Conflicting Expectations

Examples of conflicting expectations include the following.

• Company mergers. Look at what happened with Roger Smith at General Motors and Ross Perot at Electronic Data Systems. When these two cultures came together, the executives clashed in their attempts to deal with tough problems and mesh two different social wills. We saw, on one hand, Ross Perot advocating the rights of the common worker--trying to do away with layers of management and special executive privileges, seemingly unaware that certain features of the GM culture are intergenerational and simply can't be done away with overnight. Consultants can't mandate changes like that. It takes more education and a lot of communication. But most people in acquisitions and mergers don't get into meaningful two-way communication. They play either hard ball or soft ball, win-lose or lose-win.

• Marriage relations. Today, many of the once hidden issues and expectations of marriage are out in the open. But there is still much debate over the role of the man and the woman. For example, if a young man from a more traditional family approaches marriage with the implicit expectation "I'm the breadwinner, and you take care of the kids," he may be in for a rude awakening. It's evident that young and old couples alike are struggling with conflicting role expectations. Many women are unfulfilled without a professional career out side the home--a phenomenon fueled by a society that doesn't provide much appreciation, validation, and reinforcement for women as homemakers.

• Education. Each special-interest group sees education through its own pair of glasses, and each points to different problems and proposes different solutions. One burgeoning issue is the emerging trend toward providing character education in the schools, which is more and more needed as the traditional two-parent family breaks down.

• Parent-child relations. Parents often experience conflicting expectations in their relationships with their children, especially as these children enter teenage years. Parent and child have different ideas about their roles, and these ideas change as they go through various stages of growth and development.

• Government relations. Is the role of government to do good, or is the role of government to keep people from doing harm? If I am working with someone who believes that the government's role is to do good, we may have totally different expectations, which leads to conflict, disappointment, and cynicism.