Expectations

This is the deal, both ways. We hold a high bar and we hold it with high support: the two are not in tension, they’re the same commitment. We’re here to open your capabilities, not to be the gate you wait behind. So this page says plainly what good looks like, what we ask of you, and what you should expect from your lead in return. If either side of that isn’t happening, it’s a problem to name: in a 1:1, in a weekly report, out loud.

High standards, high support#

Most places pick one. Demanding-and-abandoning burns people out; kind-and-undemanding lets them coast and quietly stops them growing. We deliberately sit in the corner where the bar is high and you’re set up to clear it.

The support exists because the standard is high. If we didn’t expect a lot of you, we wouldn’t need to invest in unblocking you, giving you context, and building your judgment. The demand is a form of respect; the support is how we make it fair.

What good looks like#

• You own the outcome, not the task. “I did what was asked and it didn’t work” isn’t done. Owning it means noticing the outcome is off and doing something about it, including flagging when the ask itself was wrong.
• You move fast, because you remove friction, not because you add hours. Speed is a feature of how you work, not how long you sit. See below.
• You ask early. Being stuck quietly is the expensive failure. Asking after 30 minutes is a strength, not a weakness: it’s how the team stays fast.
• You communicate before you’re asked. Status shouldn’t have to be chased out of you. The weekly report and honest updates are the baseline, not a favour.
• You raise the bar around you. You leave code, docs, and decisions a little clearer than you found them, and you say so when something isn’t good enough, including your own work.

Every blocker carries three lines#

A blocker on its own is a complaint. The same blocker with two more lines under it is a decision someone can make. So whenever you raise one, in a 1:1, a weekly report, or a check-in, it comes as three lines:

1. The blocker. What actually got in the way, in one line.
2. What I did to help create this situation. Your own hand in it.
3. Proposed solution. What you think should happen.

The middle line is not self-blame, and it is not a confession. Plenty of blockers are genuinely external: the API was down, the client changed the brief, the answer took four days to arrive. “Nothing, this was external” is a fair answer once you have actually looked. What isn’t fair is never looking. The habit is checking your own contribution first, because that is the part you can change without waiting on anyone.

The third line is what makes it actionable. A problem without a proposal hands the thinking to your lead; a proposal, even a wrong one, means we’re editing a plan instead of writing one from scratch. Being talked out of your proposal costs you nothing, so bring it while you’re still unsure.

And it runs both ways. Plenty of blockers are ours: a slow answer, a fuzzy brief, missing access, a norm nobody wrote down. Those get an owner and a date on our side, in the same conversation, not a sympathetic nod. A meeting where you leave with three things to fix and your lead leaves with none is usually a meeting where somebody was being polite.

Speed is a feature. Hours are not the metric.#

We want work to move quickly, and that is not the same as working long hours. A calm, focused day that ships is worth more than a frantic one that doesn’t. We are not counting hours; we never will.

But quick is quick. The thing that should take fifteen minutes should not take four hours. When it does, the cause is almost never effort: it’s friction: waiting on an answer nobody asked for, redoing work because the brief was fuzzy, polishing something that didn’t need it, or grinding alone on a wall a two-line message would have cleared. Velocity is mostly about removing that friction, and removing it is a shared job:

• You: timebox the grind. If a task has ballooned past what it should take, stop and escalate: that’s the expected move, not a last resort. Cut scope to the thing that actually matters. Don’t gold-plate what nobody asked for.
• Your lead: answer fast, decide fast, and don’t be the four-hour wait. Blockers pointed at us get unblocked in hours, not “next 1:1.”

The test isn’t “did you work hard.” It’s “did the fifteen-minute thing take fifteen minutes, and if not, did you catch it and pull the ripcord?”

We open capabilities, we don’t gate them#

The goal is for you to be able to do more over time without waiting on anyone, including me. A lead who is the bottleneck for every decision is failing, however busy they look. So expect the direction of travel to be toward your autonomy:

• We hand over decisions as fast as your judgment earns them, and we tell you plainly what would earn the next one. (See Growing Your Reports for the levels of delegation.)
• When you’re blocked on us, that’s our emergency, not a footnote.
• We’d rather teach you to make the call than make it for you, even when making it ourselves would be faster this one time.

If you feel more gated than backed, that’s exactly the thing to say out loud. It’s a bug in how we’re working, and we want to fix it.

What you can expect from your lead#

The deal runs both ways. Hold us to this:

How this shows up week to week#

Expectations aren’t a poster; they’re the operating loop:

• The weekly report is where you self-report progress, blockers, and confidence, honestly, including the reds.
• The 1:1 runs off that report: it’s for unblocking and direction, not status-reading.
• Performance conversations are just the accumulated pattern of those weeks. If we’ve been honest all along, the review holds no surprises for anyone.

That’s the whole point of writing this down: so the bar is known, the support is real, and nobody is ever guessing where they stand.

Related: Weekly Report, Leading People, Growing Your Reports, Performance Review Cycle, Operating with Clarity