The Yes! Leader Expects the Best

On the improv stage, performers are taught to say “Yes” to scene offers and to think “Yes” with respect to their fellow team members and the entire process of collaborative scene creation.

On the life stage, being a Yes! Leader involves having positive expectations of the people you’re leading and influencing, as well as possessing a basic trust in their desire to create a positive outcome. Rather than trying to control the outcome (and control people), the Yes! Leader needs to adopt an attitude of: Hey, someone else may just have a great idea! As I mentioned in an earlier article, the Yes! Leader must be able to resolve the (seeming) incongruity of being both influential and influenceable.

I recently ran across another great example of the power that can be unleashed in others when we expect the best of them. In their book Sway, Ori and Rom Brafman cite a study in which military trainers were provided leadership-aptitude test data for an incoming crop of new trainees and told to carefully memorize each trainee’s test result. At the end of the 15-week training, the trainees were administered a standard paper-and-pencil test to assess their knowledge of topics covered during the training.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trainees with the highest leadership-aptitude scores going into the training emerged on average with the highest scores on the paper-and-pencil test.

But here’s the kicker: Unbeknownst to the trainers, the leadership-aptitude scores given to them were totally bogus! No such “leadership-aptitude” testing had in fact taken place; the scores were completely made up and randomly assigned.

But wait, there’s more: The trainees themselves were totally unaware that all of this was going on as well! They had no idea that the trainers had been led to believe anything about their supposed leadership aptitude.

This now puts the post-training scores in a new (and very surprising) light. As the Brafmans observe, “Simply being labeled, however arbitrarily, as having high leadership potential translated into actual improved ability.  Remember, neither the trainers nor the trainees had any idea what was going on. Without realizing it, the trainees had taken on the characteristics of the diagnoses ascribed to them [by the trainers].”

What does this mean for the Yes! Leader? As the Brafmans observe:

“If you’ve even been fortunate enough to work for a boss who values and believes in you, you’ll know that you tend to rise to meet the high expectations set for you. On the other hand, there’s nothing that will make you feel more incompetent and demoralized than a supervisor who is convinced you don’t have what it takes.”

So the expectations we have of others do matter – and can have a powerful effect (either positive or negative) on the actual performance of those we're trying to influence.