Succeeding at work has been on my mind—I'm in the process of changing fulltime jobs. It is a natural time to look back on what I've accomplished at the old job, identify what I wish I'd done differently, and anticipate what I hope to accomplish at the new one.
Here is a trio of blog posts I've come across (all but the first link are blogs I follow fairly regularly) that give good advice on how to succeed at work, which is largely about properly managing expectations:
Looking back I can see that at times I've felt so driven to meet utterly unrealistic deadlines or goals, and often repeatedly pulled the rabbit out of the hat to accomplish them, that such "magic" becomes the expected norm.
The inevitable danger, however, is that when people have expectations of you as a miracle worker, and successful miracles breeds a longer line of people in line beseeching miracles, you reach a limit where you can't keep giving the proverbial 110%. As the Under Promise, Over Deliver essay notes, peak performance cannot (by definition!) be sustained.
So people who learn to expect miracles may wonder "what's wrong with [Michael]?" when overload occurs and there is a drop from 110+% to 100%.
This is an interesting situation: expectations are failed, not because of past-failed expectations, but because of past expectations being consistantly exceeded. Obviously when you regularly exceed expectations you somehow need to actively and conciously manage the resulting "expectation inflation."
—Michael A. Cleverly
Tuesday, February 15, 2005 at 22:04