Are You Leveraging the Pygmalion Effect?

The name “Pygmalion Effect” refers to a story in Greek mythology about a sculptor whose intense love brought a statue to life. Regarding individual and organizational performance, the Pygmalion Effect describes a self-fulfilling prophecy — the expectation of the leader exerts a powerful influence on the performance of her subordinates.

To state it simply, if you expect your people to be lazy (or dishonest, or apathetic, or whatever) you’ll get more of that. If you expect your people to be hard-working (or honest or caring, or whatever) you’ll get more of that.

This occurs whether or not you state your expectations. If you believe, for instance, that person A is a high-potential employee you behave differently toward that person than you do toward others. In most cases, leaders are completely unconscious and unintentional about this, but the effect occurs nevertheless.

It is important to understand that the Pygmalion Effect is not mere conjecture. Research has established experimentally the strong correlation between expectations and performance. Here is a link to an excellent paper on this topic, authored by Dov Eden.

How can you turn this insight into practical action? To quote Eden, “The most practicable way for a leader to create (a self-fulfilling prophesy) willfully is to communicate high performance expectations to followers, in a way that augments their self-efficacy. Perceiving themselves to be capable and therefore expecting to succeed, followers mobilize their internal resources, including knowledge, skills, ability, resolve, patience, and stamina, for peak performance.”

Here’s a recent example. An international cosmetics company piloted a “Feedback Card”, which was given to each employee stating explicitly how that person’s unique strengths could be used to enliven the company’s service values. Implicit was the expectation that the employee would increase efforts to use those strengths to more powerfully enliven the service values. This intervention achieved a consistent 5-7 percent increase in sales during the 90-day pilot. Based on that success, the company has implemented an ongoing policy to present Feedback Cards on a regular basis.

One final observation, when the team (or an individual) fails to excel, getting upset or expressing disappointment demonstrates the belief that they are capable of more. When performance is mediocre simply accepting it sends the message that you do not really believe the team is capable of more.

So, in your heart-of-hearts what do you really believe about your employees’ potential? And very importantly, what is the basis for your belief? Too often our beliefs about a person or team are NOT based on fact. They are based on statements of others or on prejudices of which we might not be consciously aware (e.g., girls are not good at math). Examine the basis for your belief. If you discover that the basis for your belief is questionable, discard it!

Every team deserves a leader who believes in them, and every leader deserves a team she can believe in. Make changes until this situation is achieved.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Larry Sternberg

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