I think it’s safe to say that from time to time, we’re all dissatisfied with or upset about some aspect of our lives. We find ourselves wondering why we’re not further along in our career, why we didn’t get that big promotion that went to so-and-so instead, why we haven’t “done as well” as a sibling or close friend, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Now here’s the thing: at the risk of overgeneralizing, I think the chances are that what upsets us the most in these situations is not the specific “failure” in question, but the fact that our expectations—and the expectations of others—have not been met. In other words, in many cases the problem isn’t so much that we’re not further along in our career, for example; the problem is that our parents or our spouse or our friends—and worse yet, we ourselves—expect that we should be further along!

In my professional role, I’ve done a lot of coaching and counseling, with people at every stage of their career, from young people just starting out to top executives not that far from retirement. And most of them, including those highly successful executives, almost always express this kind of dissatisfaction about something. Something that has gone wrong for them. Or something that hasn’t happened fast enough. Or  something that they really wanted to happen, but that probably isn’t going to happen at all.

But most of the time, when I ask those people how those unmet expectations were set in the first place—where they came from—they rarely have a clear answer.  I sometimes think about this in terms of the “Book of Shoulds.” You know, that unwritten book that most of us nonetheless seem to carry around in our head, the one that prescribes where we should be at every stage of our lives. The book that sets those unspoken expectations that have such a powerful effect on our sense of who we are, what we can aspire to achieve, and what we’ve actually accomplished.

And the thing about the Book of Shoulds is that it covers a whole lot of terrain. In this blog I write often about the challenge of creating real and lasting organizational change, whether the organization is a small unit or a global enterprise. And believe me when I say that the Book of Shoulds definitely comes into play here.

In my experience, efforts to create significant organizational change almost always happen too slowly for the organization’s senior leaders.  I’ve been involved in many complex change initiatives, at many organizational levels, and I’ve had leaders say to me, “We’ve been working at this thing for a year now, and we still haven’t  moved the needle. How long is this going to take?” Or “Sure we’ve made some progress, and I know we started in the bottom quartile, but why haven’t we made it into the top quartile by now? We must be doing something wrong, because it ‘should’ be happening faster.”

Who says “it” should happen faster? All too often it’s the Book of Shoulds, rather than any real understanding of how change happens. In fact, the research shows that even the best orchestrated organizational change or engagement efforts takes time. In the very beginning, you may see very little progress, as the change initiative starts to penetrate the organization. (If you chart that progress, the graph will often show the classic “hockey stick” profile.) Beyond that, a good rule of thumb is one year for every layer of management between the CEO and the front line manager for a major cultural or engagement change to occur—and really become established.  Five levels, five years.

Of course that doesn’t mean you won’t see progress long before that. It’s those signs of progress that you need to capture and tell stories about. Publicize them widely throughout your organization, whether that’s the whole company, a division, or a department or work unit. Create heroes of those who are leading the way and doing great work.

The bottom line is that organizational change is hard. Successful organizational change takes time, and many change efforts fail because expectations aren’t set correctly or managed well. So use the facts to set and manage them—and toss the Book of Shoulds aside.