The Pygmalion in you

Prologue

“One for the master, one for the dame, and one for the….”

Face flushed – uncertain smile stretched across the tiny mouth, the little child stumbles through the popular nursery rhyme, as a crowd of smiling elders look on. Eyes fixed on her mother, she searches for the next word as the mother – mouth slightly open, tongue  touching the upper palate and the lips stretched apart – mimes the bridge word, imploring the child with her eyes to remember, remember, remember…..

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Of horses and men

In 1891, a horse named Hans became very famous in Berlin. Its owner, Wilhelm Von Osten – a High School Maths teacher and a horse trainer had trained it to solve arithmetic sums and many other tasks. Given a sum to do, the horse would tap its hoof to indicate the correct answer.

The horse gained a strong reputation as Von Osten held public – and free – displays of Hans’s gift. So much so, that the German government decided to have his gifts investigated. At the end of a fairly lengthy investigation by pschycologist Oskar Pfungst, it was established that the horse was really not solving any arithmetic sum – it was merely tapping its hoof till it sensed, from the body language of Von Osten and the assembled audience, that the correct answer had been reached!

The “Clever Hans Effect”, as it subsequently came to be known, has had a far reaching impact on the fields of research, cognitive and social psychology and understanding of animal training.

But what has this really got to do with leadership?

Great Expectations

When Pfungst published his findings in 1907, people were quick to label Hans as a fraud. As a matter of fact, neither Hans nor Von Osten were guilty of fraud. It was proven conclusively by Pfungst that Von Osten was completely unaware of the body signals that he was subconsciously giving out. And as for Hans – why he was only performing to meet his master’s expectations.  As a supremely intelligent animal – he developed the faculty of reading his master’s body language!

In AD 8, nearly 1900 years before Clever Hans, Ovid, one of the 3 great Latin poets, completed a monumental work named Metamorphoses – a 15 book epic which contains an interesting story that achieved fame much later, and through other hands. The story is that of Pygmalion.

In this story, Pygmalion is a shy – almost misogynistic – sculptor who carved a beautiful and perfect woman out of ivory, named her Gallatea, and then fell in love with her. The kind Venus, seeing Pygmalion’s condition, granted Pygmalion’s wish and turned Gallatea into a live woman.

Pygmalion is also the name that the noted Social Psychologist – Dr Robert Rosenthal – gave to a phenomenon that he had observed and researched with Lenore Jacobsen – an elementary school principal. Dr Rosenthal’s core research focused on the “Psychology of Interpersonal Expectations”, and he was studying how “one person’s expectation for the behaviour of another can come to serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy”.

In the study, Dr Rosenthal chose random children and told their teachers that those children had scored very high in a test that established them as a potential A-Grader. The test was of course fictitious – it was never conducted. Curiously those children did do better than their peers!

What really happened? According to Dr Rosenthal, like Pygmalion, the teachers “loved” the potential A-graders (the “perfect” form) and their “wish” or expectation was granted. In a cruel converse, the teachers did not expect the other children in the school who were not picked up by Dr Rosenthal’s random sampling, to perform as well. And they didn’t!

Working to the leader’s expectations has been known to be the cornerstone of successful teams. Equally, it has been the cause for dysfunctional under-performing teams.

In 1995, I was put in charge of Citibank India’s retail banking data center. It was almost a decade old – the electrical wiring was frayed, the raised floor tiling was broken in many places, unused machines grouted to the floor made movement difficult and a jungle of unused cables below the raised flooring harboured rodents. It had to change. ASAP.

Being a retail bank that prided on being 24×7 accessible, we didn’t have a large time window. I, with my two key peers estimated (quite adventurously as it turned out later) that it could be done in 3 days. And Pongal the next week gave us precisely that three days window.

The three of us believed it could be done. We told our disbelieving teams that it had to be done and expected them to do it.

And they did it. As have the teams of many leaders we have come across, in our work in BullzI, who believed in giving “Stretch” goals and sincerely expected that their teams will make a good attempt at reaching the goal.

In most cases, this stretch goal would simply be a percent increase over the targets accepted from the HO or board. In nearly all of those cases, the teams below knew how it worked.

But knowing how it worked didn’t matter. What mattered was the expectation of the boss. And the resulting Expectancy Cycle.

The figure here depicts the “Pygmalion Expectancy Cycle” – a four stage process that starts with the formation of “expectations” – from subordinates and peers. How this expectation is formed is a matter for later discourse.

The Pygmalion Expectancy Cycle

The second stage – when the expectations are communicated – is perhaps the most critical stage in the Expectancy Cycle. In many of our interactions with middle to senior managers, we have had debates, sometimes heated, on the implementation of reporting processes. The most troubled teams were the ones who were caught in a double bind. These teams were asked to implement a process without being given any leeway as to their existing (already stretched) deliverables. These teams didn’t succeed in implementing the process because they were not expected to.

So what should leaders do?

The challenges to be overcome, as it is, lie in managing the formation and communication of expectations by the leader. Just as in the case of poor Hans.

While the obvious solution is to improve their understanding and control over the way their expectations are communicated, the even more obvious step is to first start by admitting that they could be, if not are, prey to the dissemination of inconsistent and nonverbal cues on expectations. Sadly, that seems to be easier said than done.

It’s not me !

In a survey on “risk prone” behaviour while gambling, 92 % respondents agreed that they had spotted risk-prone behaviour among others. Only 20% respondents agreed that they exhibited the same.

The ratio, when it comes to the awareness of nonverbal cues,is quite the same with leaders. When presented with 360 reports, we observed that the most common first response is – “Hey – that’s not me !!”

In BullzI we use a simple but potent tool to help leaders discover the impact their subconsciously communicated expectations of performance has on the work culture.

We invite leaders to fill up a modified 2+2 tool. Done honestly, results from this activity helps correlate the time the leader spends on an employee with the shared liking and performance of a subordinate. A high correlation is an indication of an environment where Pygmalion Expectancy Effect is at play.

The epiphany that often accompanies this exercise helps win the battle of the mind. The best follow-up to this, we have found, is a good old-fashioned introspection that leads to action steps.

Tailpiece

Legend has it that Hans was not the only animal that Van Osten tried to train. He also tried to train his cat and a bear. The cat was bored and did not show interest. The bear apparently became hostile to his training methods.

It was said that horses and dogs, pack animals who are sociable by nature, are more motivated to “perform to expectations” and develop a higher degree of sensitivity to body language. Bears are fiercely independent. Cats, though to a lesser degree than bears, are certainly more independent than dogs.

It is not uncommon to find cats and bears in teams. A leader will do well to check the 2+2 tool output to see if there is a lack of congruence with the stated value and displayed behaviour. A team and an organization can gain enormously from these independent operators who may be inadvertently suffering from lack of attention.

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Epilogue

….a smile lit up the little girl’s face as a flood of memory triggered in her tiny brain.

“One for the little boy who lives down the laaaayne!” – she finished with a squeal and a flourish and ran into her mothers beckoning arms, burying her tiny head into the dupatta as generous applause and loud cheers rose all around her.

Next time, she promised herself, she will also sing “Frere Jacques”.