5 Words Your Team Needs to Hear You Define

September 19, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

~George Bernard Shaw

I still think about a tenure file I read years ago.

The faculty in that program had worked with the candidate for five years, and their consensus was clear: the teaching wasn’t at an appropriate level.

The mid-tenure review had come back mixed. There were a few concerns, but it didn’t cite a specific course. Or student feedback. Or name what needed to change..Five years of accumulated documentation, and nothing in that folder described what good teaching in the program meant. But it was clear that the teaching that was happening wasn’t meeting the standard.

The committee voted to deny the candidate.

They all seemed to know the teaching standard. And I could not find any evidence that it had ever been said to the person whose job depended on it.

Every unit I have led has had standards like that one. Real, widely shared, never written down. And they are the most common reason I see a leadership team or a staff break down. Every house has rules nobody posts. Shoes on or off, whether you answer the phone at dinner. We often don’t think of them as rules until someone does it differently.

The same is true of what we expect at work. Most of us find out what our expectations are the moment somebody misses one, because that is when we get irritated.

Why Unspoken Expectations Derail Teams

Every one of us carries an internal definition of what “good communication,” “collaboration,” or “accountability” looks like. The problem? We all define them differently.

One person thinks “good communication” means daily updates. Another assumes “no news is good news.”

One faculty member defines “collaboration” as co-authoring. Another sees it as simply not blocking others’ work.

One chair defines “mission alignment” as recruiting majors; another thinks it’s publications.

When those expectations stay unspoken, we can interpret people's actions as resistant or disengaged, but it's often just two people working from different playbooks in the absence of clear, shared expectations.

J. Richard Hackman studied for decades why teams succeed or fail. His conclusion was that a leader cannot make a team perform, only build the conditions that let it, and one of those conditions is the team's core norms of conduct. Most of us have defined the work. Very few have ever defined the norms.

Five Words Leaders Should Define

In higher ed, "expectations" usually means workload. But the expectations that matter most aren’t about what gets done. They’re about how we work together while doing it. Here are five expectations every leader should define for their team:

1. Collaboration.

• When spoken: people share credit, back each other in public, and bring problems to the group early.

• When unspoken: turf, silos, and "that's not my area."

2. Communication.

• When spoken: concerns surface while they are still small, and updates arrive before anyone asks.

• When unspoken: hallway conversations, cc'd emails, and silence until a crisis erupts.

3. Conflict engagement.

• When spoken: Disagreement is normalized and it can happen in the room.

• When unspoken: avoidance, resentment, and relitigating it in the parking lot. (More on this here.)

4. Mission alignment.

• When spoken: decisions connect to the unit’s purpose.

• When unspoken: everyone optimizes for their own goals and collective work stalls.

5. Accountability.

• When spoken: commitments get honored, and mistakes are owned.

• When unspoken: deadlines slip, work piles on the same few shoulders, and frustration builds.

Try This Before Friday

Think of the last time someone on your team irritated you. Not a blowup, just the small kind you let go without saying anything. They copied the entire unit on something you would have handled with a phone call. They waited until Thursday to tell you a staff member had been struggling since Monday. They said nothing in the meeting and plenty in the hallway afterward. Underneath that irritation is an expectation that probably hasn't been spoken out loud.

Write it in the words you would actually use, and end by asking for their agreement.

"When a personnel issue starts, I want to hear it from you that week, even if you don't have it figured out yet. Can we agree on that?"

Then find a neutral time to say it to them. You don't need a special meeting. Your next one-on-one will do, and it goes down easier if you own the omission rather than the offense: "I realized I've never actually told you this."

You are handing somebody the standard you have already been grading them against.

The Bottom Line

Most teams never have the conversation about how they want to work together. They have the one about what needs to get done that week, and then power through the friction produced by people's different interpretations of how to do that work.

One of the best moves you can make is to write the list with your team rather than for them. Start with your leadership group or one committee, put the five words on the table, and let people say in their own words what collaboration and accountability mean and work toward a consensus.

What comes out of that time is shared language. Once a group has said out loud what "keep me in the loop" means, nobody spends Thursday afternoon reading a five paragraph email that could have been a text.

I have run this conversation with my own teams, and I have facilitated it for other teams that were not mine. It takes a few hours to establish these expectations and then a simple commitment to keep each other accountable moving forward. I don't say this lightly - it can be transformational.

It is foundational work, and it is one of the real gifts of having a leadership role. You build the conditions. Good people do the rest.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading.

I’ll see you next Saturday.