win, if they understand the definition. Aligning on it is the hard part?
- Focus on RESULTS (outputs) not on APPROACH (input).
- Example from L @ D.
- Expectations are not 1:1 (you + individual). They are often group expectations; how your employee behaves is influenced by what others in his peer group expect him/her to do. So the more you can have a shared definition (see CULTURE), the more likely your employee will understand expectations.
- End goal: shared definition of SUCCESS.
- how do you know you've achieved this??
- watching behaviors? Early signs?
- #Wisdom: 'I pay attention to what you worry about. If you are worried about it, then I probably don't need to be worried about it.'
https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/competencies/
- A lot of expectation setting ends up being more leadership-y, especially if there is a VERY large gap between current expectations and the ones you want to put into place.
- Under Leadership I think I want a section around "raising the engineering bar". It should point to this expectations section...