​Ever walked out of a meeting thinking you had full agreement and commitment—only to discover weeks later that no one had a clear sense of expectations or how to work together? Most leadership energy loss starts long before it evolves into conflict. It starts with the assumptions no one bothered to explore, check and repeat out loud. Leaders tend to think our intentions, preferences and expectations are more visible to others than they actually are. We assume people understand us, and yet they rarely fully do. In leadership, that gap between what we think we have communicated and what others actually hear becomes a breeding ground for frustration, misalignment and preventable energy loss. But when leaders are aware of their own operating principles and become radically clear about their values, quirks and decision-making principles, teams can relax, alignment accelerates and the relational load of working together becomes noticeably lighter.

Thinking Expectations Are Clear When They Aren't
One CEO was brilliant, fast-thinking and deeply committed to empowering her leadership team, but she was exhausted by constant escalations and check-ins. “I would like to lean out more,” she said. When I asked if her direct reports knew what she expected them to do without her, she paused. “I think so,” she said. During an expectations-mapping exercise with her team, we uncovered three assumptions about her decision thresholds that were not clear before and took time to define:

1. How much risk she was comfortable with
2. How fast she expected decisions to be made
3. When alignment was required

Once the team explored and articulated her expectations explicitly in a few bullet points, team culture shifted. Escalations dropped, speed increased and the team became more decisive. People on her team were not the issue; inexplicit, unchecked expectations were.

The Ongoing Nature Of Expectations Management
In a recent session with two senior leaders who were stepping into new roles, something powerful happened. They had known each other for over a decade, respected each other deeply and had already weathered a complex professional history together. But the new dynamic required new clarity. In our session, they both named what they needed from the other to perform at their best:

• Addressing issues early
• Giving each other direct feedback before looping in third parties
• Offering recognition
• Checking in on the person behind the intellect or pace

They acknowledged that one is more analytical and reflective, while the other is faster-paced and instinctive. At a certain point, one leader voiced something that shifted the energy: “It bugs me when I realize you’ve already talked to someone else about an issue before you talk to me.” The other validated their colleague, and I felt trust growing. When we change roles and context, our behaviors and expectations change. Being explicit about expectations in new roles creates clarity and paves the way for explicit operating principles, both of which are necessary for trust and smooth, swift cooperation.

The Magic Of Beginnings
A powerful illustration of expectations-setting comes from Hillary Super before she officially started her role as CEO at Victoria’s Secret. She joined a company-wide town hall and introduced herself with one sentence most executives would never say out loud: “I’m an introvert.” She explained that she was naturally quieter and more reserved, and she didn’t want people to interpret that as aloofness or lack of approachability. In one stroke, she diffused the most common misinterpretations introverted leaders face: silence mistaken for distance, thoughtfulness mistaken for disengagement. What she did was intentional expectations management. Instead of waiting for her team to experience the first moment of misalignment—the quiet pause in a meeting, the reflective look that someone might misread—she named the pattern up front. She taught people how to read her accurately. First encounters have what I call the magic of beginnings. There is a natural openness of minds at the beginning of a relationship that we can use to create clarity and establish good foundations.

How can you start defining your own leadership user instructions?
One of the most helpful practices I coach leaders to do is create their own user instructions, a concise, honest articulation of how to work with them. This is also a way to further operationalize your values as a leader. To do this yourself, define the following:
1. What I value (e.g., speed over perfection)
2. What I expect of others (e.g., “I expect you to act as a leader of our organization when you make decisions, not just a leader of your team or department.”)
3. How I make decisions (e.g., “A decision without pain is no decision; every one of us will at some point experience this pain when we make decisions together.”)
4. What I find difficult (e.g., “I am impatient. I get triggered when I feel there is no progress.”)
5. My quirks (e.g., “My calendar is my nervous system; keep it clean.”)
6. What support looks like for me (e.g., “Bring me unfinished thinking, not polished slides.”)
You’ll also want to ask your team for their user instructions. This way, everyone can work from a shared understanding.

A Simple Exercise For The Next Weeks
Use the following exercise to proactively overcome the illusion of transparency and prevent false assumptions within your team. Schedule a 30-minute conversation with three of your key direct reports or stakeholders. Engage in dialogue around the following questions:
1. What’s one expectation of mine you think you understand, but you’re not completely sure?
2. What do you need from me to do your best work?
3. What’s one preference or quirk of yours that the team should know?
4. What else do we need to address to work together effectively?

Keep Iterating: clarifying user instructions is an ongoing practice
There is never a final version of your user instructions. They are an ongoing work in progress and a practice of developing ongoing self-awareness as a leader. Leadership is a relational sport. Your clarity invites clarity from your staff. Explicit expectations are not micromanagement. Leadership becomes harder when we expect people to decode us. Clarity is kindness. Intentionality is discipline. Explicit expectations are your best strategy for effective execution and your best defense against unnecessary drama, wasted energy and misalignment.

An invitation for this week:
Try drafting your own user instructions this week — even just three lines. What do you value, what triggers you, what does support look like for you? Share them with one person who works closely with you and notice how the conversation shifts.

This article originally appeared on Forbes Coaches Council:
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2025/12/15/user-instructions-are-the-most-underused-leadership-tool/

High-powered senior leadership teams play a pivotal role in shaping organizational success.
Their ability to think together influences the quality and clarity of strategic prioritization, and their
ability to work together primes connectivity among the people and culture of the organization.
But according to recent research, less than a quarter of senior leadership teams are considered
highly effective. In their seminal work, Senior Leadership Teams—What It Takes to Make Them
Great, Harvard Business School academics and consultants surveyed 120 senior leadership
teams globally. They measured effectiveness based on three criteria: measurable organizational
performance, continuous team improvement and team member learning and satisfaction. The
book details the fact that only 21% of the teams surveyed were high-performing on all three
criteria.
​
The findings of the study emphasize that those teams that were successful demonstrated trust,
shared purpose and mutual respect. It’s easy to agree with these values, but the low percentage
of high-performing leadership teams shows that it is very hard to implement them.
Here are three practices to bring trust and respect into the everyday behavior of senior
leadership teams.

1. Overcome empathy gaps.
Senior leaders have come into their positions of power by being successful in previous roles.
This success affects their brains. Research shows that empathy decreases when power
increases. This decrease in empathy can get in the way of senior leaders’ ability to think, listen
and feel effectively with and alongside each other. (Yes, feeling is an important part of thinking
and decision-making.)
An explicit commitment to a growth mindset and vulnerability practices can help counter this
potential empathy gap. Try starting your meetings with everyone sharing “my biggest mistake
last month” or ending meetings with “what I learned in today’s meeting.”

2. Embrace each other’s superpowers. 
Every leader possesses distinct talents—some excel at strategy, others at execution; some see
possibility, others see problems. These differences can either harmonize or clash. A visionary
CEO may clash with a detail-oriented chief operating officer (COO), leading to friction.
Effective senior leadership teams recognize the value of diverse talents and also know that each
talent has a shadow side. And they regularly take the time to discover each other’s superpowers,
pitfalls and shadows. Make sure this discovery is ongoing by talking about each other when
you’re in the same room: “what I appreciate in you” and “where I see you struggle.”

3. Manage power dynamics.
With ambition and drive come ambitious and driven leaders. Even a “servant leader” has an ego.
When resource decisions ripple through an organization, stakes can get high and egos can
clash. When egos clash, collaboration suffers.
High-functioning teams prioritize collective impact over individual power plays. Every team
member is responsible for signaling and addressing power plays with each other, but the most
senior team leader needs to go first and set the tone. She needs to address and coach on power
dynamics diligently. If hidden agendas and power plays are accepted at the outset, norms are
set. A shared vision and values can serve as a compass for guiding the team’s dialogue and
actions. One practice to monitor values is to continually and publicly reflect on adherence to
those values.

Conclusion
Senior leadership teams are multifaceted challenges: The smartest individual players do not
always make for the best-performing team. Fostering active listening and empathy, embracing
and bridging differences, and navigating power dynamics are three practices to incorporate into a
team’s working relationship that lay the foundation for trust and respect. Trust and respect are
the key ingredients that allow a team to think together to create clarity for the best course of
action.
​
High-functioning leadership teams can be strategic differentiators. The key lies in ongoing
self-reflection and dialogue and the open-mindedness of each leader to reflect, learn and change
regardless of past success.

This article originally appeared on Forbes Coaches Council:
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2025/12/15/user-instructions-are-the-most-underused-leadership-tool/

Anybody who thinks leadership becomes easier with more formal power does not get it. The
complexity only increases with more power. It comes with unintended side effects on both the
leader and their co-workers. Leadership is what author Ronald Heifetz, one of my favorite leadership thinkers, calls an adaptive challenge. It means there are no quick fixes, silver bullets or one-size-fits-all approaches that work for all people in any situation. Leading people and organizations is an ongoing process of interaction, awareness, experimentation, learning and adaptation.

When we are in a follower role, most of us have very high expectations of our leaders;
subconsciously, we often expect them to have all the answers, solve big problems with ease and
take away all our suffering. That might be why research finds we spend an average of six days a
year complaining about our bosses. And yet, there is no such thing as a leader who has all the
answers. Think about climate change: No leader can solve that problem alone; it will take every
human on the planet to address this adaptive problem, and it will take years to untangle and rebuild a more sustainable way of living.

Leading people comes with responsibility, and it’s not an easy job. To stay highly functioning as a
high-powered leader, it takes a lot of inner work (a.k.a. self-reflection), assimilating feedback and
an ongoing beginner’s mindset. While inner work on your purpose, vision and values is
necessary to counterbalance the potential blindfolding effects of power, there are some
additional principles every leader can use as guidance to engage with herself and the world
around her. There are four C’s to guide the journey of leaders in a complex and ever-evolving
world: connection, clarity, coaching and commitment.

Connection
The essence of leadership is connecting a future vision to people’s actions to create progress
toward the vision. Whether your vision is building a house, increasing profit margins or solving
world hunger, you need people to do something in order to make progress toward your vision.
The original meaning of the word connection is to bind together. To stay effective, a leader needs
to bind together various elements. First, a leader needs to connect with their own vision and
values. The stronger this inner connection, the more resilient they will be. To connect people to
the vision, a leader needs to bond with their people: Listening, noticing talent and values fit andrecognizing contributions are just some ways to connect. The most important practice for
connection is to make time—for ourselves, our people and our vision. Most leaders I work with
tend to forget to create this time in their agendas and stay in getting-things-done mode.

• Build a mindfulness practice like journaling, breathwork or meditating.
• Ask questions like what do I/we stand for, and what binds me/us to the community?
• Observe your listening-to-statement ratio; make listening at least 50%.
• Receive coaching and create a safe space to explore your thinking.

Clarity
Connection and clarity do not work without each other. Connection without clarity can become
pampering; clarity without connection can become ruthlessness. The two act like a Venn
diagram: More overlap is more effective. And yet, creating connected clarity is challenging for
many leaders. They think they have created clarity by stating things once or giving people a
presentation. My own research regarding organizational clarity shows that organizations with low clarity scores can improve quickly by taking time for doing this: simplifying messages, engaging in two-way dialogues and repeating. Clarity for vision, values, goals, roles, etc. has various benefits. A recent Harvard Business Review article shares evidence for the benefits of dimensions like
well-being and performance.

• Build one-minute pitches for your key messages.
• Make meeting content visual during meetings.
• Practice your message on someone; what did they hear (or record yourself).
• Check your language on filler words like umm and actually.

Coaching
Even with the highest level of connection and clarity in any given moment, visions will change or
evolve, and people will fail or not do what we expect them to do. Every individual has their own
idiosyncratic user instruction and works differently in the face of a clear vision. Coaching is a
mindset to empower and enable people to find alternative ways of working. Many leaders fall into
the trap of wanting to prescribe their solution by advising how they solved a challenge they came
across. Coaching is grounded in the belief that human beings hold the best-fitting solutions to
their own problems. Connection and clarity are part of the process of coaching. Questioning and
challenging come right behind.

• Allow for enough connection and clarity time with people.
• Ask lots of inquisitive questions to understand assumptions and beliefs.
• Ask “what if” questions to foster thinking and alignment.
• Give feedback based on observable behavior.

Commitment
In an information-overloaded world in which there is constantly more than one option to give
attention to, explicit commitment is key. Commitment is a way to create predictability in an
unpredictable world. It is pivotal to create smooth progress when different people’s actions are
interdependent. Many of the leaders I work with fall into the trap of assuming commitment. Some believe it is silly to ask for explicit commitment. Yet research has shown that explicitness in the contract between leader and co-worker and the follow-up commitment to fulfill the contract are critical for progress toward goals.

• Ask “Can I count on you to do XYZ?”
• Write down agreements and deadlines for all action owners, or let them do it.
• Wrap up meetings by inviting others to recap the next steps.
• Address non-commitment by asking, “How do we commit better next time?”

​The four C’s are meant to guide thinking, experimentation, reflection and ongoing design of
authentic leadership. As with any model, the four C’s fall short of representing the complexity of
reality. Yet I hope they inspire you and offer guidance for real-life experimentation.

This article originally appeared on Forbes Coaches Council:
https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2025/12/15/user-instructions-are-the-most-underused-leadership-tool/