The Real Driver of Performance Is Your Expectations

The way leaders perceive their teams has a direct impact on how those teams perform. By managing expectations deliberately, managers can unlock stronger engagement, better decisions and improved results

CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in Science of People

Have you ever heard of the expectancy effect? Once upon a time, a pair of adventurous researchers had participants undergo a unique experiment. They were told they had to train rats to quickly make it through a maze.

• Half of the participants were told they had “maze-bright” rats that carefully were bred to be highly adept at completing mazes.
• The other half were told they had “maze-dull” rats that had no training in completing mazes.

The participants had five days to train the rats to complete the maze. After those five days, the “maze-bright” rats were able to complete their task TWICE as fast as the “maze-dull” rats.

But, of course, there was a catch.

There was absolutely no difference between the two groups of rats! Both sets of participants got randomly selected rats with no maze experience at all.

Yes, you read that right. The rats were exactly the same, but the participants who were TOLD they had faster rats somehow helped the rats actually perform better. This study has been repeated over and over again. It’s called The Expectancy Effect.

This concept gives us a lot of power.

The single biggest mistake leaders make is to assume the worst.

The problem is that leaders often are brought in to fix problems. They are asked to lead a ‘low performing team.’ They are asked to train a group of ‘inexperienced newbies.’ They are asked to fix a ‘problem area’ of the business. If you want to be a truly incredible leader, you can’t just think about solutions or ideas, you have to address your own expectations. Here’s how:

What Are Your Expectations?

We often are not aware of our own expectations. In the rat experiment, participants were told explicitly that they had either “maze-bright” or “maze-dull” rats. This was an explicit expectation. But we have both explicit and implicit expectations driving us.

• An explicit expectation is when something is directly stated, and leaves no room for uncertainty.
• An implicit expectation is when something is implied, but not directly stated.

Identify your explicit and implicit expectations around your team. Take out a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of.

Positive or Negative Expectations

Now it’s time to identify which of your expectations serve you and which ones damage you. Go through your list of explicit and implicit beliefs.

Circle the positive ones and underline the negative ones.

Argue with Yourself

Now it’s time to decide if your bad expectations are actually true or assumed from a few bad experiences. We can use this to identify our biases and challenge the accuracy of our beliefs.

Eliminate

Any lurking negative expectations will drag you down. You must either eliminate them or actively work to fix them. If you don’t work on eradicating bad expectations, they will fester and grow like a fungus under the floorboards. They will get bigger and bigger until they make you sick.

Leaders especially must  address these for themselves AND their team.

Seed Positive Cues

Expectancy effect psychology thrives on subtle signals—plant cues to nudge better results. This tip uses deliberate prompts to tilt perceptions your way. See the tables below for how to pull it off.