Giving your manager a deadline: how much room for uncertainty?
A manager asks for a date; the employee often has a scenario rather than a certainty. The useful question is how to provide a workable timeline without presenting assumptions as established facts.
What the literature establishes
Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross (1994, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show across several studies that people tend to underestimate the time needed to complete their own tasks. Their predictions focus on the anticipated course of events and draw insufficiently on experience with previous tasks. These findings shed light on how estimates are formed, without directly establishing how a manager responds to uncertainty.
A detailed scenario is not enough
Daniel Kahneman and Dan Lovallo (1993, Management Science) offer a theoretical analysis distinguishing an inside view, focused on a project's particular features, from an outside view based on outcomes in comparable situations. A detailed plan can seem persuasive while overlooking delays observed elsewhere. In discussions with a manager, this mechanism suggests examining the actual durations of comparable work, rather than just the planned steps.
The tempting shortcut
One might conclude that simply adding a buffer to every proposed deadline is enough. Yet these papers provide neither a universal correction factor nor a guarantee that a range will be better received than a single date. The more useful distinction is between the desired date, the estimate supported by available information and the conditions needed to bring the two closer together. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
Studies of individual estimation do not reproduce every dependency in a collaborative project, and a theoretical analysis is not an intervention trial. Past examples can also mislead if scope, resources or requirements have changed. Finally, better documentation of a forecast does not remove hierarchical pressure: presenting uncertainty requires a manager willing to discuss it.
A practical check in Lausanne
In Lausanne, whether in a medtech company, a higher education institution, an international sports organisation or a scale-up in the Lake Geneva region, an exercise in the programme « Construire une relation efficace avec son manager » could involve documenting upcoming timeline estimates before discussing them. For each one, record a delivery window, the durations of comparable tasks where available and any unresolved dependencies. Over a six-week trial, retain the original estimates and then calculate the proportion of completed tasks delivered within the stated window, listing tasks still open separately. Reviewing this record with the manager provides a test of forecast calibration, without mistaking it for a measure of relationship quality. To go further: explore the Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager training in Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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