Unspoken Expectations are the Costliest Thing a Leader Never Says

Author Neil Strauss said it in five words, making obvious what is often hidden: “Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.”

Leaders hold expectations for process and performance. When those expectations remain unstated but are still used to evaluate team members, the people being judged can feel a genuine sense of injustice.

Organizational psychologist Denise Rousseau has spent decades studying what’s called the psychological contract, the unwritten belief set about what leaders and team members owe each other.

It’s a contract neither side knows it has signed. But it shapes perceptions of competence and integrity all the same.

Inevitably, leaders and team members will breach this unwritten contract, not because they are careless but because they operate from different assumptions.

Leaders often believe they are more transparent and explicit about their expectations than they objectively are. They also commonly overestimate how visible their intentions, priorities, and standards are to everyone else.

When team members don’t know these expectations, they are almost guaranteed to violate them. Leaders who assume the team was told, or should have known, become frustrated and disappointed.

Team members, meanwhile, become resentful. They naturally view it as unfair to be evaluated against a set of expectations that were never communicated. That resentment, once it takes hold, shows up as a lack of discretionary effort and a general withdrawal from the leader.

The usual prescription for leaders is to communicate more and to “set clear expectations.” But that’s not as easy as it sounds, because communication and understanding are not the same thing.

The best leaders have learned that setting expectations isn’t about issuing instructions. It’s about drawing a clear line, early and often, between the decisions that belong to the team member and the ones that must follow a more scripted set of actions. When people know what is theirs to decide, they naturally seek out clarity for the steps they must follow on everything else.

To close the gap, leaders don’t need to script every decision or announce every preference. They just need to clarify what is the team member’s to decide and what isn’t. The boundaries surrounding decisions work to shape most other expectations.

The psychological contract will never be perfect, because no leader can anticipate every assumption a team member carries into a role. But clarity about decision rights reduces the space for resentment to grow.

If unspoken expectations can become premeditated resentments, then clarified decision boundaries are the source of premeditated trust.