Ask the Team Scientist: How do I set clear expectations for my collaborators?
Q: At a recent talk I attended, I heard you say that you can’t hold people accountable for expectations you haven’t made clear. Can you please say more about what it means to make my expectations clear? Shouldn’t people just know how to do their work? Why do I have to micromanage them?
A:
There are different kinds of expectations we want our collaborators to meet, including outcomes, process, and culture expectations. We expect people to deliver things, do things a certain way, and behave a certain way while working together.
Let’s talk today about outcomes, the specifics of what you need people to deliver to you in order for the work to be complete and high-quality. If you are working with people you trust, setting expectations for those outcomes and deliverables and letting them figure out how to get there is generally enough.
For example, you may have a team responsible for developing a social media strategy and materials for recruitment in your trial. Clear expectations would include things like:
Details about the population you want to recruit. If you only want to recruit Black women between 18 and 25, that needs to be very clear. If you need 100 participants but want to over enroll to account for attrition, that also needs to be clear.
Dates for starting and ending recruitment, which may be dependent on a certain number of participants being recruited or may be tied to an event like a class they’ll be attending.
The need to use IRB-approved messaging, where appropriate, or the flexibility to adapt the messaging for a specific population.
Any other IRB restrictions, such as incentives or the use of specific platforms for recruitment.
The format in which you need the recruitment data. What platform will you be using for the step after recruitment and will the data need to be in a specific format to be useful?
How exactly to represent the study, which aspects they can share and which they should not.
Basically, you need to give the team all the details they need to deliver to you what you need to do your work.
Which, of course, means that YOU need to be very clear about what you need from others before you can communicate those needs. Hopefully your project plan is clear and lays out the work in sufficient detail to be able to articulate what needs to happen. If not, you need to invest in that work before starting to communicate with others.
It’s not micromanaging to let people know what you need from them. It becomes micromanaging when you tell them in great detail how to do their jobs. So, saying, I need your team to recruit and consent 100 patients, within this specific demographic distribution, all patients entered into X system and ready to start clinic visits by December 1, is setting a clear expectation.
It starts to become micromanaging when you are working with an experienced team of recruiters who know how to do their jobs and you start giving instructions on specifics like how many people to call each week to get to 100, or other minor details. Doing so implies that you know better how to do their job than they do. Of course, if those details are an important part of the protocol, those need to be communicated as expectations! But, if the how is less important than the result (assuming the recruiters follow generally acceptable recruiting practices), then setting expectations for the outcomes is what matters.
Part of setting clear expectations is understanding the people doing the work. How experienced and skilled are they at the work you’re asking them to do? You would set different kinds of expectations with a PhD student studying biostats and a biostats professor with 20 years of experience. You might be more detailed in your expectations with a team that is recruiting 500 participants for a large NIH-funded R01 than with a project manager helping you recruit 10 people for a pilot study.
The final aspect of setting clear expectations is considering what happens if people don’t meet them, and that will be a topic for a future post!