What do you expect?
Leadership trainer and conference speaker, Frank Newberry, considers how good leaders understand how the ‘power of expectation’ can be used to influence outcomes, particularly the performance of others.
Frank also challenges us to raise our expectations of ourselves and of other people
I first came across the power of expectation early on in secondary school. This was remarkable, given that my school’s only claim to fame was that more of its pupils left and went to prison than left and went to university.
The Head Teacher was once asked to describe the school. Was it academic? No. Was it vocational? No - he would say ‘it’s custodial’.
In this unlikely setting, I was blessed to learn about something that has proved really helpful to me throughout my career. I found out that we can influence people’s performance through the power of our expectation. You want your staff to work harder? They will. You want your team to pull together? No problem. You want your senior managers to respond better? Right away!
We are judged by the performance of our people.
How can this be? Well, it is done by exerting the power of expectation - known to some as the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ or the ‘Pygmalion Effect’. If good leaders are to get the best out of their people, at all levels, they need to communicate their highest expectations of them and not just assume that people will reach their peak performance levels automatically. We must never forget that, as managers and supervisors, we are judged by the performance of our people. It is very much in our interest to get the best from them.
When I was a schoolboy attending one of our much hated theatre classes, I was instructed to read the part of Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s play ‘Pygmalion’. This play is based on a very old story by Ovid (born 43BC) in which a man called Pygmalion, a sculptor in ancient Cyprus, falls in love with the statue of a beautiful woman he has created. The Gods intervene and Cupid kisses the statue’s hand. The statue is immediately transformed from an ivory sculpture into a beautiful woman. She then lives happily ever after with Pygmalion.
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In his play (later adapted into the musical ‘My Fair Lady’) Shaw has his protagonist (Henry Higgins) bet his friend (Colonel Pickering) that he can, after just six months of hard work, pass off a common flower girl (Miss Eliza Doolittle) as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. In the play, Eliza succeeds and Professor Higgins wins his bet.
By the way, if you want to check out the play, it is on at The Garrick Theatre in London until 3 September 2011. It currently stars Rupert Everett as Professor Higgins.
As a boy I struggled to play the part of Professor Higgins, but the concept was very clear to me. Even then, I could see that negative expectations could come to pass as readily as positive ones. I could see that, because our Head Teacher believed or expected most of his pupils to not achieve anything, they did not. And, because he expected that many would go straight from his school to juvenile detention centres, many did. He had consciously, or unconsciously, set up a self fulfilling prophecy. I wonder if we do the same with some of the people we have to deal with day to day?
Achieve a positive effect by having higher expectations
I personally have to be careful not to inadvertently set up a negative outcome through my expectations. I try, instead, to achieve a positive effect by having higher expectations of myself and of others. When I went into management at a young age, I would let my team know my positive expectations of them. For example, when I took on a new operational assistant, I indicated to him that I thought he could be a supervisor (and a good one) within a year - and he was.
I quickly gained a reputation for spotting people with potential. In truth, I gave all my staff the same treatment. Most met my high expectations of them; a few did not for a variety of reasons. The most common reasons being their:
- Fear of failure, and a
- Lack of trust due to bad experiences with other managers in the past
Sometime later, I refined my use of expectation to transform not only an individual’s performance, but also tackle the fears mentioned above. I did this by delegating lots of higher level work to my new assistant. Of course, when I delegated work to my assistant, I remained accountable for results, so this took away some of the pressure on the person. A couple of other things were important at that time.
1. A lot of the work I was delegating was not meant to be done at this level in the team, or even at the level above. However, I had no one else available to me at the time and, with some guidance, my assistant was soon able to do some of the higher level work. I deliberately did not mention that the work was two levels higher in case it affected my assistant’s confidence. However, in all my dealings, I behaved as though the assistant could do the work.
2. I found that, very quickly, I could confer and confide with my assistant on nearly all important matters. My assistant had become my professional colleague.
After a few weeks, when worries about an ever increasing workload surfaced, a couple of other things seemed important.
1. After explaining how to prioritise work, I took the opportunity to explain the Pygmalion Effect. My assistant’s response was thoughtful and positive - and worries about the workload ceased.
2. I then commended my assistant’s work to senior management. A few weeks later I was moved elsewhere; eighteen months later my former assistant had gained the two promotions needed to get to supervisor level.
Things felt very different to me
How do we exert the power of expectation? How is the Pygmalion Effect achieved?
Well, I am not absolutely sure, because so few people have used it on me. Yet, the
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