What If Their Behaviour Isn't the Problem... Your Assumption Is?

There’s an unwritten rule that I think most of us carry into the workplace without even realising it. It’s an automatic expectation we have of the other adults we work with, and it goes something like this: “I can manage myself, so I expect you to be able to manage yourself too.”

On the surface, that seems reasonable. We’re all adults. We have jobs. Surely, we shouldn’t have to tell another grown adult to turn up on time, communicate when they’re running late, follow through on what they’ve committed to or think about how their behaviour affects the people around them. These are basic things, aren’t they?

The problem is that self-management is a skill, and like every other skill, people have different levels of capability and maturity in it. What feels automatic to you may require conscious effort for someone else. What you consider a basic personal standard may not be a standard they have ever set for themselves. Yet because we assume they should know, we often don’t have the conversation. Instead, we become frustrated when they fail to meet an expectation we have never actually made visible.

This came up in a recent coaching conversation with a leader who was grappling with a reliability issue. She had someone in her team who was good at her job and had recently interviewed extremely well for another role. There were plenty of reasons to see her as capable, but there was one issue that kept getting in the way: she was regularly late.

For my client, reliability is a really important personal standard. If you say you’re going to be somewhere, you’re there. If other people are relying on you, you make sure they can rely on you. So every time this person was late, it affected the way my client saw her. She could see the capability, but she was questioning whether she could trust this person with greater responsibility because she couldn’t rely on her to consistently turn up when she said she would.

As we unpacked it, I realised this was another example of something I’ve been seeing repeatedly in my coaching conversations. Most of us walk into a workplace with an automatic assumption that other adults should be able to manage themselves because we know how to manage ourselves. The problem is that we rarely stop to consider that our version of self-management has been developed over years through our experiences, the expectations that have been placed on us, the mistakes we’ve made and the standards we’ve chosen to set for ourselves.

In this situation, what this person’s behaviour was revealing was that her personal management skills were less mature than my client’s and her personal standards around reliability were lower. That doesn’t make the behaviour acceptable, and it certainly doesn’t mean my client should lower her own standards to accommodate it. It simply changes the way you approach the problem.

If we believe someone should already know better, we tend to approach them with frustration and judgement. We think, “Why should I have to tell you this?” We start collecting evidence every time they do it again, and before long, the issue is no longer simply that they are late. We have started forming a much bigger story about who they are. They’re unreliable. They don’t care. They lack commitment. They’re not ready for more responsibility.

Meanwhile, the other person may have absolutely no idea that this is the impact they are creating.

This is where the unwritten rule gets us into trouble. We assume that because something is obvious to us, it must be obvious to them. We assume that because we have developed a certain level of self-management, they should have developed it too. Then we become increasingly frustrated when they continue to fall short of a standard that, in many cases, we have never actually discussed with them.

The alternative is to recognise the gap for what it is and make the invisible visible. In the reliability situation, that means having a conversation about what reliability actually means, why it matters and what impact the current behaviour is having. It might sound something like, “Reliability is really important to me, and when you’re regularly late, I start to question whether I can rely on you. I actually want to be able to rely on you, so we need to talk about what is getting in the way and what needs to change.”

That conversation gives the other person something they didn’t have before: awareness. They can now see the gap between their current behaviour and the standard that is expected of them. They can understand the impact they are having on someone else, and from there, they have a choice about whether they are willing to do something differently.

Because you cannot self-manage another adult. You can create the environment and the parameters they are expected to work within. You can clarify the standard, explain the impact, support them to develop better habits and hold them accountable for the commitments they make. But ultimately, they have to decide whether they want to elevate their own level of self-management.

I think this is the part we sometimes miss as leaders and colleagues. We either expect people to manage themselves without ever making our expectations clear, or we swing too far the other way and try to manage them so closely that we take responsibility for things they need to learn to own themselves. Neither approach helps someone grow.

There is a middle ground. We can recognise that people come to work with different levels of self-awareness, different personal standards and different levels of maturity in how they manage themselves. Then, instead of silently judging them against our own standards, we can have the conversation that gives them the opportunity to see what we see.

Without that conversation, the frustration simply runs in the background as an unspoken message: “You don’t meet my standards.” The other person feels the frustration but may not understand where it is coming from, while you become more annoyed that they still haven’t worked out something you think they should already know.

So the next time you find yourself repeatedly frustrated with someone at work, it may be worth getting curious about the expectation sitting underneath that frustration. What are you assuming they should already know how to do because you know how to do it yourself? What standard are you holding them to that you have never actually made visible? And what conversation have you been avoiding because part of you thinks, “I shouldn’t have to tell them this”?

You may be right. Maybe you shouldn’t have to tell them. But if the issue matters and the behaviour keeps happening, being right about that won’t change anything. Having the conversation might.

The goal isn’t to lower your standards or excuse poor behaviour. It’s to stop expecting people to magically know what those standards are and how to meet them. When we recognise that self-management is a skill rather than something every adult arrives at work already knowing how to do, we can spend less time being frustrated by what people should know and more time creating the clarity that gives them a genuine opportunity to grow.