I read a post recently and one line stood out to me: “The Tyranny of Low Expectations.” If you do not believe you can achieve a goal, you won’t - it is that simple. Until Roger Bannister broke the barrier and ran a mile in under four minutes, nobody thought it was possible. However, slowly, incrementally, runners demonstrated that they could get faster and faster, and finally Bannister broke the Tyranny of Low Expectations. From that point forward, four minute miles were no longer seen as unattainable, and everyone’s expectations increased. Years ago, I was biking with a competitive cyclist, and I asked how he became so fast. He gave me the obvious answer - “I increased my cadence of peddling,” but then he went on to share a similar philosophy about low expectations. It took a lot of practice and training to increase his cadence, but the biggest hurdle was overcoming his belief that he was already going as fast as he could.
I recently decided to get back into running. I had pretty low expectations, but I signed up for a 30 day course to go from nothing to running a 5K. Day one was a low impact, simple interval alternating between two minutes walking and 30 seconds jogging, and even that was hard. I could not see how I was going to get from such a low starting point to my goal. I was suffering under the tyranny of my own low expectations. The intervals of running got longer, and the pace increased, and 30 days later I reached the goal. Each time the trainer upped the intensity, I had to overcome the tyranny. It was the trainer’s confidence that pushed me past my fears.
In a growth business, we are always striving to break new ground - sell more, do more, grow faster. The Tyranny of Low Expectations creates a headwind to slow us down in numerous ways. As leaders and managers, we have expectations for individuals’ performance, market opportunities, capital availability, engineering results, sales performance, and numerous other vectors of growth. At the same time, each individual in our organization has their own personal expectations for their abilities and performance, and their own perspective on the potential for the company. The board and investors have their expectations for the performance of the CEO, executive team, and the business overall. Actual performance is the result of a soup of all of these expectations swirled together. The challenge for the CEO is to overcome the collective Tyranny of Low Expectations. Like the trainer in my running story, the CEO needs to build a sense of self-confidence in the team that enables them to raise their expectations. If my running trainer had started with ‘We are going to run three miles on day 1,” The tyranny of my low expectations would have led me to quit immediately. Instead, his inspiration met my abilities and slowly overcame my low expectations.
Starting with modest, achievable targets serves to build confidence. Establishing a cadence of weekly meetings to review progress, take stock of the current situation, and align on the ‘baby steps’ for the week, will create a consistent opportunity to set targets and measure results. Each week, the leader should ask four simple questions:
How did we do on the commitments from the prior week?
What are the goals for this week?
What is the current working view of achieving our overall desired outcome?
What do we need to do (if anything) to course correct?
This process is how we build muscles to overcome the Tyranny of Low Expectations. The overall desired goal may seem beyond the teams expectations, but each week the CEO has to drive the team to raise their expectations just enough, while maintaining confidence and trust. In my running example, although I remained skeptical that I would run a 5K in 30 days, each week the trainer raised the bar just enough to build a foundation that supported increasing my expectations.
Too many CEOs and leadership teams set what are perceived to be unattainable goals on day 1, and by doing so, they fail to meet the team and the business where it is. The team has to buy into the potential to get there, even if they remain skeptical. When the gulf between executive expectations and the team’s Tyranny of Low Expectations is too wide, the tyranny wins out, and the team’s perception of leadership flips from inspirational to out of touch. The leadership art is to distinguish between a stretch goal, a leap of faith, and a bridge too far. The team should readily accept a stretch goal. Once a team has built confidence in the leader, they can be coaxed into accepting a leap of faith because they have faith in their leader. But, a bridge too far is just that. Nobody signs up for that goal, and the leader loses credibility.
CEOs need to recognize that the Tyranny of Low Expectations creates a natural barrier for teams, and limits our possibilities. Until we sell $1M in a month, it looks unattainable, but as we continue to grow, soon ‘only’ selling $1M in a month becomes a failure. Throughout the journey, leaders have to provide balanced inspiration to overcome the tyranny. Teams can do amazing things, but first they have to overcome their built-in Tyranny of Low Expectations.