4. What you expect of people is what you get

A line of dominoes - the first few of which have started to fall. Photo by Atlantic Ambience from Pexels.

There’s a powerful finding from behavioural science that has been replicated so many times, in so many contexts, that it's no longer even debated: if a manager is convinced that the people in her group are first-rate, they'll reliably outperform a group whose manager believes the reverse — even if the innate talent of the two groups is similar.

It’s called the Pygmalion effect - and it's one of the most powerful but most overlooked levers a leader has.

The prophecy causes its own fulfilment

The name comes from George Bernard Shaw's play, in which Eliza Doolittle explains that the difference between a lady and a flower girl isn't how she behaves but how she's treated. The research bears her out. In a 1960s experiment, psychologist Robert Rosenthal told teachers that certain pupils had been identified as "growth spurters" — children on the verge of an intellectual leap. In reality, the children had been selected at random. But by the end of the year, those children showed significantly greater gains in IQ. The teachers' expectations had shaped the outcome.

The same pattern shows up in workplaces. Martin Seligman studied insurance salespeople at US firm MetLife and found that agents who scored high on optimism outsold the pessimists by 31% in the first year and 57% in the second — even when the optimists had failed the company's own aptitude test. What you believe about what's possible shapes what actually becomes possible. And what you believe about the people around you shapes what they become capable of.

Innovation researcher Hila Lifshitz-Assaf draws a distinction I find really useful here. She studied problem solvers and solution seekers. Problem solvers assume that if they can't fix it, it can't be fixed. Solution seekers don't think they'll necessarily be the ones to crack it — but they believe a solution is out there, and they keep looking. The solution seekers are the optimists. Their expectation that an answer exists is what keeps them in the game long after the problem solvers have walked away.

I ought to flag that this works in both directions: the Golem effect is the Pygmalion effect in reverse, where low expectations suppress performance. Managers who doubt their teams create cautious, risk-averse, low-performing teams — which confirms the manager's original assessment, which further lowers expectations in a vicious cycle.

It starts with what you believe about yourself

Here's the part that often gets missed. The Pygmalion research found that the high expectations of the best managers weren't primarily based on their assessment of their team. They were based on what those managers believed about themselves — their own ability to select, train and develop people. What managers believe about themselves subtly influences what they believe about their people, what they expect of them, and how they treat them.

So if you want to raise your expectations of your team, the starting point might not be your team at all. It might be your confidence in your own ability to bring out the best in them. That's uncomfortable, because it puts the responsibility squarely back on you.

Psychological safety is an expectation too

Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety is really about expectations — specifically, what people in a team expect to happen when they take a risk, raise a concern, or admit a mistake.

If the prevailing expectation is "you'll be punished for getting it wrong," people will stop experimenting, stop flagging problems early, and stop putting their hand up for anything that might fail. If the expectation is "you'll be supported to learn from it," people will take the kind of risks that lead to innovation, early problem detection, and genuine growth.

The is why the retrospective prime directive is so powerful — "everyone did the best they could with what they knew at the time" — is a positive expectation made explicit. It's the team saying: we choose to assume positive intent. We choose to expect the best of each other, and that expectation creates the conditions for honest conversations.

Growth mindset is an expectation about the future

Carol Dweck's growth mindset research fits here too. A fixed mindset — "I'm either good at this or I'm not" — presumes ability is static. A growth mindset — "I can get better at this with effort" — is an expectation that ability can develop. And that expectation changes everything about how you respond to difficulty: whether you avoid challenges or seek them out, whether you give up when things get hard or persist, whether failure feels like a a verdict or like information.

At some point in childhood most of us stop treating failure as a natural part of learning and start treating it as something to avoid. And then as adults we bring that expectation into the workplace, where it hardens into a culture of perfectionism, risk-aversion, and only volunteering for things we know we can already do well. (As an aside, this is why you’ll never see me play Scrabble).

Realistic optimism asks you to reset that expectation for yourself and for the people around you. Not "everything will work out" (that's toxic positivity). But "I expect that effort and learning will lead to progress, and I expect setbacks along the way." It’s a completely different stance from "I expect things to go wrong and I expect to be blamed for it", which has such a paralysing effect.

What your culture teaches people to expect

At the organisational level, this lens becomes about the unwritten rules — the expectations that nobody states but everybody learns. What happens here when someone makes a mistake? What happens when someone proposes something bold? What happens when someone says "I don't know"?

If your answers to those questions are "punishment," "ridicule," and "loss of credibility," then your culture is teaching people to expect the worst. And they'll behave accordingly — cautiously, defensively, and with a very reasonable reluctance to stick their necks out.

Changing those expectations isn't about writing a new values statement, or saying that you want people to have psychological statement. It's about changing what actually happens (and then the stories that are told about what happened) when things go wrong. Are you promoting people who learned from failure, not just people who avoided it. Are you starting meetings with "what have we learned?" not just "what went wrong?" Can leaders say "I don't know", publicly, and not losing credibility for it.

Expectations are contagious. They cascade from leaders to teams to individuals, and they compound over time. Fortunately for us positive expectations are just as contagious as negative ones. The challenge is creating them requires more deliberate effort, because our negativity bias means the default setting is still avoiding failure and expecting the worst.

One more thing about expectations, and it's the one I find hardest to practise consistently. When someone seems to be blocking your progress — the stakeholder who keeps saying no, the colleague who won't engage, the leadership team that won't prioritise your thing — the realistic optimist starts from the assumption that they're also trying to do the right thing. They have constraints you can't see, motivations you haven't understood, information you don't have. Starting from that expectation (giving them the benefit of the doubt) rather than from cynicism about their intent doesn't just feel more generous — it's more strategic because it can turn those blockers into potential collaborators.

Something to try this week

Think about one person in your team that you find difficult — someone you've mentally written off a bit, or whose potential you're not sure about. Before your next interaction with them, spend five minutes actively considering what they're good at, what they might be capable of, and what it would look like if they surprised you.

Then pay attention to how you behave toward them in that meeting. Are you more open? Do you ask better questions? Do you give them more space?

You might not see a transformation overnight. But the thing to remember is the shift starts with you and how you show up, not with them.