Why did the seller get so angry at one of the best agents in town?

I believe one concept sits at the root of most of the conflict we have. It shows up on our teams, between leaders, with customers, and even with our kids and our spouses. Just about any group that has humans in it runs into it. It's called the expectation-reality gap.

Let me explain with a story from real estate.

The seller's expectations

When one of our agents lists a home, the seller walks in with expectations already built in. Some come from how they were brought up, some from their last home sale, and some from what their uncle told them at dinner the night before. We don't control those expectations, and they're there before the relationship starts.

If the agent doesn't address communication up front, whatever the seller expects becomes the standard the agent gets measured against. Maybe the seller's dad told him how it should go. Maybe at his own workplace, people answer texts and calls within the hour. Either way, he goes in assuming that if he calls or texts the agent, he'll hear back within the hour.

The agent signs the listing, walks through the marketing plan, the pricing and the commission, and even talks about how strong her communication is because she calls every client once a week with an update. On the surface, it looks like a great relationship.

Then, in the first week, there's a showing at 2 p.m. on a Monday.

The story he told himself

When the seller gets home, he and his spouse talk about the showing. Did they like the house? Are they going to make an offer? He texts the agent at 6 p.m. By 7, no reply. By 7:30, his spouse asks, "Did you hear anything back from the agent?" He says no, and decides to call the agent.

It goes straight to voicemail. He leaves a message with a bit of an edge in his voice. Over the next two and a half hours, he checks his phone every 30 minutes or so and sees no missed calls and no reply to his text.

By the next morning, the edge has turned into emotion. On his way out the door to work, he's built a story in his head: the agent is too busy or too unorganized to care. Maybe she has too much on her plate. Maybe she hasn't prioritized his listing at all. Maybe the reason he doesn't have five showings is that she just isn't a good agent.

All morning, his anger builds. At 11 a.m. he calls again. The agent picks up on the first ring, sounding delighted to hear from him. The moment he speaks, the mismatch couldn't be more obvious.

What the agent was doing

Now look at it from the agent's side. She has built good boundaries so she can have family time, get eight hours of sleep, and still get back to clients promptly, almost always within four to five business hours. Her business hours are 8:30 to 5:30.

She's so disciplined that she turns her phone off at 6 p.m. Every morning from 8:30 to 10:30 she does lead generation, bringing buyers and sellers to the market for all of her clients. Her standard is to return every text or call within five business hours, but she's off after 6 and prospecting until 10:30.

She's one of the most disciplined and effective agents in the marketplace, because of the way she manages her time. The seller expected a reply within 60 minutes, at almost any hour. If she had 20 or 30 clients at once, that schedule wouldn't be sustainable. And it isn't the seller's fault that he had that expectation. He hasn't done this before.

The gap, and what we put in it

The seller had an expectation, the reality was different, and there was a gap between the two. Any time we have an expectation-reality gap, we tend to fill it with a story, and that story generally isn't true. We make things up to bridge the gap, and the relationship gets worse. We lose trust and confidence, and we end up dissatisfied at work, in business, and at home. (I wrote recently about how the stories we believe can keep us stuck in Why can't I think my way out of this?)

So I'm always looking for expectation-reality gaps. If I sense edginess, irritation or anger between people or between organizations, I'd put a lot of money on an expectation-reality gap sitting somewhere underneath. Our job is to find it, identify it, own it, and close it.

If you're already in the 11 a.m. phone call, that's exactly what you do. Own it, apologize, point out the misunderstanding, and reset expectations going forward. The best case, though, is never needing that call at all.

Setting the expectation before it's needed

The agent should review communication expectations before the client signs the contract. That's what we've trained our agents to do.

When I was in sales, I added an office hours section to my paperwork before the client signed. It showed when I return calls, when I'm available, when I'm not, and how long they could generally expect to wait for a call back. I had them initial that section to show how much it mattered, and I initialed it too. My voicemail greeting repeated the same return-call expectations.

That two-step process set the expectation once and reminded clients of it every time they called. Because we almost always beat it, clients were almost never upset about returned calls. It often went the other way. They were pleasantly surprised when we called back in two to three hours instead of four to five.

We'd hear things like, "You are so responsive, so communicative." We weren't any more communicative than before. We had closed the expectation-reality gap, and then we exceeded it.

When you sense the smoke

Dissatisfaction, anger, or irritation is a smoke alarm. It points to a fire underneath, and that fire is almost always an expectation-reality gap. Whether it's with a spouse, a child, an employee or a customer, here's what I'd do:

1. Find out what their expectation was.
2. Own the fact that you didn't set the expectation properly to begin with.
3. Close the gap.
4. Make sure you're both on the same page going forward.

We've found we can eliminate most dissatisfaction simply by setting expectations well.

If there's a relationship where you can't find the gap, that's what my Unstuck Calls are for.

-Dave Hooke.