The power of positive expectations

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”.

William Shakespeare

In 1968 the work of two psychologists, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen, studied the effects of tutor expectations on the performance of their students.

They took intelligence pre-tests with the children and then told teachers the names of twenty percent of them who were showing "unusual potential for intellectual growth" and predicted they would bloom with the academic year.

They then sat back and watched what was to unfold.

Unknown to the teachers these children were randomly selected with no relation to the intelligence test. Eight months later they re-tested the children and the results showed that the randomly selected children, who the teachers thought would bloom, scored significantly higher.

They called this the "Pygmalion Effect" named after the legendary figure of Cyprus. Pygmalion was a sculptor who carved a woman out of ivory. He fell in love with the woman in his statue and wished he would meet a woman just like her, which he did shortly after.

The results from this study (and since there have been hundreds of studies done in this same area) showed that positive expectations of others influence performance positively and negative expectations do the opposite.

“When we expect certain behaviours of others, we are likely to act in ways that make the expected behaviour more likely to occur.” (Rosenthal and Babad, 1985)

You may recall times in your life when this effect has taken place on you, if you had a teacher in a particular subject in school that believed in your abilities or a boss who did the same and you stepped up to meet their expectations of you.

Great leaders have the ability to see more in people than they can often see in themselves.

Steve Jobs is somebody who was famously known to push people beyond their limits do often achieve what was considered impossible. His colleagues dubbed this effect ‘Reality Distortion Field’ after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force.

An early example of this was when Jobs was on the night shift at Atari and pushed Steve Wozniak to create a game called Breakout. Wozniak said it would take months, but Jobs stared at him and insisted he could do it in four days. Woz knew that was impossible, but he ended up doing it.

Those who had not worked for Jobs and didn’t really understand him interpreted the Reality Distortion Field as a euphemism for bullying and aggression. But those who worked with him admitted that the trait, as infuriating as it could be, led them to perform way beyond what they thought was possible.

Jobs and Apple had a fraction of the resources that Xerox or IBM had, yet he acted as if the ordinary rules most people play by didn’t apply to him and he inspired his team to change the course of computer history as a result.

Debi Coleman who was a member of the original Mac team recalls “It was a self-fulfilling distortion”. Coleman won an award one year for being the employee who best stood up to Jobs. “You did the impossible because you didn’t realize it was impossible.”

One day Jobs marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain why reducing the boot-up time wasn’t possible, but Jobs wasn’t interested.

“If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” he asked. Kenyon conceded that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if five million people were using the Mac and it took 10 seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to 300 million or so hours a year - the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes a year.

A few weeks later Kenyon had the machine booting up 28 seconds faster.

The message is simple. Be careful what you expect from others and be careful what others expect from you. Have a look around and notice if it is having a positive or negative effect.

Inspiring others to perform at the highest level starts with ourselves.

We cannot force others to change but we can facilitate the change. Our very own expectations of others will have a direct impact on their behaviour, so checking in with ourselves and analysing our own perceptions of others is the starting point.

What expectations do you have of those around you?

Are your expectations having a positive impact or a limiting impact?

This is an excerpt from my book ‘How Leaders Make It Happen’, and you can find out more about my wider work here: View Martin's website

Keep making it happen,

Martin Robert Hall