Managing to Make a Difference

Chapter 17Set the Right Expectations

You are cultivating positive relationships with your people, discovering their unique talents and strengths, optimizing the fit between their themes and their responsibilities, and working on becoming a better coach to each person on your team. What else can you do to unleash outstanding performance in the people and teams you manage? Set high expectations for their performance, make sure they are the right expectations, and communicate them in the right way. We will start with a story about how to communicate your expectations.

The Incredible Banquet Department

At The Ritz-Carlton, Tysons Corner, we had a banquet department that produced incredible results as indicated by several financial and nonfinancial metrics. This department had two outstanding managers—Steven Freund and Julie Naberhaus. We were presented with a wonderful problem. How do you motivate these people to achieve even better results? In many cases, a manager will say to the people, “Thank you for your great work, but we can't be satisfied. We need to do even better.” There are many variations of this, and most of them send the message, “You are doing well, but you are not doing well enough.”

We came up with the following alternative. After the team had achieved yet another notable success, I would visit their departmental meeting and say, “That was remarkable. You people are geniuses. I can't wait to see what you do next!” Those were very lofty expectations, articulated ...