Managing Expectations

You probably have heard the phrase: “Under-promise, over-deliver,” but not many people really think it through. It actually can be a good strategy, if you can stick to it, without withholding information simply for the sake of “under-promising.”

When we are on the right business path, we prepare ourselves to work our hardest but maintain realistic — if not conservative — expectations.

It’s important to be honest with the C-suite executives, your customers, and other audiences about what you’re doing for them and to provide them with updates when new information is available. But, it’s just as important to manage their expectations.

This applies to everything from multi-million dollar projects to daily social-media interactions for your organization. For example, we always recommend creating a detailed social-media plan for your proactive engagement with fans and followers, and then sticking to a schedule for responding to inquiries. Just because it’s easy to answer a few social-media posts on the fly doesn’t mean you should comment back and forth with fans right away. Why not? Because when bad news breaks later, they’ll expect you to be just as responsive.

We all get excited about what we do, and it’s hard not to promise the world to your boss, client, or customer. But, it’s much easier to explain better-than-expected results, than it is to clarify why you weren’t able to deliver. And, sometimes the only difference between these two outcomes is how you communicated.         

Crystal DeStefano is president and director of public relations at Strategic Communications, LLC, which says it provides trusted counsel for public relations, including media relations, employee relations, and community relations. Contact DeStefano at Crystal@stratcomllc.com.