A friend of mine told me about someone she knows who was just fired from his job as a grant writer for a school. They paid the guy $30,000 and he "only" brought in $40,000 in his first 9 months on the job so they let him go.
Sounds like he did a pretty good job to me. He paid for himself in less than a year.
You have to wonder what his supervisors were expecting him to do, don't you?
Maybe his manager told him that if he didn't bring in X amount in grant money he was going to be out on his ear...but somehow I doubt it.
Managers might tell you the responsibilities of the job but rarely do they get as explicit as "this is what I expect and these are the performance criteria you need to meet". I like to think I tried to do that when I was a manager but I probably didn’t do as well as I could have.
But employees don't ask for that either. I may have mentioned before that I've interviewed more than 10,000 people (so excuse me for repeating myself) and I can't remember any that have ever asked me for specific benchmarks and performance criteria they'd be evaluated against and expected to meet.
Both managers and their employees carry different expectations in their heads and when they aren't met there's disappointment, frustration, and anger on both sides.
We do that with our peers in the office too. We just expect someone to answer our phone and when they don’t we get annoyed. Or we just expect them to see that we need help with something and pitch in. When they don’t we get really annoyed.
God has expectations for us. And He’s pretty clear about them. He’s used lots of people over the years to help us get the message. Of course we can be pretty thick. So He sent His son.
Jesus made the expectations pretty clear for us. We’ve got the two great commandments to follow.
More than anything else, we’re to operate from a position of love.
It’s not a tough expectation but it’s awfully hard to fulfill sometimes isn’t it?
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