Setting Expectations

How to underpromise, overdeliver

Setting expectations is an art. The best founders and leaders excel at it.

Interestingly, despite being one of the most common things in an organization, it’s not really formally taught. The best entrepreneurs learn from experience. They become masters at understanding how to set expectations, with the goal of exceeding them consistently. Doing this well requires exercising judgement in the face of uncertainty and synthesizing a number of key inputs to make an informed decision about the right path forward.

The trap I most often see leaders fall into with this is to set expectations too low. Some might call this “sandbagging.” The art is in setting reasonable expectations, and moving the pieces on the board to exceed them, consistently.

How do you set expectations for your team? For your board? For your customers? Success starts here, and compounds as you consistently exceed those expectations over long periods of time.