I was talking with one of my mentors recently and he told me, “You want to make sure that they’re not expecting magic.”
At the time I was still deciding whether to accept an offer at my current company as part of the sales team. What my mentor was telling me was that because it’s a very early stage company you want to drill down during the interview process on what their current sales system looks like and what they expect from sales performance.
When the reward is high enough sometimes we get excited and throw out expectation management because we jump at the opportunity too fast. This happens in relationships, too. We want the immediate satisfaction of the new job, new relationship, or closing a deal. So we forget to have an honest conversation about the road ahead after the honeymoon phase.
If something is hard, your boss needs to know it’s hard, otherwise he’s going to expect magic from your performance. If something about your partner is upsetting, they need to know, otherwise they’ll expect magic from your patience.
Same with a client, if you sell the dream in order to bring the client onboard, they’re going to be expecting a lot and might churn if they don’t get it. But if you have an honest conversation ahead of time about the pain point and make clear that it’s a big one, then you and the client are on the same page about the difficulty of the task he expects your firm to complete.
We can pull off a few miracles now and then, but we can’t do magic all day, unless you’re actually a professional magician, then just make sure your audience has an understanding of how difficult it is to pull bunnies out of a hat.