you think about the people you
manage may become a self-
fulfilling prophecy.
“Expectancy effects happen
every time you have a power
imbalance,” says Allan Fili-
powicz, clinical professor of
management and organizations
at the Samuel Curtis Johnson
Graduate School of Manage-
ment at Cornell University. “If
you play it right, you get better
performance, and if you play it
wrong, you get worse perfor-
mance.” In his classes at Cornell,
Filipowicz teaches executives
about how positive expectancy
effects—also called the Pygma-
lion effect, after the mytholog-
ical sculptor whose love for his
creation brought it to life—can
be huge drivers of how well their
workforce performs.
To understand how the
effect works, let’s imagine an
employee named Elizabeth.
First off, it’s important to know
that how well Elizabeth does
her job depends on how much
confidence she has in her own
abilities. Studies have shown
that Elizabeth’s belief in her
own effectiveness can improve
her performance by as much as
30 percent. If she believes she
has what it takes to succeed,
she’ll work longer and harder,
despite setbacks. If she lacks
confidence, she’ll see each set-
back as the result of her own
inadequacy. And Elizabeth’s
confidence—or the lack of it—is
influenced by the powerful
people around her. “If your
boss is making signs that he or
she doesn’t believe in you, that
changes your sense of your abil-
ity,” explains Filipowicz.
Take Elizabeth’s boss. He
holds certain beliefs about her
potential, based perhaps on
past performance, her body
language or appearance, or
what he’s heard about her from
others (think about the “maze
bright” rats). These cues and
others, Filipowicz says, will
prompt him to interpret her
behaviors positively or nega-
tively. Say the boss sees Eliza-
beth taking a coffee break. If
he thinks she’s a superstar, he
sees someone taking a breather
before another round of blister-
ing productivity. If he believes
her to be an underperformer,
he sees someone sitting around
drinking coffee when she
should be working. Either way,
his bias has been reinforced.
Now the boss will begin
engaging in behavior that only
continues to fulfill his beliefs
about Elizabeth. If Elizabeth is
seen as a lackluster employee,
she may be micromanaged,
which is likely to make her
defensive and secretive, which
will cause her boss to micro-
manage further, effectively
crushing her confidence. If she
is seen as a top performer, she
might be allowed to work more
independently, which will bring
about more successes, which in
turn will lead to her being given
more opportunities to succeed.
Thus, the cycle continues indef-
initely, pushing top employees
further up the ladder and deval-
ued ones further down it.
These scenarios play out
every day in organizations
around the world, and they
have big consequences in terms
of how companies manage and
recruit talent—especially when
it comes to building culturally
diverse workforces, given that
beliefs about potential have
been shown to be often biased
based on race and gender. (One
experiment out of Princeton
University in the 1970s, for
orientation, “forward lean”—
how much they angled their
bodies toward the candidate—
as well as their speech error rate
and the length of the interview.
All these behaviors signal to a
conversational partner that you
believe in them.
Filipowicz says there are
countless others, too. How
much time do you give a sub-
ordinate to start talking? How
many questions do you ask? Is
there richness and depth to the
way you discuss material with
them? There’s one behavior
he notices in particular: Exec-
utives tend to glance down at
their smartphones earlier when
talking to an employee deemed
to have low potential, signaling
a lack of interest in the conver-
sation. Any of these behaviors
can be manipulated to convey a
higher estimation of the person
you’re talking to.
To get a sense of your own
particular behavioral tells,
Filipowicz recommends video-
taping a few exchanges with
various colleagues—it’s easy
to do on a smartphone—and
reviewing the footage to see
how your physical and verbal
cues differ between those inter-
actions. Then choose a couple
of actions—perhaps how much
eye contact you make, or how
much time you give the other
person to speak—and practice
modeling them in all your inter-
actions. The adjustments might
sound trivial, but Filipowicz has
found that they have a surpris-
ing impact. In the end, he says,
it doesn’t take much to get even
“maze dull” rats up to speed.
instance, demonstrated that
white job interviewers treated
black applicants with less
warmth, a greater number of
speech errors—misspeaking,
slips of the tongue—and shorter
amounts of interview time.
That caused the applicants to
perform less well than equally
qualified white applicants,
effectively guaranteeing that
the black applicants would
appear inferior.)
If getting more out of your
interview candidates and
employees is as simple as treat-
ing everyone like a potential star,
it seems like a cheap and easy
win for any business. But despite
rock-solid data on the subject,
the phenomenon has proven
stubbornly difficult to manip-
ulate. The issue, Filipowicz
says, is that most executives go
about it wrong. Simply telling an
employee that you think she has
high potential won’t do the trick
if your unconscious behavior
toward her still suggests oth-
erwise. “People misunderstand
how difficult it is to change
beliefs,” he says. In other words,
wishing won’t make it so.
So how can you manipu-
late this effect as a manager?
In his classrooms at Cornell,
Filipowicz coaches executives
on a workaround: consciously
changing the behavioral cues
that communicate beliefs about
potential to subordinates. In
the Princeton study, researchers
looked at a series of behav-
iors that varied based on job
interviewers’ biases about the
applicants: eye contact, inter-
personal distance, shoulder
BOSSES DRIVE THE PERFORMANCE OF THEIR EMPLOYEES
SIMPLY THROUGH THE POWER OF THEIR OWN BELIEFS.
IN SHORT: WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT THE PEOPLE YOU
MANAGE MAY BECOME A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.
January-February 2018 / TREPRENEUR.COMEN / 23