hacks for using the growth cycle to improve performance
Imagine that you’re a high school runner who races in the 100-yard-dash competition. You’ve hit a bit of a slump recently and have been psyching yourself out every time you approach the starting line. Your recent results show it.
Now imagine that, on your way to a meet, you overhear one of your coaches saying to another, “Y’know, I think [your name] could totally win today — I don’t think they know how strong of a runner they are.” You hear nothing else and show up to race 15 minutes later. How are you likely to perform in that race compared to a world in which you never overheard that conversation?
If you don’t immediately have an intuition that this would impact your performance, try the following:
Setup: Set comfortably at a desk. Launch the timer app on your phone, set a countdown timer for 5 seconds, and place it in front of your left hand.
When ready, with your left hand press START on the timer and, with your right hand, tap your finger as many times as you possibly can. Count as you tap.
<do that now before reading on>How many did you get? Say it aloud right now.
Take a deep breath. Shake your hand out and relax.
Now, do the same thing again. But this time, tap faster. You must beat your previous record.
Feel free to think for a moment if you need. Whenever you’re ready, go!
<do that now before reading on>
Odds are — and I’ve done this with hundreds of people — you did better the second round than the first. But this is strange: I told you to go as fast as possible the first time and yet, somehow, you went even faster the second round. What gives?!
Here’s what I think is going on there: The intervention of my saying “this time, tap faster” forced you to index to a new expectation. You were then forced to accept that you could go faster. Then you overrode your prior expectation of yourself and your performance increased in turn.
Enter: Roger Bannister. For hundreds of years, no runner could run a mile in less than 4 minutes. In fact, many people thought that four minutes was the limit of what human kinesiology and physiology would allow. Then one day in 1954 Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3:59.4. The running world rejoiced! Then, just 46 days later, Bannister’s record was broken with a race time of 3:57.9. This record has since been outpaced hundreds of times, with the current record standing at 3:43.1. Apparently, it was a psychological — not physiological — barrier that was holding back progress.
This same thing happens all of the time at work. Expectations about the ceiling of “as much as possible,” “as good as possible,” or “as fast as possible” tend to be far too low. Generally, we calibrate to expectations that are too low. Then people behave in ways that match those expectations (at best).
Almost everyone’s initial assumption about the ceiling of what’s possible is too low.
The job of a great leader is to constantly clarify the bar of excellence and raise people’s expectations about what is possible. In other words, your job as a leader is to do for your team — intentionally, not accidentally — what our imagined high school track coach did for you before your imagined race: Challenge their sense of what they can accomplish.
People’s performance follows their expectations far more than the opposite.
-Ben
