Aim Higher

Sixty seconds to landing. The pilot is about to land a small plane, and a strong wind blows from the side. If the pilot points the nose straight at the runway, the wind pushes the plane sideways, and it lands in the grass next to the runway. The fix: aim a little into the wind. The plane then drifts exactly to where it should land.

Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and founder of logotherapy, learned this from his flight instructor, and he told the story himself in a lecture in 1972.¹ He used it for how we see other people, and he quoted Goethe: “If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as what they could be, we help them become it.”²

“If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as what they could be, we help them become it.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Frankl used it for therapy. We can use it in the office. Every team has its crosswind: old habits, self-doubt, a hard quarter. A leader who aims at who someone is today gets what the wind delivers. A leader who aims higher gets someone who arrives where they are capable of arriving.

So where do you aim with the people on your team? Most of us would say: higher. In practice, two kinds of bosses often miss the runway, in opposite directions. The bad guys often develop talent badly. They are too harsh, and they can hurt people. And the good guys? They often don't develop others.

Why do the nice ones hold back?

Hardly anyone decides to expect little of a colleague. It happens in small steps, and five reasons come up again and again.

• Kindness. Asking for more feels like pressure, and we like these people. So the bar stays where it is.
• Fear. The difficult conversation. The disappointed face. Being disliked, or being wrong about someone.
• Laziness. Stretching someone takes effort: more explaining, more check-ins. Giving the task to the person who always delivers is faster.

• Complacency. Good enough becomes the standard, for them and for us.
• First impressions. A missed deadline, a so-so report, a quiet first meeting. The picture forms early, and afterwards we notice what fits it.³

These small steps can add up to a cycle. The manager comes to see someone as a weaker performer and supervises more closely. The employee feels distrusted and withdraws, and the weaker performance seems to confirm the manager's view.³ The good news? The cycle runs in both directions.

The class that bloomed

Want proof that expectations travel? Here is the classic. In the mid-1960s, the psychologist Robert Rosenthal and the school principal Lenore Jacobson told teachers at an elementary school in California that a test had identified some children as about to bloom. The test had done nothing of the sort. The children had been picked at random.⁴

At the end of the school year, the first and second graders on the "bloomer" list had gained more on an IQ test than their classmates. The only difference sat in the teachers' heads. In work organizations, a meta-analysis by Nicole Kierein and Michael Gold found a substantial effect across settings, strongest in the military samples.⁵ Researchers call it the Pygmalion effect.

How expectations travel

What do bosses do differently when they expect a lot? Psychologists who reviewed decades of studies found that people we expect much of typically get four things from us:⁶

• Climate. More warmth, more eye contact, more patience.
• Feedback. More feedback, and more specific.
• Input. More challenging tasks and more information.
• Output. More chances to speak, try and show what they can do.

The mirror image has its own name, the Golem effect: low expectations travel through the same four channels and pull people down.

From belief to behavior

Is it enough to believe in people? Researchers tried it. Dov Eden and colleagues taught managers in companies to create Pygmalion effects through workshops, and the results were mixed.⁷ Belief alone is not enough. What helps is the behavior that follows from belief: the harder assignment, the closer feedback, the extra hour of attention.

The goal has to stay within reach. Goal-setting research by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham shows that specific, demanding goals raise performance, as long as people believe they can reach them and get the support to do it.⁸ An expectation that feels impossible tends to discourage. Aim above the mark, the way the pilot does, and keep the mark in sight.

How to raise the bar

Name it. Tell the person what you see in them and what you think they can achieve in the next year. Say why, with an example from their own work. A specific sentence carries more than a general "I believe in you."

Back it with an assignment. Give the next harder task, one step beyond what they have done before, and say what support you will offer.

Follow up. Give specific feedback soon after, and set a date to talk about how it went. If the bar turns out too high, adjust it together.

Check your channels. Look back at the last week. Who received your warmth, feedback, challenging work and airtime, and who received less? Add one stretch moment for someone in the second group.

Related in The Times Glossary: Pygmalion Effect · Golem Effect · Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome

¹ Frankl used the comparison in a 1972 lecture; a short recording circulates under the title "Why to Believe in Others."

² Goethe, J. W. von (1795–96). Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Book 8, Chapter 4. The wording here is a paraphrase.

³ Manzoni, J.-F., & Barsoux, J.-L. (1998). The set-up-to-fail syndrome. Harvard Business Review, 76(2), 101–113.

⁴ Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils' intellectual development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. The study drew methodological criticism, and later results have been mixed.

⁵ Kierein, N. M., & Gold, M. A. (2000). Pygmalion in work organizations: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21(8), 913–928.

⁶ Harris, M. J., & Rosenthal, R. (1985). Mediation of interpersonal expectancy effects: 31 meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 97(3), 363–386.

⁷ Eden, D., Geller, D., Gewirtz, A., Gordon-Terner, R., Inbar, I., Liberman, M., Pass, Y., Salomon-Segev, I., & Shalit, M. (2000). Implanting Pygmalion leadership style through workshop training: Seven field experiments. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(2), 171–210.

⁸ Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.