This mini-toolkit is designed for the early stages of a collaboration. The goal is to bring expectations into the open while the relationship is easy to develop (or, indeed, to repair). It’s intentionally lightweight and practical: you can use it in 10 minutes on your own, or in a short conversation with a colleague, client or team.

The toolkit has three parts that you can use as appropriate, depending on the stage of the interaction or relationship that you would like to improve:

• A 10-minute Expectations Audit helps you clarify your own assumptions first, so you enter the conversation with a cleaner hypothesis and less emotional noise.
• A “What Good Looks Like” Template that gives you a shared template to align on outcomes, priorities, ways of working and boundaries in plain language.
• A Reset Script that offers a simple, low-defensiveness way to raise the issue when expectations have already started to drift, providing a respectful entry point into realignment without blame.

Used together, these three steps help you avoid unnecessary friction (I’m sure you know the vibe I’m talking about!) and build a shared sense of clarity in your interactions - ideally before frustration hardens into something more costly like burnout or unhappy clients.

10-minute Expectations Audit (self-check)

Use this when you notice repeated friction, slow delivery, defensiveness or that slightly brittle tone that suggests people are trying to be polite while feeling annoyed.

These are questions that you should ask yourself. The answers are usually a bit uncomfortable, because they force us to question our assumptions and the myriad of silly mental shortcuts that we all take without noticing. Assumptions just come to us naturally, which we can’t stop. But we can pause and think after!

Here are the questions:

• What do I assume the other person thinks success looks like here? Why?
• What do I think I’m being judged on? And what am I judging them on?
  • Think about speed, quality, responsiveness, initiative, independence.
• What do I assume they think their role is versus mine?
• What is currently ambiguous but important in this interaction?
• What do we keep circling without labelling directly?
• If we continued like this for the next three months, what would likely break first?

This gives you a useful starting hypothesis before you speak to anyone. It helps you go into the conversation with curiosity rather than accusation.

“What Good Looks Like” Template

This template can be used in lots of different interactions. I find it especially useful for clarifying project deliverables, but the same questions translate well to many other situations where expectations are implicit or risk drifting.

You can use it to align with a new internal stakeholder, to reset a working relationship that has become slightly tense, to define what “good” looks like for a recurring process or to agree the rules of engagement for a cross-functional collaboration. It also works well for onboarding a new team member, setting expectations with an external partner or supplier, and even shaping the scope and ways of working for a short-term task force.