Expectations matter. We all have them, and typically we don’t know we have them until they go unmet. Kelly and I learned that lesson by serving within a marriage ministry at our church called Reengage for three years. It’s a funny thing to see couples who have been together for decades still enter into situations with unstated expectations; we certainly still do after over twenty years of marriage. If we have expectations with our life partners even after decades together, it’s not so surprising for us to have expectations within our teams that are often just coming together!

People have expectations; this is normal. For the most part, our expectations are just the natural extension of our experiences. And the tricky thing about experiences is that they are so uniquely individual. We may understand someone’s circumstances, and may have even shared those circumstances, but still know very little about their actual experience because the same conditions do not equal the same experiences.

In my life, this has been true in marriage, in war, and in business. I experience this with my family, my friends, and my colleagues. Instead of maligning our differences in expectations, it’s best to seek to understand them.

As a young sales director, I did not understand, nor did I seek to understand the value of divergent expectations. I was on the receiving end of a $7B organizational restructure that took my four state specialized region, and shrunk it to a half state generalized district. Our company, AmeriPath was a conglomerate of high-end laboratories that focused on cancer diagnostics, doing really advanced esoteric testing buoyed by luminary doctors.

We were small, nimble, specialized, and really good; a gem of a boutique patchwork of labs.

Such a gem, that the company had been purchased by the largest lab in the world because they were tired of losing business to us. This all happened a year before I left the Army and was hired as a young sales rep. I remember in my interview one of the execs who was a Special Forces veteran saying, “we are analogous to what the Rangers are to the Army; we are a part of the larger organization, but we function very differently.” I was sold - please pick me!

I started the next month and for the most part, our company was allowed to operate the way it had for all those years we were taking business from the big lab. Frankly, there were still territories that just kept right on taking business from said big lab…our parent company lab.

And even though my Company AMEX said, “Quest Diagnostics”, for the next four years I would go about my AmeriPath business without much interaction with the mother ship. Honestly, it didn’t register much for me. We were just another American company acquired by a larger American company and left to do what we did that got us noticed and purchased in the first place (for $2B might I add)!

Unbeknownst to me, business people far smarter than I were looking into the profitability and sustainability of leaving us to our operating norms. And the way we were functioning was neither profitable, nor sustainable. It had to change. And change is emotional for all parties involved because our brains seek certainty. Any disruption of the norm causes a visceral reaction from most people.

The five year honeymoon ended in 2013, when Quest determined that consolidation and reorganization was in the best interests of the organization - and it truly was. The sales forces, marketing departments, operations teams, and medical professionals from the patchwork of laboratory acquisitions crammed into the Gaylord Opryland to be united under one banner.

*Photo Credit:* *@productschool* *via Unsplash.*

Everyone had their own feelings about it - the field teams were (for the most part) not pleased. A certain mistrust, and at times animosity had grown between the big lab and the boutique labs. We operated differently, we talked differently, we were compensated differently, and in some territories had competed against one another. And yet, we all worked at the same company. Our paychecks came from the same source, our 401k’s were in the same pool, our supplies came from the same distributors, and our CEO was the same man!

But the same conditions do not equal the same experiences. We all experienced acquisitions at a different rate. The differentiation within our day to day operations created different experiences.

Our values and dispositions created different experiences of the same conditions. The boutique labs were composed of highly expeditionary types (like me), who were comfortable operating in ambiguity. Many of us were former military and didn’t know any different! But the larger lab hired mostly medical sales professionals who had cut their teeth in more traditional sales roles with big pharmaceutical companies.

Our jobs created different experiences of the same conditions. Our boutique lab served patients who were eagerly awaiting the results of their tests to know whether or not they had cancer. Our big lab patients were having routine blood work done to check levels. The speed at which we functioned was very different for both.

And our life experiences created different experiences of the same conditions. I had been a Ranger for nearly a decade; the big Army was very foreign to me. Hearing that I was about to be assimilated into the big lab felt a lot like I was having my black beret taken from me again! And to be fair, our colleagues from the big lab often felt jilted by the fact that many of us had been hired right out the military into higher paying, more specialized positions when they had paid their dues in the traditional medical sales industry. They had done their time in pharmaceuticals and copier sales. Most of us hadn’t.

Though we operated under the banner of the same company that had conducted the same acquisitions - we were not the same. And we had different expectations of what the future under the same roof would look like because our expectations are just a natural extension of our experiences.

And while all of that is valid, our leadership made every effort to align the thousands of disparate expectations through one unifying purpose - the care of our patients. Our patients were often the same people being served with our services at different stops on the diagnostic spectrum. We were doing them a disservice if we remained the way it had always been.

*A 1950’s histology lab, tissue samples are prepped for cancer diagnostics. Photo Credit:* *@NationalCancerInstitute* *via Unsplash*

The world had moved on, and we owed it to our patients and the thousands of physicians serving them to move on with them.

It took a lot of effort and a lot more grace, but when our team of teams came together, the one unifying factor–to care for our patients’ needs–became the aligning force for the organization. It wasn’t rainbows and roses. And not everybody made it through the restructure. But everyone who committed to aligning around the vision to providing the best diagnostic insights to patients and care providers got through it, and learned a lot in the process. I know I certainly did.

And I know I learned a lot about the value of respecting each member of the team’s individual experiences and expectations before attempting to align around a unified, collective expectation of what the future might hold.

In today’s world of continuing mergers and acquisitions, organizational realignment, workforce reshuffling, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, we could all benefit from taking the time to honor others’ expectations before aligning them to the team’s expectations. Once we’ve done that, we’ve earned the opportunity to do what leadership requires of us - to get the wonderfully diverse people that we’re lucky enough to lead focused on what we share and what we hope to achieve together.

Cover Photo Credit: @truth via Unsplash