Great Expectations: Breaking your Business One Expectation at a Time
- Megan Robinson
- Jul 23, 2025
- 19 min read
Updated: Feb 11
Expectations are something that we deal with personally, professionally. It affects and impacts every aspect of our lives.
Expectations are Everywhere
In this discussion, Megan and Katherine explore how expectations shape our professional lives and the challenges that arise when they are unclear or uncommunicated. These expectations can lead to burnout, disengagement and even an erosion of trust. With nearly two decades of experience in leadership and human resources, Catherine shares her expertise on aligning people practices with business goals.
Tease Key Insights
The Importance of Clear Communication: Expectations are everywhere in our organizations, from job descriptions to daily tasks. However, many of us operate under assumptions rather than clear agreements.
Expectations exist in various forms within an organization, including job descriptions, employee handbooks, and standard operating procedures (SOPs). However, many organizations fail to recognize the extent of these expectations and how they impact performance.
Leaders should engage in regular conversations with their teams to clarify expectations.
Why this Matters?
By prioritizing open communication, mutual responsibility, and adaptability, organizations can build trust, enhance engagement, and ultimately drive better performance. As leaders navigate the complexities of modern work environments, being intentional about setting and communicating expectations will be crucial for success.
Listen Now
In today’s fast-paced work environment, change is constant. Katherine emphasizes the importance of being transparent about these changes and their implications for your team. Instead of making promises that may not hold, leaders should communicate what can be expected during transitions. This builds a foundation of trust and allows teams to feel secure even amidst uncertainty.
I encourage you to listen to this episode and reflect on how you can implement these insights in your own organization.
Katherine Daniel
For Katherine Daniel, SHRM-SCP, Montani Consulting is the culmination of two decades of experience and success (and slight obsession, to be honest) across the fields of leadership development, employer branding, recruitment marketing, and human resources. In short, Katherine is deeply knowledgeable about all things people operations. Before launching Montani, she kick-started the joint HR and Marketing division of one of the nation’s fastest-growing media companies, spearheading people ops initiatives that led to top recognition for employee workplace satisfaction and company growth from Inc., Fortune, Entrepreneur, and many others.
While working full-time, Katherine managed to serve as a mentor, confidant, and trusted advisor for many HR pros and top executives. Then, in 2021, it became clear: Her next professional chapter would leverage her passion for helping other growth-minded business leaders build high-performing, highly loyal teams made up of people who are encouraged to bring their very best to work every day. She now lives out this passion through Montani Consulting, supporting dozens of businesses, from startups to well-established, all across the U.S. From non-profits and retail companies to those in healthcare, technology, real estate, and food production, Katherine (and team) meet the HR needs of clients wishing to reach their peak in business.
Katherine embodies the “work hard, play hard” mindset, always gearing up to catch the next live concert on her calendar or to host a get-together at her home in coastal Wilmington, NC. When the work day ends, it’s a safe bet Katherine will either have a new book in her hand or will be tuning in to Jeopardy. Either way, her rescue pup, Alice, is most definitely by her side.
Full Episode
Hello, and welcome to Culture Conversations, the podcast where we explore the people side of work. I'm your host, Megan Robinson. For years, I've found myself deep in discussions about workplace engagement with industry experts.
Now I get to share this wisdom with all leaders, new and experienced on their journeys to build cultures that maximize potential. We spend so much of our lives at work, let's make it a place where our teams can grow and succeed. Hello, and welcome to Culture Conversations.
I am Megan Robinson, and we are having one of my favorite discussions today about expectations. I know expectations are something that we deal with personally, professionally, it affects and impacts every aspect of our lives, of our cultures, of our communities, of our experience, frankly. At work, particularly, it is rife with challenges and landmines.
Today, I cannot wait to have this conversation with Catherine. Catherine is the founder of Montani Consulting, is a fractional HR firm that helps small and medium-sized businesses across the US build stronger teams, align their people practices with business goals, and lead with confidence, a couple of things I'm very, very passionate about. With nearly two decades of experience in leadership, human resources, and people operations, Catherine brings a mix of strategic insight, operational know-how, and deep passion for building workplaces where people and performance thrive.
Before launching Montani, Catherine built HR functions from the ground up at one of the country's fastest-growing media companies. She grew her team from one to over 80 people and led initiatives earning national recognition from Inc., Fortune, Entrepreneur, and others for employee satisfaction and that workplace culture. In 21, she's turned her focus fully to supporting other leaders, and today through Montani, she and her team partner with organizations from nonprofits and retail groups to tech startups and manufacturers to deliver tailored HR support through audits, leadership coaching, employee engagement work, compensation strategies, handbook development, and so much more.
Whether stepping in as an interim HR leader or serving as a longtime thought partner, Catherine is really known for her ability to make that complex people issues simple, strategic, and of course, deeply human. Welcome, Catherine. Thank you so much, Megan.
I am thrilled to be here. This is great. I'm so excited.
When we were riffing on what kind of topics we wanted to talk about and what you're really passionate about, actually aligns with a lot of the conversations I have with leaders, was about expectations. And I love that we were brainstorming this topic, right? Great expectations, breaking your business, one expectation at a time. With that being kind of the thought process for the conversation, let's start with what are we getting wrong with expectations? How is that breaking our businesses? Yeah, that's a great question.
I think first of all, is just the understanding that expectations are everywhere within the business. And you touched on there personally as well. Our life is full of expectations, but sometimes we don't stop and recognize just how many expectations we have and how many people have expectations of us.
And so this can show up in a business and job descriptions or employee handbooks or SOPs or the scope of work we have with a customer. And to stop for a moment and think, where are all of the expectations and are we aligned on those expectations? Because more often than not, what I have experienced is we come in and we'll ask a question like, do you have job descriptions? And the customer, the client will say, yes, absolutely, of course we do. And we go to look at them and they're outdated, they're incomplete, they're pieces that are certainly missing because frustrations exist in terms of performance.
And so for us, it's really challenging. Is there enough documentation throughout the organization to truly set out what those expectations are? Otherwise, they're just assumptions in our mind, assumptions that are living in our mind versus the expectations that live in documentation. I am with you.
I think the biggest thing we get wrong with expectations is assumed. And the only reason I know how to spell assume, it makes an ass out of you and me. Terrible at spelling, but I got that one down.
Also one of my favorite workshop slides, I have like the big donkey up there, assumptions make an ass out of you and me. And it is so rife either just with not having that clear documentation, but I'd even say not having that clear dialogue around it. Oftentimes, I find it is such an assumption, it is such a baked in piece that there is zero clarity.
And even something, the assumptions of how they would write an email or how they would follow up on something gets lost very, very quickly. Oh, no, I was gonna say absolutely. Well, it's the bigger pieces tend to be defined, like these big chunk ideas of how things should be, but then it's the execution that sometimes we miss, it's the how, it's the smaller processes or steps that can lead to bigger problems and lead to dysfunction within those big chunk ideas that maybe are defined.
And so it's not breaking it down far enough for everybody to be aligned and moving in the same direction with the same understanding. Well, I think that's a hard place to be because you don't want to get too granular. Where's that line between micromanaging and having clear expectations? Sure.
Well, and I think some of that would also, you know, it comes into play of the all of these relationships are two way. We are not like a slave master or it's a two way relationship of what can we each expect of each other, no matter what the leadership dynamic might be. And there is some responsibility for the person that's receiving the responsibilities.
So maybe in that reporting relationship, it's somebody that's the subordinate to ask more questions and to where it isn't micromanagement, but it's clarity and getting the clarity they need in order to execute, asking for feedback along the way. And I think it's not just about the end outcome, but what are the important pieces along the like, what are the benchmarks that we need to be looking out for along the way? So it's a two sided piece here and just how much clarity one individual needs versus the other. And that depends a lot on the individual and what they need for it, but also on that manager, on how they're going to define success.
So we start to talk about delegation, that what, that why, that how. A lot of things for us in leadership development looks at what is it that you want done? Why is it important and how are you going to do it? That how tends to be less and less important the more senior you get in that leadership. But to your point, the how oftentimes is where those expectations that are hidden, that no one's talking about.
And it could even be that how you expect someone to show up in a meeting. Yeah, well, and I think, you know, we've talked about this before, the challenge in our current workplace of working remotely, working in a hybrid environment. It's very different than when I was coming up in business and I was in an office watching others that I respected and I saw their success and I could see things that were happening behind the scenes.
The how of how they were preparing for a meeting or how they were executing on something where now a lot of our workforce, we just see the onscreen time, what happens during the performance, not the preparation. And how can we slow down, particularly for those that don't have the experience that they are earlier in their career and help guide through setting those expectations, providing that clarity, attaching it to vision and why it's important. It's, I think, a piece that we as leaders today have to be really aware of.
It's really easy to fall in this trap of the assumption and saying, well, they should know to show up at nine o'clock for a job. They should know that they need to meet a deadline. They should know how to send an email or a follow up.
But no, we all have to learn at some point. It's just we have to show in a different way than maybe we were 20 years ago, 10 years ago. Yeah, those those shoulds are always a sneaky trap.
I definitely look on how you're shooting on that. But I'll even say what happened 10, 15 years ago. I always called that the learning by osmosis.
And it was very much you're in the office environment. There was an expectation that you would pick these things up organically. And I think personally, that is rife with issues.
And that's what starts to separate different individuals on how they learn, how they observe, what they take away from those lessons, intentional or unintentional. And I think that's where you get a lot of that business behavior that sometimes was learned inappropriately. There's someone else they thought that was OK.
That's where you make the assumptions of what someone should know because they've watched you do it 15 times. And even back then, there was a lot of challenges that I always get really squirrely. I'll say when you expect your team to learn through osmosis and I survive, I actually thrived in that environment.
But I know many of my peers did not. And that is not necessarily how the masses really are going to learn and grasp these skills that are critical for their success later on. So I always look at that that osmosis and that gap right now.
We don't even have that opportunity, to your point. So you have to be fully intentional on what you're teaching, how you're showing them. But I'll even say even just with that osmosis type learning, being clear and asking someone, what did you learn? How are you going to approach this next time? Making sure that you're reiterating what those lessons are and making sure that they're the right lessons, because even though they were in the room with you, even though they saw the preparation, even though they're part of the conversations, their takeaways, they could have completely messed with the intentions.
I find that so such a challenge. And so being intentional about that development, being intentional about that learning is so critical with it. But what I love that you mentioned a little bit earlier, I do want to track back to it because it's one of my other favorite pieces of expectations is it's that two way straight, right? Senior managers, leaders have expectations for their team.
Those individuals have a real opportunity to ask questions, to make sure that they're getting the insight, getting the clarification, which is how they can really step into their own leadership and really elevate that skill. But what I think gets missed a lot and probably where you see a lot of the generational challenges is the expectations of more junior team members, what they have expected for their senior leadership. Yes.
Yes. And I don't know if this is like one of those life processes where, you know, I can remember when I realized my mom is just a woman, my dad is just a guy. Like, what? They aren't like superheroes that have all the knowledge and all the things.
And, you know, I think as leaders, there are a lot of times where I think we expect a lot of ourselves. Our team has a lot of expectations of us, but at the end of the day, we're all just humans. And, you know, working through that process together and, you know, I think through a lot of channels there have developed these expectations have developed of some of those more junior individuals coming into the workforce of what a leader is and what a leader isn't.
And I know for myself in particular, like I like to lean on storytelling and using humility whenever possible to share that I'm a flawed human being. I'm growing. I am developing.
Here's what you can expect out of me. Here's the safety within our relationship. Here are the behaviors you can expect out of me, the outcomes.
But, yeah, it's something interesting to navigate for sure. What have you been seeing in particular when it comes to that dynamic? I'm curious. Oh, very, very similar, I think.
And what I love about that story is that you've clearly set the expectations for them. They know what they can expect from you as a leader. Very rarely do leaders do that.
And so just and I love the analogy between parenting and leadership. There are so, so many opportunities there. But similarly, your more junior or earlier career, even just more junior level, they have they expect the sun, the moon, the stars and perfection from their leaders.
They truly do. They expect them to be perfect all the time, to do everything right, to explain everything, sometimes even to hit, especially earlier in their career, to really kind of put everything out there on a silver platter to make it easier for them. They expect clarity in a way that they're not part of that dialogue.
And without having that strong alignment of what they can expect, what your roles are, what that looks like, it really, really creates friction in that relationship. So I see that I'll never forget. I did a workshop and we were talking about what expectations do other people have of you in your role and what expectations do you have of your leadership? And just having them write down truly what they expect from their leaders.
I'm like, guys, is this reasonable? Is this realistic? And it's not. And until you're getting the clarity, until you're confronting them, is this a reasonable, is this a realistic expectation and questioning it, you're going to have a whole world of hurt. You're going to have a whole world of disappointment and frustration and challenge.
So, and I'll even say a couple of weeks ago, I was on a coaching call with a more senior level leader and they're looking for their next role. And we're talking about what's the challenges in their current one and what they're looking for. And they're talking about, I need leadership that's supportive.
Great. Right. Everyone wants a leader that's going to support them.
What does support look, what are your expectations around support? Because that is not clear. That's not a clear expectation. So really diving in what support looks like for you.
What is that specific expectation? And it's very specific. It's nuanced. Sometimes it's because of their experience that they have those specific expectations.
I think for them specifically was that they'll back them up on decisions, that they'll go to back, right? If we agree on something, I want the same agreement that we have in the preparation room to be the same agreement we have in front of clients and stakeholders. Yeah. That kind of reminds me almost of like the feelings wheel.
Have you ever seen those where they're color coded and you can get more and more in depth into using a wider vocabulary around your feelings. And it's almost like we need that for expectations of, you know, to say supportive means one thing to one person, but it could mean something totally different to somebody else. And so maybe that's our next million dollar idea, Megan, we can come up with an expectations wheel and really help people drive or kind of drill into what it is that they mean when kind of voicing their need for certain behaviors or certain outcomes.
So it's just sometimes it's just not clear enough. And I think that has been a major kind of landmine for me. And there've been times here recently where I'll drop a statement into chat GPT.
It's an expectation of some sort. It's a policy. It's a scenario that I'm trying to work through.
And I'll say, here's what I'm thinking. Tell me what I'm missing here. What are the considerations that I'm not making? What are the things that could pop up that I'm not at all even aware of? And I'm not going to say it was 100 percent accurate, but it gave phenomenal ideas that added some other layers to bring more clarity to the statements that I was making.
I've done that in my personal life, my professional life. It has been a huge help. And so, you know, it's really drilling in.
What is it that I'm saying? What do I think I'm saying that I'm not really saying? And how can I better articulate that? That is such a brilliant hack. I love that for any expectation, any assumptions that you're making, being able to use an outside resource like that to really pick it apart. One, to get the clarity for you, but also so you get to cherry pick what it is that that looks like.
Because I'll say one of my favorite expectations people have, and I'm sure you've heard it in writing job descriptions, I want them to own the project. Oh, yes. Sorry, what does owning a project mean to you? That's always my favorite question.
That's one of my favorite coaching questions. What does that mean to you? Help define this thing that you just said, because there's a whole, whole vocabulary. And I love the idea of that feelings wheel, right? Here's owning a project, here's support and putting that together and saying, OK, this is what I actually these are the behaviors and the actions that I want to see based off of this assumption and this outcome.
Yes. Well, and sometimes I think we're approaching situations too of it's hot or cold. It's either here's everything I want to see or here's everything I don't want to see.
And so sometimes it can be a blend and that can be a really nice approach to setting expectations of it's not all it's not all or nothing. It's not just one of those two paths. And sometimes the contrast of what we want to see and what we don't want to see can really illustrate more clearly as well.
Brilliant. Brilliant. Just to know that complete difference.
And you have that been hearing a lot of Charlie Munger, so you're inversing that situation. Yeah, in my head. Now, the late great Charlie Munger.
So let me ask this, then. How are you seeing this challenge of expectations affecting business and people? What are some of the outcomes? Yes, I mean, it's a little bit of everything. You can see waste within organizations, people duplicating effort or some people experiencing burnout because they don't know what the expectation is.
So they're working above and beyond and experiencing burnout. You can also see the opposite of disengagement. People don't know what to do.
So they just sit back and relax and kind of chill until somebody tells them what to do. You know, at the core of it, though, I think it's just trust being broken down. And in any relationship, if you don't have trust, I don't know how productive it can be truly.
And so when we don't have clear expectations for each other, with each other that are communicated and we have alignment and understanding of why the trust just gets slowly chipped away at until you have turnover or waste or one of the other outcomes I was just sharing. I love being able to filter down burnout and disengagement, coming back to that lack of lack of expectations and that unclarity that unclear. But what I did not expect to hear in there actually is trust.
And I think that you're right. Trust is that crux of it, that trust is being broken. And I think everyone is struggling finding that trust in organization.
And I'm looking at the statistic right now because I was just reading the DDI report on leadership development and they had a huge analysis on trust in the workplace. And particularly, right, everyone's kind of not trusted senior leaders a little bit. There's been that, I don't know about this, a little weariness, particularly later for older generations in the workforce that have been a little, had some experience to build that distrust.
But what's interesting is over the last two years, trust in someone's direct manager, that middle manager, Bell, they had a 40 percent, 46 percent trust to 29 percent. Gosh, it is plummeting. And I would say to your point, it is because managers are not able to set those expectations, that that trust is getting broken on both sides of the equation.
They're not able to set the expectations that they have for their team, which is a huge gap in how that employee is performing, what those responsibilities look like, the job descriptions, even your point. But also they're not proactively establishing those expectations for what someone can expect of them. And you did that brilliantly with your team, as you explained in that example.
This is what you can expect from me. This is how I'm going to operate. This is what I need.
This is what that looks like. And I think that both sides of those really shows the impacts that it's having with people, with that trust plummeting and the direct audience that really needs to improve their expectation game. Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, and I don't want to paint a picture that I'm I've nailed this. This is not the case. But what I will say is like, you know, I think I can empathize with leaders and business owners out there and understanding that expectations shift and that we are living in a world right now where it feels like everything's changing all the time.
And how do we keep up and especially a small business that's growing quickly? And, you know, how do I set expectations when I don't know what six months from now it's going to look like or a year from now it's going to look like? And I think that expectations can can sit in a kind of going back to the feelings wheel. It can be a variety of applications of setting expectations. And so, for example, saying, you know, things are going to continue to change around here.
Like that's not where we place our trust, where you can place your trust is that I'm going to communicate with you about this. I'm going to walk alongside you in these changes. And so helping build trust that you can stand on that foundation instead of trying to build trust on maybe something that you cannot promise, I think is important in this process, because that's the other thing I see a lot of times with leadership and business owners is we're moving too quickly.
We're changing too quickly. Like all I can tell them to do is what's happening today. And I can't spend time looking out ahead and kind of further defining any kind of expectations.
And when we challenge them to kind of slow down and what can you commit to? What is it that people can expect out of you in this organization? The list gets a lot longer than I think is anticipated. That's a beautiful way of asking that question to to really hone some real it back in in a tangible way. Yeah.
Oh, my gosh, this has been one fabulous conversation. We can talk about expectations all day. Are there any last gems or pieces of wisdom that you'd like to share? Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, it kind of goes back to the top of the conversation of have the dialogue, make sure that you are communicating back to each other.
This is what I'm hearing of the expectation. Is this correct? And then document it somewhere. And it doesn't have to be something fancy.
It could literally just be, you know, a quick Slack message. It could be an SOP and a sauna. It could be any number of things just to make sure that we have clarity around what has been decided and finding the appropriate way to memorialize that, I guess, if nothing else, and knowing that it can change moving forward to that, that you're not setting that in stone forever and ever.
But that's just your best as of today. So it's not a difficult process, but it's not an easy one either. But it's a really impactful step that we can all take and continue to take as we dig in further and further into our businesses.
Again, with the gems of wisdom, and I think that's something that's always impressed me about you and the work that you and Montani do is, yes, you are HR and you have such a flexibility of meeting businesses where they're at. It's not these are the processes. This is our rules.
This is what documentation look like. This is what you have to have for everything. But being able to have that flexibility of what does documentation look like? Not a full report.
It is a Slack message. It's something that you can refer back to. And I will say it's really putting some discipline on leadership of making sure that you have that follow through and that follow up with something.
And if you are looking for more of that structure, more of that support or that thought partner of what this can look like for your organization, I do highly recommend reaching out to Catherine and Montani. You guys are such fabulous consultants and you really are able to support those organizations at those different stages of growth to really give them just enough of that infrastructure, just enough of that support. However, you wanted to find support as we talked about it earlier, because you are flexible with that.
And I think that is so crucial for one, being able to be flexible when it comes to people and that human element, but also meeting them where they're at. And that's something that we really talk about all the time is meeting audiences where they're at. And if you are looking for that people strategy, please reach out to them for that flexible, supportive approach.
Thank you so much for joining me, Catherine. Thank you, Megan. A lovely conversation.
Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Culture Conversations. I'm your host, Megan Robinson, founder of eLeader Experience, a professional leadership development company.
Today, we shared actionable ideas to navigate the evolving workplace landscape, compete for talent and build cultures that maximize potential. If you're looking to learn more about how to support your organization's leaders, you can learn more about our work at eLeaderExperience.com. Now get out there and contribute positively to your organization's culture with your own conversations.
Comments