Expectations Have Power

Are there people in your team who you believe are coasting? One of the CEOs I coach, “Michael”, comes to every conversation complaining about just that. He feels like his team isn’t driven. And he has plenty of evidence for that view.

In his particular case, he’s mistaken. The team is working hard. But the expectations are both daunting and confusing. And that’s part of the problem.

People respond to expectations. They rise to high expectations, and coast when expectations are low. But those two options are not the only kinds of expectations employees confront.

Since my clients tend to be high-growth start-ups, the conditions are exaggerated. There is often much more at stake and far shorter timelines for production than in legacy companies. Moreover, the goals often have unknown dependencies. For example, two of my clients have strategies that call for creating new technology that —while possible on paper—has not been successfully created before.

But the expectations are based on targets that were set in a boardroom, not an engineering scrum. So the team works feverishly to meet those goals, all the while uncertain as to whether it’s possible to make their system do what has been imagined.

For many founders, it’s challenging to calibrate goals to expectations. That’s not always true. There are technical founders who have a deep understanding of the hurdles their product team must overcome. But many founders are not technical. They are not operational. So, their connection to the “sausage making” is conceptual.

That’s the challenge for Michael, the CEO I mentioned at the top. He doesn’t code and hasn’t actually done most of the jobs in the company. So, his impatience, while completely understandable, is also a source of disempowerment for his team. From their standpoint, he has expectations that are both unrealistic and fundamentally arbitrary.

On one level, this is just your average story about a leader who is operating from an executive ivory tower. He is divorced from the actual operational work, and therefore, from his team. Isn’t that the age-old story of the industrial age?

But, expectations are one of the lynchpins in a feedback loop. And that loop influences both the experience of the employees and their actual work quality and intensity. That’s why this matters.

Calibrating expectations is a key skill that can be at the heart of how well your team performs.

There is a theory of motivation called the Pygmalion Effect. It is loosely analogous to the transformation of Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard’s Shaw’s play of the same name. But the theory suggests that people rise to high expectations — but only when combined with positive feedback. So, when sales people underperform and are then further castigated by their managers, they perform even less well.

The same is true when high-performing employees fail to meet unrealistic expectations, and are met with disapproval or repudiation. They become less motivated and perform less well. We live down to low expectations, and we become even less effective as the intensity of the criticism increases.

That feedback loop becomes self-reinforcing.

So, how can we, as managers, sustain high expectations in the face of low performance? That’s where one-on-ones and a willingness to mentor and coach employees becomes critical. At a certain point, feedback isn’t sufficient. The manager has to become directly involved in learning what obstacles an employee is facing. Are they under-trained? Under-resourced? Is the goal somehow mis-calibrated? Is there something about the market, message, product or service that isn’t hitting the mark?

A willingness to interrogate the conditions AND the results may be the way to address this issue. And that is what I’ve suggested to Michael.

His expectations are high, yes. But the bigger problem is that when they are not met, his concern morphs into something more than disappointment. It seems to his team that he reassesses their ability and assigns them to a lower “rank” than in his previous assessment. That perception of losing face and losing his confidence reinforces their frustration—and further downgrades their performance. Another self-reinforcing cycle of declining performance, morale and connectivity.

In your own team, it’s worth looking at how you view underperformance and how you respond when employees fail. Do you encourage them and work with them to identify obstacles and remove them? Or do you relegate them to the low-performer bin of your mental account and slowly lower your expectations?

Stepping back to identify ways that we may be creating limiting contexts for our teams is one way to raise your performance as a leader and that of your team. Give it a shot!

Executive coaching is a fine-tuned and bespoke way to identify ways that we are getting in our own way. It works for leaders of every level. Offer yourself and your team the huge resource of executive coaching with Beyond Better Coaching-as-a-Service. Schedule a call with me to chat about it.