Your Standards Are Not the Structure
What happens when personal expectations run a group
For some reason, it’s become fashionable to carp online about how much we do compared to how little our partner does. The emotional labor of contributing to a home and relationship is lopsided, according to these folks, and it’s overwhelming. Why should I be the only one doing it? Granted, it’s often women saying it, but I’ve seen plenty of men saying it in a different way.
The reason this subject fascinates me is because of what it says about us, and how we bring that to the teams and groups we find ourselves in. Someone who already believes that they’re the only productive one in their home will act differently on a team outside the home than someone who believes that their partner on the team/in the home is also productive, even if it’s in a different way.
So today, we are going to dig into these questions of productivity, expectations, and whatnot, both individually and operationally. Now, before you come at me with your story of how your spouse really is the Laziest Person Imaginable(tm), let me just remind you that you, at some point in your life, chose them. What’s that say about you?
(Now that all those folks left in a huff, let’s dig in.)
As someone who works with people dealing with trauma, one of the most important things I have ever learned is that multiple things can be true at the same time. This sounds juvenile at first (“Well, of course they can; that’s not some brilliant observation”); you’d be surprised, however, at how much we collapse things, or use one thing to disprove the other thing’s existence when they’re actually both true and not mutually exclusive.
For instance, someone can be suffering the effects of a severe childhood trauma that affects their decision-making process in a very real way, AND be responsible for engaging in behavior that is objectively harmful to themselves and others. Where some might say their choices are not their fault because the trauma negates their culpability, I would argue that you can both have empathy and compassion for their pain, AND yet eventually need to address the simple fact that agency exists, and they don’t have to make these harmful choices over and over.
My reason for bringing this up is simple: The concept of holding two (or more) truths in tension is a critical thing when considering productivity in a home. And while I don’t typically write about marriage or cultural norms in that realm, I think who we are at home does become, in some ways, who we are on a team. And that is most definitely the kind of thing I write about.
I spent several years thinking my husband was deficient in the romance department. He was forgetful, he left his socks next to the couch, and our standards for what constitutes a clean kitchen embodied a gap that made me crazy. He also wasn’t much for telling me what you might call “mushy things.”
I would frequently point out these things; after all, according to societal “wisdom,” it is good to be open about what you need in a relationship. Except what doesn’t get talked about so much is the concept of why you need it, and if the thing you need is even just or good.
It’s not enough to be “open about what you need.” First, you need to ask yourself some questions.
Why do I need this?
What emotional need is it fulfilling?
Is it their job to fulfill that need, or is it something that’s actually my responsibility that I’m outsourcing to them?
Is it just that I ask this of them? (Don’t ask if it’s fair, because there’s no such thing. Ask if it’s just.)
Only after you’ve answered all of these do you get to ask things like, “Do they even know that I expect this?” and maybe, maybe, you will make it to the part where you get to ask, “Why are they not doing it?” In my own experience, when I am being honest with myself, I find that I used to jump to that last question without ever asking the rest.
When I stopped constantly asking “Why aren’t you doing X?” and instead went back to the beginning of the questions, the answers got pretty uncomfortable. What’s more, I realized that I was missing some pretty important data. Here’s a sampling:
In 11 years, I have put gas in my own vehicle maybe 10 times.
When my truck makes a weird sound or smell of any kind, I come home and say so, and it magically gets fixed. I don’t ever have to worry about it again. Things like new tires appear when needed, and even the oil changes that I did myself back in the day are now abstract concepts I haven’t thought about in years.
I rarely deal with things like firewood, scraping ice off windshields, or clearing snow off driveways.
When water or ice piles up in certain spots in my driveway, little bridges of wood appear for me to walk on.
When he makes me a grilled cheese sandwich, the cheese is all the way to the edge of the bread.
He gets up 20 minutes before me so that when I get up, there is already a thermos of coffee with the perfect ratio of cream and sugar sitting on my desk, sometimes with an extra touch of chocolate, cinnamon, or brown sugar. Every morning, seven days a week. In fact, this is such a mainstay that I genuinely am unable to replicate this perfect coffee on the rare occasions when he’s gone.
Not only does he not engage in porn, he chooses to be intentional about what he allows in his social feeds.
He is traveling this weekend, and yet before leaving, he made sure my gas tank was full. Naturally, the kitchen sink clogged while he was gone, and after several hours attempting to fix it on my own, he told me not to even worry about it, and he would take care of it when he got home. His flight didn’t get in until 1 am, but he chose to handle the problem.
These might seem like small things, but they are not inconsequential things. These things ARE romance; in fact, they’re the best and most real kind. They are the ways that someone says, “You matter to me, and I am willing to inconvenience myself on your behalf whether you notice or not.” He does these things without asking, and even though they are not my expectations, they are his. HE expects these things of himself because that is how a man, in his mind, shows love and care for his wife.
And yet, if a wife does not ask the right questions of herself, she will skip to the “Why isn’t he doing X, Y, and Z,” and never see the beauty of these day-to-day kindnesses and sacrifices. I don’t get flowers; I don’t get love letters or expensive gifts, or jewelry, or shopping trips, or whatever else. But I’ll tell you what: I know that I am loved and cherished, and I know that if the day ever comes when it is asked of him, he would bear any pain, even unto death, to spare me from it.
I know that because I have spent enough time asking the uncomfortable questions of myself to see reality clearly. I know that when I am being churlish about what I don’t get or what he doesn’t do, it’s often because I’m not being honest with myself about how my expectations are coloring the view and blocking me from seeing not only his contributions, but where my own are failing.
Don’t think this is strictly a wife problem, either. Men do the same thing, and that’s a whole other (yet related) conversation. Let’s move to the operational sphere, however, and look at this concept of expectations in a group context.
How This Translates in a Group
The person who skips uncomfortable self-examination at home will also skip it in a group, and jump straight to “why aren’t others doing X?” They will explain team dysfunction as being a function of other people’s deficits, and will not see that they are contributing to the degraded orientation of the team.
This is probably a no-brainer if you’re an ongoing reader here, because you understand that individuals with mismatched orientation take that everywhere they go.
To break the faulty loop and realign with reality, you can apply the same question inversion we used above. Instead of “why isn’t X person doing what they’re supposed to,” ask other questions first.
Do I know their full contribution?
Do I know what constraints they’re operating under?
Is what I expect of them actually their job, or am I projecting my standards/outsourcing things that are NOT their job?
Is there a structure that already defines what should be happening, and am I adhering to it, or am I looking to impose my own expectations on the structure?
Internal Failure Modes
Someone who sees themselves as the only productive one or the “best member of the team” creates a specific failure mode. They will stop delegating because they have decided others won’t do things right (read: the way they would do it). They can also hoard context instead of sharing it because it becomes a function of the “I am indispensable” identity.
Lastly, they can create bottlenecks. If you’re also the leader of the group and not just a self-inflated member, you have a deeper problem. If you’ve read the new book I have out with Donald Vandergriff, you understand that this is not decentralized command, no matter what you call it or pretend it is, and your decision-making will be less effective at best, and catastrophic at worst.
My husband has his own standards. He expects things of himself that I did not articulate and, more importantly, would not have thought to choose. Karina Schneidman MBA, MS-MFT wrote about this recently as well.
A good man makes the people around him feel seen, protected, and valued, not through grand gestures, but through daily choices. He creates a life where love is felt, not promised. Talk is cheap.
Teams do this, too, even though romantic love has nothing to do with it. People import their personal standards into shared spaces, and then treat failures of their own expectations as a failure of character or commitment, when the other people on the team have their own operating systems. Your individual standards become covert expectations, and you may or may not even adhere to them yourself—but everyone else has to.
During the years I was secretly grumbling about the expectations my husband wasn’t meeting, you can absolutely bet that I was bringing those expectations into the teams I was in as well.
This is also, by the way, why you need to build a structure into the group. When you have structure, the individual members all adhere to the same standards rather than bringing their own to the mix and holding everyone to a mish-mash of standards that can be competing or even contradictory.
In a properly structured group, people either adhere to the structural expectations or they self-select out. In elite military units, the structure is clearly defined, and while everyone who enters the selection process brings expectations of their own, they quickly learn that the structure is the only expectation that matters. You can realign your expectations to it and stay by adhering to them, or you can keep your own expectations…and leave.
External Failure Modes
Let’s say the church you go to has a security team. If you were to oversimplify it, their job is to protect the congregation from threats. On a gorgeous, sunny Sunday morning, a few of them are out patrolling the parking lot and notice that one of the children’s classes let out early, and all of the kids were sent to the church playground. There aren’t enough teachers outside to keep an eye on all the kids, and so your security team ends up essentially babysitting all of the kids in the playground, some of whom decide to leave the fenced area and play in a grassy spot next to the parking lot.
One of the kids runs in front of the swings and gets clocked by one of the kids on the swing. The parents are livid that their child got knocked down and has a bruise. As team lead, you’re in the unenviable position of having to de-escalate the situation as the parents ask repeatedly and at increasing levels of volume why your team wasn’t doing its job. After all, isn’t the team supposed to “protect the congregation”?
There are several things happening here.
The parents’ expectations are individual ones; they are holding you and your team responsible for their definition of “protection from threats,” not yours.
There is no structure that would define it in a way that all parties can choose to participate in or withdraw from. If, for instance, the church had a policy that children in the playground need to have their parents present, the parents can then choose to either supervise their children or not allow them in the playground.
The teachers of the children’s classes also had individual expectations; namely, that the children would stay in the fenced playground area, and that the security team members would be willing and able to help watch them.
As a result of all of these mismatched expectations and lack of structure, conflict occurred. The worst part is that you as the team lead have no structural expectation that you can outline to all parties; instead, you’re stuck trying to piecemeal a solution and hopefully create a structure after the fact that will prevent further occurrence. That won’t help you with this incident, though, will it?
Tying It All Together
The person complaining online about carrying all the emotional or even physical labor at home is often the same person on their team who has decided they’re the only one doing real work. They skipped the uncomfortable self-audit questions and moved directly to the “what about that guy over there” questions. As a result, they’re getting wrong answers everywhere; their view of reality is skewed, and they are resistant to feedback, healthy embarrassment that drives behavioral change, and other critical things needed to grow and contribute in a meaningful way.
Structure is necessary, and yet self-examination has to exist first; without that internal lens, you will find ways to rationalize why your standards are the only good ones. If you can do the uncomfortable process of self-audit, you’ll be able to start seeing what’s actually there. You’ll see that often, your spouse is doing things for you out of love, even if it doesn’t correspond to your personal preferences. You can recognize that your co-worker, who is saddled with constraints you weren’t aware of, may be doing the best they can.
You can even see that you have work to do on yourself, which is far more important than anything others are doing or not doing.
Are you calibrated enough to see it?
An adage I've lived by for many years is: You expect from others what you expect from yourself.
Followed by: Unspoken expectations are guaranteed to be violated.
Beautiful