If an employee gets fired and that conversation is the first they’ve heard of a performance problem, the communication failure doesn’t belong to the employee. Most workplace performance issues—including the ones that end in termination—trace back to a gap in how expectations were set and communicated in the first place. Here’s what that gap looks like, and the habit that closes it.
I’ve been watching The Four Seasons on Netflix — three couples, decades of friendship, a standing tradition of vacationing together. Mild spoilers ahead, but only for episode one.
Early in that episode, Nick tells his two oldest friends that he’s planning to leave his wife, Anne. On the weekend of their 25th anniversary. Now, that’s awful in a myriad of ways, but it isn’t what got me ranting at my television. What got me is that he blindsides her. He tells his friends how miserable he is, how long he’s been thinking about this, what he feels, what he needs — and the first Anne will hear of any of it is the end of the marriage.
Is it so much to ask that he mention some of this, ANY of this to his wife before he says sayonara? There should have been conversations about this. I don’t love the word “should,” but I’m standing by it here. For a marriage — especially one of 25 years’ standing — that’s a pretty low bar, but this character completely failed to clear it.
The workplace version of a blindside breakup
The working world’s version of this breakup is firing someone. Letting someone go for cause should not be a surprise. If “you’re not meeting my expectations, so I’m letting you go” is the first an employee hears that there’s any problem with their performance, there’s been a communication failure — and it belongs to the person ending the relationship.
I can speak to this one personally. At my very first job out of college, I was let go. When they called me in to deliver the bad news, that meeting was the first I’d heard that anything was wrong — which is the same failure in a different outfit.
Nobody reads minds
My husband and I established rule one of our relationship from the very beginning: neither of us reads minds. You cannot expect someone to know something you have not specifically articulated — whether that’s something practical like “we are low on milk” or something that’s going on in your head or your heart.
This rule is relevant to professional situations too, and it matters most with expectations, because so much of the employer-employee relationship is expectations. The employer has them and communicates them; the employee attempts to meet them. (The employee gets to have expectations too, but that’s a different essay.) The employee’s ability to meet expectations depends entirely on how well they were communicated. If they weren’t communicated well, then it’s purely accidental if anyone ever meets them.
One skill, every relationship
This probably won’t be the last post I write inspired by a piece of pop culture. I see a lot of parallels between personal and professional relationship issues. Articulating your expectations and communicating your needs isn’t a marriage skill or a management skill. It’s one skill, and it goes wherever you go.
The entry point is genuinely modest. Saying your expectations out loud. Mentioning a need before it curdles into a grievance. Attempting to communicate. Anything other than silence is a pretty low bar to clear.
So, a little self-reflection: how are you at communicating your expectations of the people around you? Is that something you could stand to work on? Let me know in the comments!