BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Leadership Trainer and Motivational 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.
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.
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, 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.
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