Leveraging Leadership
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Leveraging Leadership
The Critical Role of Clear Expectations in Team Success
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A Chief of Staff shared how her boss thought a high-talent sales team wasn’t meeting expectations, but no one could clearly say what those expectations were. Emily Sander highlights the importance of clearly defining what success looks like for a team, asking questions like “What is the output we want?” and making sure the team knows and has what they need to deliver. She suggests backing up gut feelings with clear measures, and openly communicating targets with the team.
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Who Am I?
If we haven’t met before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want.
Time Stamps:
00:26 A Conversation on Team Performance
01:19 Identifying and Setting Clear Expectations
02:24 Steps to Evaluate Team Success
04:21 Conclusion and Next Steps
Welcome back to Leveraging Leadership, where we unpack the art of business leadership. I'm your host, Emily Sander, chief of staff to an executive leadership coach. This show is all about finding your points of greatest influence and leveraging them to better serve those around you.
A Conversation on Team Performance
Identifying and Setting Clear Expectations
Steps to Evaluate Team Success
Conclusion and Next Steps
emily-sander_2_02-05-2026_155025All right. I was just talking to this chief of staff and one part of the conversation was a really good reminder. So the part of the conversation was she had heard from her boss that this one team was not. It was not really, um, they weren't seeing the, the output that they wanted from that team. And this was like a sales kind of revenue, revenue ops sales team. And it just, like, there's not, like, we're not, the expectation for this team is much higher given the talent we have on this team. We have so many good people on this team, and we're just not seeing the outcome and the output we expected. And the first question I asked was like, oh, like, oh, what, what was expected? What's the expectation? She was like, oh, that's a good question. I'm not quite sure. Leadership had an expectation. My boss and the whole leadership team had an expectation of this team, but that isn't clear right now. And it was just a good reminder that we get into these situations where we go, that team should be doing better, or that individual team member should be doing something. Differently. Like just like, just let's just do it right type of thing. And we need to make sure that we're clear on the expectation and we're clear on the outputs we're asking for. Now, it's not necessarily a bad thing if you can't readily articulate that right now. Right off the cuff, it might be it was a brand new team and we just had to stand it up quickly. It might be, it's a new org structure on the sales and revenue team. It might be we are counting or measuring things in our financials a different way. It might be we're asking them to do something different. We're asking them to sell into this adjacent market versus our traditional market over here. So there's lots of valid reasons why it could be the case where. We're just having this gut check. We're like, we're not quite seeing what we wanna see out of this team, and we don't have a clear articulation of why right now. That could be fine. I would encourage you and invite you to take that next step of okay, how would we know this team is doing good? What would make us say that team is knocking you outta the park? Like our gut check is like, yes, like this team is on fire. Just let'em loose, give them more fuel. Whatever they need to do more of what they're doing, let them do that. What would indicate to you that that was the case? So try to like back into this or kind of try to poke and prod like, Hmm, what? Like what am I looking at? Or where, where am I getting this? This intuition that this team isn't quite doing what we want, and then it might be, okay, what would best indicate they're moving in the right direction? Maybe put some measurements around that or put some stat tracking or reporting or visibility or what have you around that. so the takeaway here might be, so the, the takeaway would be if we are getting the sense this team isn't quite doing what we want, what do we want them to do? How would we know they're doing what we want them to do and do they know what we want them to do, and then have they been equipped and empowered and trained and given the information and access and time to do what we want them to do? And if they still haven't hit the mark, have we told them they're not hitting the mark or are they looking around going like, we didn't even know. There was a mark, like no one told us about the mark. Why, like, we were doing this thing, we thought we were doing great. So as long as all those sequence of steps have happened or are happening, or you can put them in motion to happen, I think that's, I think that's a good approach. That's a good direction. Um, but it's just a really interesting or just interesting part of the conversation where it's like, yeah, this team isn't, isn't doing the output. They have really talented team members. Um, the people are like so good and skilled and have the experience they should, they should have, and we're just not seeing it. Yeah, what, um, what are we not seeing? I don't know. So if you're having some of those initial parts of the conversation in your team or in your company, then I would work through some of these follow up questions and follow up steps to get yourself to a good answer. All right, hopefully that's been helpful and I'll catch you next week on leveraging leadership.
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