A founder I was working with had taken that advice to heart. His best engineer would step up to lead their small but growing technical team, freeing the founder for the strategic work only he could do.

One afternoon, the new leader ran his first meeting. The founder wasn’t in it, but he had the project tracker open, and it was updating live. With every edit, his blood pressure climbed a little higher; it was all wrong! Halfway through, he logged into Zoom and reprioritized the whole thing. In front of everyone.

When he brought the situation to our coaching session, he framed it as a feedback problem: his engineer had been a great IC, but he wasn’t delivering as a lead. “How do I tell him he’s… not doing a good job?” 

Before tackling that question, I asked what expectations he’d set and what guidelines he’d given for prioritization. There was a telling pause.

Depending on which chair you’ve sat in, you may have already decided who’s the villain and who’s the hero in this story. But the real culprit was something neither of them could see.

Social science researcher and author Brené Brown has the perfect name for this invisible villain: stealth expectations. 

These are the standards that skulk in the shadows when the work is assigned, then jump out when it’s evaluated. 

They plague performance reviews, one-on-ones, and deliverables that should have been a breeze. If you’re the boss, the work might be passable; it’s just 1x when you expected 10x. Meanwhile, the person who did the work is quite confident they nailed it.

Here's why these expectations often stay hidden: 

As the leader, you've built your sense of what good looks like over years, so it feels like common sense; it seems so obvious, you never think to say it out loud. Somewhere below conscious thought, you’re assuming the other person's brain works the way yours does. You might not even know you're holding a standard until the work arrives and fails it. 

Stealth expectations are rarely intentional, but the impact stings all the same, on both sides of the table. On the receiving end, you feel like a disappointment or a failure. On the boss’s side, you feel like a jerk (a disappointed, frustrated jerk).

Think back to that new engineering leader. After watching the founder rewrite his priorities in front of the team, the new leader starts to feel that making his own calls is risky, so he sends more of them back up the chain.

The founder sees those decisions piling up on his desk and reads them as proof that the team needs closer oversight, so he steps in more often. Meanwhile, the strategic work he’d freed himself up for stays on the TODO list, collecting dust. 

That’s the irony. A leader delegates or hires to speed things up and increase overall productivity, then their stealth expectations sabotage that goal in sneaky ways: 

They steal speed. 

A direct report who sends every decision back to you for approval slows the process, but at least you can see it. What’s even worse for productivity is someone spinning their wheels trying to read your mind: What does the boss secretly want? Which option is least likely to get reversed?

By the time you notice your direct report’s stress, it’s likely to have cost the team countless hours of productivity.

They steal growth. 

“It’s all wrong” tells someone you’re unhappy. It doesn’t give them the principle that would make the next attempt better. And because the standard arrives after the fact, the person on the receiving end can’t do anything with it except feel bad. 

That helplessness can nudge people toward what Carol Dweck calls a fixed mindset, where a miss becomes a verdict on their ability rather than information about what to try next. 

They steal candor. 

When feedback arrives as a surprise correction, people get careful. Your team’s left-hand column gets fuller, and you lose access to their best thinking and early warnings. 

They steal repeatable quality. 

A founder can have excellent standards. But if those standards only exist as reactions (not that; this), nobody else can apply them in advance. Excellence then depends on the founder’s personal review rather than on shared judgment. That might hold work while you can review everything personally, but it breaks as you scale. 

Let this go on long enough, and the founder’s question changes from “How do I give him feedback?” to “Is he the right person for this role at all?”

This is where stealth expectations do their sneakiest damage, because they collapse a number of issues into “not good enough,” which muddies the solution:

If the direct report had everything they needed and still fell short, then it’s a performance problem. But that’s tough to declare with conviction until you’ve ruled out the other variables. When you improve the context and feedback you give your people, they either rise to the occasion and “exceed expectations,” or you’ll have more clarity about what to do next. 

Bottom line: if the standard only lives in your head, it shouldn’t be the basis for deciding whether someone stays or goes. 

The standard advice here is "set clear expectations," and it's good advice. The trouble is that in practice, it can be a false starting point. It skips the part where you have to discover and clarify your own expectations when all you have is a direction, a hunch, a spidey sense.

So, may I present… 🫤The Meh Test! 

The name might need work, but the idea is handy. Think of it as a 30-second pre-mortem:

For instance, say a quarterly goal reads "Set up an industry coalition." Fast-forward, and you can picture your direct report interviewing a couple of industry experts and marking it done. “Fine, but two people isn’t a coalition. Fine, but one interview isn’t momentum. Fine, but they need to be committed.”

Move those into the brief, and the goal becomes “Build an industry coalition of ten vetted, committed industry influencers who’ve formally signed on, and host the kickoff meeting by end of quarter.”

Perfectionists’ Caveat: 

If you run the test and still can’t say exactly what the finished work should look like, no need to panic. You’ll often end up with a sense of what you’re trying to accomplish and why it matters. Be clear about what you expect and where it’s not yet clear (i.e., where exploration will be necessary). That context and intention-setting gives the other person something to ground their work in as the specifics take shape. 

Rather than pretending you have clarity, the goal is to make what you know (and what you don’t) available to the person doing the work. 

I get how counterintuitive this advice can be. Pausing to articulate your standards, or choosing the generous question over the obvious correction, can feel like a luxury you can’t afford. When those objections pop up, keep these perspective shifts in mind: 

“I don’t have time to spell it out.”

Skipping the brief might feel more efficient in the moment, but the time it costs shows up later, scattered across someone else’s calendar and your own.

The Meh Test takes thirty seconds, and even a fuller brief is a matter of minutes. A round of rework takes days, and a team that’s learned to wait for your verdict moves more slowly on everything. If you don’t have time to get clear up front, you’ll likely have even less time to clean up the aftermath.

"I shouldn't have to."

We're professionals. I hired great people precisely so I wouldn't have to think everything through for them, and if something's unclear, it's on them to ask.

Hire great people, absolutely, and then set them up for success before you get out of their way. 

As for asking, the overconfident direct report doesn't ask because they think they've got it, and the eager-to-prove-it direct report doesn't ask because they won't admit they don't. Either way, the silence never meant understanding. You're the only person in the exchange who knows what you didn't say.

"I can't articulate it. I just know it when I see it."

Let a before-and-after do the articulating. This one, I learned from Hillary Gridley: gather a few example work products of a first draft alongside the finished versions. If AI is an option, feed it the before-and-after pairs and ask it what distinguishes the starting points from the end points; if not, lay them side by side and look for the pattern yourself.

Either way, don't swallow the output whole. Treat it as words to react to, a starting vocabulary for a standard you couldn't quite name. 

"The handoff already happened."

That’s when you quiet the critic and tap in the coach. 

A few weeks ago, my daughter yelled down the stairs with a very urgent question. She was leaving on a weekend camping trip the next day, and she was packing two bags: did her swimsuit go in her weekend camping bag or her Monday school backpack?

Child!! The weekend bag! Obviously! 

That’s what the critic in me replied in my head. She’s smart and responsible, and she packs for herself, so how is this even a question? What I said instead (after a deep breath) was: “Which bag would be more useful to put it in?” 

She got there in two seconds using her own reasoning instead of mine. That’s the difference between the two postures: the critic hands down a verdict, and the coach surfaces the thinking.

As technology raises the bar on what individuals and organizations produce, every gap between what you expected and what you got feels less excusable and more expensive. The work arrives fast, and the stakes feel high all the time, so it’s understandable that the critic seems like the most responsible role you can play.

But as a leader, the heart of your job is to create the conditions for your people to do their best work. You give them the context and clarity to start well, room to try things, and feedback that makes the next attempt better. 

So every once in a while, step back and swap “Is this good enough?” for a bigger question: “Do they have what they need to make it great?”

Keep reading, keep leading,

Jess

P.S. If you've ever been on the receiving end of a standard that showed up after the fact, I'd love to hear how it landed (and what you wish your boss had said up front). Hit reply; I read every response.

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