Are You a Management Chicken or Egg?

Boot Camp

In the early 1980s the Israeli army ran a combat command course.

Every 15 weeks, one hundred trainee soldiers were allocated to one of four instructors and then, for  3 months, they received 16 hours of instructor / trainee contact every single day.

I’d have never lasted in the army.

The experiment

Two psychologists (Eden and Shani) persuaded the government to run a test to see if the Pygmalion Effect (the greater the expectation placed upon people, the better they do) existed in the military.

Before a group of trainees started the course they undertook a series of psychometric tests to see how capable they were.  These test scores and the ratings from the trainee’s previous commanders were combined to predict the trainee’s potential.

• High Potential — scores suggested they would do well as combat commanders
• Regular Potential — scores met the course requirements but did not exceed them
• Unknown Potential — scores were not statistically grounded

The trainee’s potential was then shared with their instructors before the course began.

What the instructors didn’t know was that the trainee’s rating was totally random and had nothing to do with their potential.  The exercise was only undertaken to manipulate the instructor’s expectations of the trainees before they started the course.

How did the trainees do?

At the end of the course, the soldier’s performance was evaluated using a set of objective tests that measured speed, accuracy, and learning.  The design of the tests removed any biases that the instructors may have developed.  The results looked like this:

Despite the fact that the trainee’s potential score was assigned randomly, the trainees that instructors believed had the most potential did best, the Pygmalion Effect was alive and well in the army.

If an instructor believed someone would do well, they did.

And how did the instructors do?

Eden and Shani added a twist to their research.  They asked the trainees to rate their instructors.  The score reflected leadership ability and whether or not the trainees would recommend the course to their friends.

What they found was that the high-potential soldiers rated their leaders most highly, whereas the low-potential soldiers rated the same instructors poorly.

These were exactly the same leaders, with exactly the same soldiers, on exactly the same course. Why would their leadership style vary so much?

It is all about expectations

As managers we change our behaviour depending on our expectations of those who work for us.

Or, to put it another way:

• The best performing managers believe they have the best staff
• And the best performing staff believe they have the best managers
• The worst performing managers believe they have the worst staff
• And the worst performing staff believe they have the worst managers

Perception and reality become the same.

The implication is that the way to improve our performance as leaders and managers is simply to increase our expectations of those who work for us.

An interesting twist on the chicken and egg problem — and not one that ranking and stacking your staff will solve any time soon.