1/23/2007
By FatMan in Charlotte
for BigBlueInteractive.com
Managing expectations. If there is one thing I’ve learned that is more important than any other in the workplace – it is management of expectations. Let’s look at two situations with the same exact result, but with a different takeaway:
- Employee A is launching a new product. He tells superiors that the project is on time, on cost, and on spec. He lets them know that first month sales will be $100K and the full year sales will be $2.5M.
- Employee B is also launching a new product. He tells superiors that the project has been lagging and may have a delay, it is over budget, and the engineers are screwing him on the specs. He’s doubtful they will even launch on time, so he says that by scraping together enough resources, the product might have first month sales of $25K and will be lucky to break $1M for the year.
- Both products launch on time, just over cost and on spec. They do first month sales of $50K and first year sales of $1.75M.
So you are thinking, “Great Mr. Friedman, but I tuned out Economics in high school and I’m tuning you out right now. What are you getting at?” What I’m getting at is that neither employee is really doing an exemplary job, but Employee A just pissed off a whole lot of people, including the budget people, while Employee B is looking like a star. Why? Because he managed expectations better. He undersold and over-delivered. Right now, as Giants fans, we are looking at Coughlin as Employee A and we aren’t happy.
We were told discipline would improve, that injuries would be lessened, and that control would be taken over the team, and to the naked eye, all three areas look to be worse. In reality they probably aren’t, but given the media’s penchant for wanting to hate Employee A, they APPEAR to be worse. Management of expectations have failed miserably.
With two weeks left to go in the regular season, I had a pitchfork in my hand, too. I was ready to pick up some burning hay, don a white sheet, and rail Employee A out of town, but then I saw a feature on the Packers and I thought to myself, like I do on all ESPN pieces, “What the hell is this?” ESPN was lauding the Packers, saying what a great job they were doing and how they DESERVED to go to the playoffs. They even mentioned that the Giants didn’t deserve to go. And it got me thinking – Why didn’t we deserve to go? We didn’t manage expectations well enough!!
Starting out 6-2 is akin to Employee A telling people everything was OK. Finishing the year 2-6 made people grab pitchforks. But yet doing the opposite is noble and gritty. Of course the end result is that we made the playoffs – and no, despite what the media made it out to look like, we weren’t even the first 8-8 team to gain that honor. But the lingering image that remains is we didn’t belong there. I say “Hogwash!”
Now I know making parallels between the sports world and the real world is usually an exercise in futility, but this one has legs. As fans, we have insanely high expectations for the team. We see the Patriots doing well or the Eagles doing well and we think, “We should be like them.” And by and large, we ignore the Cardinals and the Lions as being inferior franchises. Going hand in hand with that mode of thinking, most fans also look at their team in a vacuum. They want to emulate the Panthers or they want the success of the Seahawks. But the truth is the Giants have the same number or more Super Bowl appearances and playoff berths than both of those units since 2000.
The one place the Giants have matched expectations is in the NFL offices. Pete Rozelle began a quest for parity a couple decades ago, and for the most part he has succeeded. We have become what they wanted us to become. Denny Green knows exactly what we are. We are an inconsistent team whose measure of success is usually a determinant of our strength of schedule and our injuries - pretty much the same as 20+ other teams (eliminating the high and low outliers). And while it is damn frustrating as a fan to witness this inconsistency, we are in the same boat as a lot of others – and pinpointing why we are in this place is easy if we choose to look at it correctly.
In a way, ownership has done the fans a favor next year. They’ve set the bar of expectations high. Even being Employee B won’t get Coughlin by in 2007. He must make a run for the Super Bowl and a damn good one to be retained. He can do it. He also may fail. Because in the NFL today, you are just as apt to be high one week like the Broncos and out of the playoffs the next - just as you’re likely to be down and out one week like the Eagles and division winners the next. Injuries, schedules, and momentum are much more important than when Lombardi took a squad and ran roughshod over his outclassed opponents. It’s both the beauty and the bane of today’s NFL. You’ll never be able to manage the expectations of idiots who expect a title each year, but you can work on the rest of the fans who hopefully understand the big picture of things.
And that is The FatMan weighing in…..
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