You will be able to state the unwritten rules of your team so people are not judged against standards they never heard.
Wei Ling answers client emails within the hour. She always has, it's how she built her reputation, and she assumed everyone on the team did the same. Then a client complained that a question to Farid had gone unanswered for a day and a half. When she raised it, Farid was genuinely surprised. He checks email twice a day so he can concentrate on the reports, and no one had ever told him that wasn't fine.
He wasn't failing a standard. He was failing a standard nobody had stated. That is one of the most common and least fair problems on a new manager's team.
Goals, from lesson 4.1, From team purpose to individual goals, say what results you want. Expectations cover how the work is done day to day. They are the unwritten rules of the team: how fast to reply to a client, how good a draft needs to be before it goes to you, when to escalate a problem, how to flag that a deadline will slip, whether cameras go on in video meetings.
Every team has these rules. In most, they live only in the manager's head and the habits of the longest-serving people. New joiners learn them by breaking them.
New managers fall into this trap more than most. You were good at the job, so your way of doing it feels like the obvious way. Replying within the hour, double-checking every number, calling a client before emailing: you do these without thinking, so you assume others do too.
They often don't, and there is usually no reason they should have guessed. Farid's twice-a-day email habit came from his previous manager, who wanted long blocks of focused time. In that team, it was the right call. Nobody had told him this team worked differently.
The result is a manager quietly frustrated by things people don't know they are doing wrong. Over time that frustration leaks out in tone and in reviews, and people feel judged against a test they never saw.
The fix is to write the expectations down. But how you write them matters a great deal.
Many teams write expectations as traits. "Be proactive." "Take ownership." "Communicate well." These sound right, and almost nobody disagrees with them, which is the problem. Everyone thinks they are already proactive. Nobody can check.
Write them instead as behaviours you could observe. Compare these pairs. "Be responsive" against "reply to client emails within four working hours, even if only to say when you'll have an answer." "Take ownership" against "if you can see a deadline will slip, tell the person waiting before it slips, with a new date." "Quality matters" against "check figures against the source before a report goes to a client."
The behaviour version can be checked, taught to a new joiner, and discussed fairly when it isn't met. If you took Communicate at work, lesson 7.1, Describe the behaviour, not the person, makes the same point about feedback, and it applies just as well here.
On a hybrid team, include the expectations that hybrid work creates: which days people are in the office, how quickly to answer the team chat, when cameras are on, and how to show you are away from your desk. Communicate at work covers these in more depth in lesson 8.4, Set team norms for remote and hybrid work.
You could write the list and send it round. People would read it, and most would follow it for a while. But rules announced by a manager feel imposed, and they tend to fade once people stop worrying about them.
Bring a draft to the team instead and treat it as a starting point. Ask what they would change, what's missing, and what is unrealistic. Your team will often make the expectations better. Farid pointed out that "within four working hours" was impossible on report days, so the team agreed a Monday exception with an auto-reply. Hui Min added one Wei Ling had never thought of: when you take over someone's client during leave, read the last two weeks of the thread before replying.
The conversation also surfaces the expectations people already have of each other and of you. One person may want to be told about changes before they are announced to the whole office. Another may want a rule about after-hours messages. Those belong on the list too.
Five is a good number to start with. Pick the ones that cause the most friction today, write each as a behaviour, and keep the list short enough that people remember it.
Draft your five now, in the behaviour form, so they are ready to bring to the team.
Draft five team working expectations as observable behaviours and bring them to your next team meeting for discussion.
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