High Expectations: World Cup pressures and workplace productivity

I watched the BBC documentary (Scotland 78 – A love story) just before the World Cup started. It’s a great film about Scotland’s calamitous World Cup in 1978. I was only 9 at the time but I remember it vividly. Ally MacLeod, the Scotland manager had the whole nation convinced we were going to win the World Cup. A set of expectations, neither he nor the team were able to get anywhere near living up to. For this World Cup the expectations seem lower for England, and maybe they will thrive with less pressure.

The irony is that setting high expectations, in most circumstances, actually raises performance. It’s been known as the Pygmalion Effect, a theory tested out by Dr Rosenthal. One of his experiments involved rats; half of the group were characterised to the participating humans as ‘smart’, whilst the other half were labelled ‘dumb’. In reality, there was no difference between the groups, they were just average rats.

Rosenthal’s study proved that it was the way the participants coached these rats to complete a maze actually made the ‘smarter’ group more successful. Because those coaches felt confident in the ability of the rats, their expectations were higher and their coaching reflected this. In contrast, the defeatist attitudes bred by the ‘dumb’ label given to the other group, made their coaches less interested in testing the true ability of their rats.

This experiment provides a scalable representation of how the Pygmalion Effect can encourage better performance and higher attainment, whilst conversely, the Golem Effect can undermine true ability. In the workplace, stretching expectations should be set against every employee, empowering them to grow within their role, confident that their manager has confidence in them. This is a transformational leadership principle and one that I live by at IIP.

The ‘Batman’

Another example of high- expectation reality that I recently came across strengthened my belief in the power of this principle. I was listening to the ‘This American Life’ podcast, an episode about the real- life ‘Batman’, a blind man named Daniel Kish who had developed a sonar vision system. In short, Daniel uses clicking noises that he makes to judge distances and obstacles as he walks.

Daniel’s story is incredibly inspirational; it tells of how his mother refused to wrap him in cotton wool, believing that allowing him to live and play like a seeing child would give him the best chance at a balanced and happy life. Daniel does not hide the fact that this freedom as a child resulted in some scrapes; he fondly recalls crashing head first into a post on his bike. However, his core message is that his mother was prepared to cope with the cuts, bruises and odd broken bone, to enable Daniel to perfect his own system of sight, and as a result there is now nothing that his blindness precludes him from. 

 When hearing about Daniel’s story, one of the things that struck me most was his assertion that many blind children begin to use clicking or stomping in their early development, but are dissuaded from this by their parents, teachers or peers because it is perceived as ‘abnormal’. This got me thinking that the fear of negative perception is everywhere in today’s society. I don’t think it was the high expectations that crippled the Scotland and England teams, it was the fear of the consequences of making an error that meant they underperformed, or worse still, missed a penalty.

What I think the Daniel Kish story highlights is that in setting high expectations, you have to give people the room to “fail” safely. Learning from experience and making mistakes is a crucial part of the journey towards fulfilling high expectations. 

In all areas of life, there is little as damaging as low expectation. So, have high expectations for your teams, make it safe for them to fail and in the long run you will achieve much greater and sustainable results.