In the early 2000s, the Australian public school system introduced the Responsible Thinking Process, or RTP. Teachers were given five questions to address disruptive students.
When a student misbehaved, teachers asked what became known as ’the questions’.
- What are you doing?
- What should you be doing?
- What are the rules?
- What happens when you break those rules?
- What are you going to do now?
(Is it telling that I wrote these questions from memory?)
After the questions, the next disruption landed you in the RTC (Responsible Thinking Classroom). Once in the room, you sat in silent supervision, with the task of writing your teacher a plan and justification for why you should be allowed back in class and how you plan to follow the rules moving forward. I hated the process, which may or may not be because of my regular RTC visits.
With the gift of hindsight and maturity, I’ve come to appreciate how the process made the unspoken clear. To correct someone, the teacher first had to name the expectation. When a student crossed it, there was something established to point to. If nothing had been named, the teacher let it pass and treated it as a chance to set the expectation properly.
Some of the leaders I work with just hope people will figure out the rules in time. The result is a team that feels parented rather than led, good behaviour rewarded and bad behaviour punished, and everyone reading between the lines for what’s actually expected. Tori Eleto, @nytherapist, names the cost of that.
“What isn’t communicated is felt, what’s felt is interpreted, and what’s interpreted is often inaccurate.”
This is where I think the shift needs to happen. Rules are imposed. Agreements are shared. But that only holds if someone said the thing out loud, and mostly we haven’t. We all carry unspoken expectations that need to be surfaced, and the way you get there is through an expectation conversation, held early, and again as the team changes.
There are three questions worth asking in that conversation. What do I expect of my team? What does the team expect of me? What does the organisation expect of us?
Ask all three, and a pattern usually appears: a handful of themes that show up across the answers. Those themes are your values, already held, just never named. Which is why this is less about inventing values and more about noticing the ones you already run on.
A named expectation isn’t yet an agreement. It becomes one when everyone is clear on what it looks like on any given day: what we do, what it is for, and what we do when it slips. That is the thing you can point to, and it is why confronting poor behaviour gets easier, because you decided how you would respond before you needed to.
If you want to get the process started, begin with a conversation about expectations. Raise it in your next team meeting and ask a simple question: What expectations do we have of one another that we’ve never said out loud?
Then give people space to think and to answer.
In the classroom, the teacher’s question was never really about what you were doing. It was to get you to take ownership of what you should be doing, because it had been named, and because you were there when it was.