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Dennis Collins:
Welcome to another episode of Connect and Convert, the Sales Accelerator podcast where small business owners tune in every week to hear insider tips about how to grow sales faster than ever. Right, Leah Bumphrey?

Leah Bumphrey:
That’s what we do. It’s exciting, and I love seeing our ability to make a difference in small businesses.

Dennis Collins:
Today’s topic, accountability, expectations or agreements. Leah, accountability, that’s an ugly word, isn’t it? I always used to think when I was managing radio stations, why are important things not getting done? What the heck’s going on here? Has that ever hit you?

Leah Bumphrey:
Absolutely. And you know what? It’s got to be someone’s fault, and I don’t think it’s mine.

Dennis Collins:
Right. It’s over there, boss. So what’s the deal with accountability? I want you to think about this sentence for a second. I love this sentence.

“I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”

What do you think about that?

Leah Bumphrey:
There’s a lot there, and when we’re talking about accountability. You got to repeat that one more time for this.

Dennis Collins:
I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Leah Bumphrey:
Love it. Just love it. Let’s define our terms, gentlemen.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, that’s attributed to some smart scientist somewhere that said that. I’ve stolen it. I’ve used it for years. I love it. Whenever I’m having a conversation about communications, I bring that out, because really, accountability is about communications, isn’t it?

And there are four things present in a communication event. What the speaker means to say, what the speaker actually says, what the listener hears, and what the listener thinks they understood. Wow. And you thought communication was just me telling you or you telling me something, right?

Leah Bumphrey:
And I’m listening, but I don’t know if I heard you.

Dennis Collins:
And isn’t that the main problem with accountability? So picture this. Back in the old days, I had some friends of mine, a young couple. We were all young back then at one time. They moved in together, but they weren’t married. Back in the day, you just moved in together and give it a trial, right?

Leah Bumphrey:
It happened in Canada, too. Still does.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, I figured it did.

So they are expecting the best, and one partner assumes that the other is going to handle all the household chores, and the other expects an equal division of labor. Leah, how do you think that works out?

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, that’s going to be fun. That’s going to be a fun first couple of weeks.

Dennis Collins:
So what happened? There are assumptions being made here. You know what I mean. You know what I want.

I hired you to be my sales manager, Leah. You are experienced. You know what to do. How’s that? Is that a mandate for action? You can take that and run with that, right?

Leah Bumphrey:
You feel like you can. If someone told me that I’m building my own program… oh, you mean that’s not what you want me to do?

Dennis Collins:
Ah, I see. So that’s subject to some interpretation, but you know what?

Leah Bumphrey:
Comedy of errors. It is not going to be fun.

Dennis Collins:
You have a lot of special skills, and one of them is mind reading. I am sure of that.

Leah Bumphrey:
Just ask my husband.

Dennis Collins:
I’ve seen it. I don’t even have to ask Sean. I know you can read minds. So tell me, what is your secret to knowing accurately about what someone else expects? How do you do it?

Leah Bumphrey:
You know, it’s terrifying because the truth is we really believe that we do. I know when he says something, what he actually means. And I know when I’m saying something that he has heard exactly what I’m thinking. It’s a recipe for confusion, and if it was a half-hour sitcom and we had a swinging kitchen door in the middle of it, oh, wouldn’t that be funny? Because how much comedy has been built over people who move forward?

Dennis Collins:
You know, and that’s how much of our lives are built around expectations, not just comedy, but our whole lives. I mean, we live on expectations, don’t we? We expect something from other people, but we don’t always know if that’s correct. So I call it the mind-reading fallacy. Other than you, you can probably do this. I cannot assume or intuit what other people are thinking and desiring. When I assume intention, when I assume that I make a mistake, or we project, you know, I’m typical.

God love my wife, the queen. She believes that her own perspective is universal. Universal perspective. We avoid vulnerability. We don’t want to explicitly state our needs, our wants, because we’re opening up. That’s vulnerable. Particularly in sales, I’ve seen this a lot when coaching salespeople, they assume that patterns they’ve seen from previous customers will apply to every new customer.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yep.

Dennis Collins:
You’ve been in sales. What do you think about that?

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, absolutely. Experience is important, but if you’ve ever talked to someone who has a ton of experience, but is rigid in that experience, if they get into a different situation, they just will pull that experience with them. And it’s to their own detriment, because they’re not being open to something being different.

Dennis Collins:
Correct.

Leah Bumphrey:
And it kills the sale. It kills your sense of knowing what you’re doing, your confidence.

Dennis Collins:
It’s sad, but true that we cannot rely on what’s happened in the past to predict what’s going to happen in the future. So when I have an expectation of you, that’s built on something that happened in the past, and it doesn’t happen, whoa, shame on me. I didn’t clarify the expectation.

And there’s a lot of self-awareness or lack of self-awareness involved here. Really not understanding our own expectations, and yet now it’s getting kind of deep. I mean, that’s probably too deep for us, but for today anyway. So today I want to talk about expectations versus agreements. This is kind of a paradigm shift in accountability. Because most accountability these days is done on expectations. I expect you to do this, I expect you to do that, and we end up pissed off and disappointed.

It doesn’t work. So what do most people do? A manager expects an employee to stay late to finish a project without explicitly discussing it. Why does that fail? The employee may have other commitments, feels blindsided or, you know, it’s an unstated expectation. Resentment, potential conflict.

How about a spouse? This is a good one that we should talk about, Leah. You know all about this. Your spouse, Sean, has the expectation of something special for his birthday or anniversary. It fails. What happens? Why does it fail?

Leah Bumphrey:
It fails because his expectation hasn’t been voiced. There’s no way of me knowing. And then why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t he just simply say he didn’t want a big birthday party? I wanted to put on this fantastic birthday party for him and it was a great idea and it was phenomenal.

And what do you mean? Oh, you mean when you said you didn’t want one, you actually meant that?

Dennis Collins:
So I have a story just like that. My wife, one year, I think it was Christmas, you know, we decided, look, no gifts.  We won’t exchange gifts, you know? We’ll take care of the kids, the grandkids, we’ll take care of them, but we’re not going to exchange gifts. And we shook hands on it and said, agree, deal.

So I took her at her word.

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, Dennis.

Dennis Collins:
And then comes Christmas day, everybody’s around the tree, opening packages and presents. And she said, where’s mine? I said, honey, you told me, you said no gifts. You specifically said that. Remember, we shook hands on it. She said, that’s not what I meant.

I said, whoa. I don’t know why we agreed on that, but she expected something else.

Leah Bumphrey:
And Sean and I did the same thing for years and he took me at my word, but there was always something under the tree for him from Santa that I might’ve had something to do with.

Dennis Collins:
I tell you what, I did not read the tea leaves, Leah.

Leah Bumphrey:
You can call me anytime, Dennis.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, I probably need to. But here’s the deal that I have found with expectations. They’re usually unspoken, they’re assumed, they’re not mutually agreed upon. They’re subject to interpretation. So that leaves, particularly in business, that leaves a lot to be desired. I got a great story.

This happened years ago before I became part of Wizard of Ads, but I had a Canadian client actually at one time in Winnipeg. Oh, I love your country.

Leah Bumphrey:
I’ve been to Winnipeg. I hope you didn’t have to go in the winter.

Dennis Collins:
Always the winter. That’s the only time I could go there because he was in the retail business and that was their slower season. Five retail stores, underperforming in sales. I started with the owner and his wife. It was a family-owned business. Let’s talk about how you hold your five store managers accountable. And he told me about the emails and the meetings, the staff meetings and the topics. He was very certain when I asked him, how certain are you that the expectations that you have of your store managers are crystal clear?

He said, positive. Look at all these documents. I said, okay. So you guessed it. I went out to each store manager privately, individually, met with them and you guessed it, they were not on the same page. Chaos. So at least I had a starting off point for that engagement. I had to find a way to secure non-expectations, but agreements.

So the owner had done what he thought was a good job of communicating his expectations, but he never doubled back to make sure that the store managers were in agreement with that.

Leah Bumphrey:
So they read these emails and they went, that’s impossible.

Dennis Collins:
I can’t do that. I mean, that’s unrealistic.

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, you gotta be kidding.

Dennis Collins:
That’s, you know, you can’t be serious. Guess what? He was serious. But the reason for lack of performance, there were several, but the main reason was they were totally out of alignment. So I turned to a guy, you may have heard of this guy. His name is Steven Chandler,  He’s quite an interesting guy, an author, a speaker, a teacher. I really, he has a real interesting style. He’s kind of like just real down home, easy to listen to conversational. Years ago, I came across him and I got some ideas about agreements. What the heck is an agreement as opposed to an expectation?

So here’s what Steve Chandler taught me. Agreements promote ownership and accountability. So if I agree with you, Leah, to do something, I own it, right?

Leah Bumphrey:
Right.

Dennis Collins:
If you can’t meet my performance expectation, what can you do and what do you need? So if we see that there is, uh oh, I have an expectation. You can’t meet that. Let’s come up with something you can meet. That’s an agreement. I agree to deliver the first draft of the report by 5 p.m next Tuesday, instead of, hey, I’ll get that report done soon.

So how many times in business? Yeah, I’ll get that boss. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of that. Is that an agreement or expectation? That’s totally expectation.

Leah Bumphrey:
Yeah.

Dennis Collins:
Be specific. I agree to deliver the first draft by 5 p.m next Tuesday. Put it in writing. Of course, that helps. Use shared documents, emails to record the agreements. How about review and revise? You know, I’m a big believer in check-ins. I think we talked about this on another podcast.

Checking in, not micromanaging, but checking in. Hey, tell me about what happened yesterday. What’s the good news from yesterday? Number two, what are you working on today? What’s exciting today? Number three, what is it that’s blocking you? What’s stopping you? Where do you need help? Check-ins. I love check-ins. When they’re not creepy and not done to micromanage, they work.

Leah Bumphrey:
But specific again, right? A specific check-in, not a general, how are you?

Dennis Collins:
Nope. Not, hey, how are you doing today? Good to see you. How’s the family? That’s not a check-in. That’s not a check-in. That’s maybe rapport building or something else, but check-in is specific. In my check-ins, there were three points.

Practice making agreements. You know, we’re not used to that. We feel like we’re getting into the other person’s space or we’re invading their privacy or we’re pushing them, being too aggressive. To the contrary, this is the way that’s much more sensible than having unmet expectations, unstated expectations. This is the way to get out of a rut and up and running.

Paul Boomer:
Here I am. Something that comes to mind. Actually, I’m gonna ask Leah this. What do you think, how do you feel when somebody says covert?

Leah Bumphrey:
I feel that they’re being sneaky. I don’t trust them.

Paul Boomer:
Dennis, what comes across your mind?

Dennis Collins:
Undercover.

Paul Boomer:
Another perspective to look at that I’ve used with my own kids, actually, and some of my clients is, you are creating a covert social agreement. When you don’t state your expectations and come to an agreement, it’s a covert social agreement.

Dennis Collins:
Covert? I think that’s overt.

Paul Boomer:
Well, it’s covert because I know I have a social contract with you, Dennis, but you don’t.

Leah Bumphrey:
What comes to mind to me with that is, let’s say a sales meeting, and Dennis, you and I have talked about this before. If you have an 8 a.m. sales team meeting every Monday, and you have a couple of people that are always coming in late, your expectation as a sales manager is it starts at eight.

They’ve never agreed to it. So you have this expectation, but because they’ve never said they’re gonna do it, and they continue not to, unless you go and say, okay, I need you to agree to this, they’re gonna keep coming in late.

Paul Boomer:
It’s just a different way of looking at it, Dennis, in terms of I have a social agreement with you, but you don’t know I have a social agreement with you.

Leah Bumphrey:
I need you to repeat back to me, and we were talking about this at the beginning. Repeat back to me what my expectation is.

Dennis Collins:
When I talk about agreements, though, I’m talking about a mutually stated back and forth, not a covert, but an overt agreement.

Paul Boomer:
I absolutely agree with that. And that’s the outcome that you should have. And this actually goes back to what you were talking about earlier with what happens is you have an agreement with somebody, but that other person doesn’t know that they have an agreement. This actually happens with my wife and I sometimes where I have an agreement, or I think I have an agreement with her because she knows what I need, right? Going back to that conversation.

But she doesn’t. It’s a covert social agreement that I have with her, but she has no idea that I have an agreement with her.

Dennis Collins:
But isn’t that really an expectation?

Paul Boomer:
That’s the thing. It is an expectation. It’s just a different way of looking at it. Because when you think of social agreements, it becomes bigger. It’s a bigger thing. We all have social agreements with each other in terms of, especially in the Midwest, you help each other out. You help your neighbor out.

That’s a social agreement. It’s a covert social agreement because my neighbor may not know it that we’ve had this expectation or agreement with each other, but it’s a bigger, grander, cultural thing. So when you talk to your employees or your boss or whomever and say, listen, I was in the wrong. I had a social agreement with you I didn’t tell you about.

That puts a whole different perspective on it of going, oh, I’m taking full responsibility because I realized that I had an expectation or an agreement with you, but you never knew I had an agreement. It’s a change of terminology, that’s all.

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, I’m getting wound up in the terminology because I call that an expectation, but I can understand your terminology. Bottom line is, if it’s not clarified and communicated, it’s not an agreement. An agreement is a meeting of two parties.

Leah Bumphrey:
And this is where Chandler’s recommendations come into play, right, Dennis? Because we’re talking about make sure that they know, put it in writing, review and revise, be specific, and that’s back and forth.

Paul Boomer:
Yeah, and that actually is why I’m talking about it because you and I are having not a disagreement, but a disagreement because we haven’t come to an agreement of what is the terminology.

Dennis Collins:
Correct, right.

Paul Boomer:
And so I’m kind of proving a point by stating this.

Dennis Collins:
However, I think it’s the same concept, two different terminology.

Leah Bumphrey:
It’s defining terms though. And you know what, as you were saying it, Paul, and we’ve both used the examples of our spouses and how it relates to work. In my head, I’m going, the first thing though, I’m going to caution you guys, don’t put it in writing with your spouses what the agreement is.

But, I’m now revising that because isn’t that what the calendar is all about? We have a calendar in our fridge and I have written down what I’m doing and Sean is supposed to write down what he’s doing and my expectation, and it’s a voiced expectation between us, that calendar is the family Bible when it comes to what’s going on. So it is putting it in writing because, oh yeah, there it is. I see it there.

Dennis Collins:
I have one of those calendars too. But I don’t keep the calendar. I have to abide by the calendar.

Paul Boomer
Exactly, yeah, me too.

Leah Bumphrey:
And you’ve agreed to do that.

Dennis Collins:
I mean, I have agreed that I will let that rule my life.

Paul Boomer:
So I want to put in just one more thing in there is when you are having and creating your expectations and agreements with each other, make sure that you have the same definition as well.

Terminology, because you could be using two different terminologies thinking you’re talking about the same thing, but then come to realize, oh, that’s not what I meant. So don’t just stop at, okay, we have an agreement. Make sure by asking, okay, what do you think I meant by X, Y, and Z? So that you get on the same terminology.

Dennis Collins:
So it all goes back to that initial statement. I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Paul Boomer
Yeah, thank you for Leah for asking him to restate that because I’m like, okay, okay, got it.

Dennis Collins:
I know, the first time you hear it, it’s a little confusing.

Paul Boomer:
Yes, yes. All right, I’m going to back out now. I just wanted to jump in there.

Dennis Collins:
Good points, Boomer, as always. Thank you, producer Paul, for jumping in.  So I guess to sum it up, how do you get out of the world of expectation or a social agreement that only one party knows about? How do you get out of that world? How about assessing the communication in your own family, in your own business?

Make a list of the expectations. That would be hard, somewhat hard, because some of them are just so embedded, right? Our expectations are so embedded, but try to make a list of your expectations. And then ask yourself, do an audit. Ask yourself how many of those are totally understood by both parties? The definitions are understood, the obligations are understood, and how can you turn those into agreements?

So if you can’t give me X, Y, Z, what can you give me? I can give you A, B, C, okay?

Leah Bumphrey:
And when you’re doing this audit, don’t just assume and go, yeah, no, I’ve made sure to tell Dennis that this isn’t what we’re doing. Ask.  Dennis, are we doing three or are we doing four?

Dennis Collins:
Yeah, are we on the same page, Leah?

Leah Bumphrey:
Oh, this was a good one. I’m gonna give this some thought.

Dennis Collins:
This is one of a, it’s a pet topic of mine. I hope we’ve done it justice today. We’ve got to stop now in the interest of time, but maybe we should revisit this. Paul brought up some interesting points. I think we all had some interesting points, to be honest. I think it was a good discussion.

Leah Bumphrey:
And even though my assumptions are always correct, I’m gonna ponder this a little bit.

Dennis Collins:
Oh boy. So I got to live with this at work and at home. Leah, whatever you say.

Leah Bumphrey:
It’s excellent, well said.

Dennis Collins:
I always have the last word in my house and on my podcast, yes, dear.

Leah Bumphrey:
You have a good week, Dennis.

Dennis Collins:
Take care, guys. That’s it for Connect and Convert this week. We’ll see you next week. Tune in.

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