Most people will meet your expectations. Give your team something to aim for.

Our desire to fit in and meet expectations is a powerful innate motivator that is universal. It’s a powerful tool that leaders in every office can use to improve performance of whole teams.

If you give people the conditions and expectations to grow, you will find that in nearly every case, they meet or exceed expectations.

Imagine for a moment, a gardener taking two seeds from the same packet. The gardener plants one seed in a garden where it has just the right amount of sun. They water it, give it rich soil, and ensure weeds don’t choke it. The gardener drops the other seed carelessly near the edge of the roadway.

Which seed is likely to grow to its full potential, the one tended in the garden or the one left to fend for itself by the roadside? And who is responsible for the seed’s performance: the seed or the gardener?

Having high expectations for the people around you is an essential tool for growing a culture of high performance. High expectations come from having a growth mindset, which simply means that you assume others can and will grow to meet your needs if you give them the resources and encouragement to do it. Like a seed in a well tended garden.

Many people have instead a fixed mindset, expecting that people will do the minimum and won’t learn much of anything new. Again, people will generally live up to expectations, so if you think people aren’t capable of much, they generally won’t do much.

Raise your expectations, and you will find that pretty soon, people raise their performance.

Expectations Define Culture

Consciously or unconsciously, we do our best to meet expectations. If you expect to succeed and assume everyone around can do the same, you can create a self-fulfilling prophesy in a good way. Changing culture is a matter of changing assumptions.

Expectations can also create cycles of low performance. There is no need to keep someone down if they are convinced that they don’t deserve to rise up. They’ll keep themselves down. This is the assumption that often lies behind imposter syndrome. When expectations are based on discrimination or bias, unsaid expectations become a social tool for keeping down whole classes of people.

It’s not easy, but you can break this cycle for yourself and others. To do that, you need to raise expectations up out of the unconscious, unspoken realm, and start expecting more of yourself and the people around you. It means tuning out the little voice inside that says, “you’re not good enough” or “they are not good enough.” Instead, it means saying out loud more often than you want to: “Actually, I think I can,” or saying, “actually, I think you can. How can I help?”

Simply mentioning to someone that you expect them to succeed is enough to motivate most of them to put in enough effort to achieve in surprising ways.

My Own Story of Expectations

Having high expectations for myself has become a guiding philosophy for me and has led me to succeed in ways I could never have imagined. When I went to Australia in 2005, on the very first day, I went to the grocery store, and it was there that I heard the question that would change my life. “Would you like a bag?”

Of course, I did want a bag, but even more, I wanted to fit in. So I looked around to see what I was expected to say.

All the women around me had their own bags, and clearly, I was expected to say I had mine own too. But I didn’t. Luckily there was a stack of bags right there at the check out stand for 99-cents, and I said, “I’ll just take some of these.”

That seminal moment put me on a path to learn what Australians knew, that plastic bags were having a devastating impact on our planet. That realization led to me starting my own business and a career I had not even dreamed of until that moment.

By shifting the question from “Paper or Plastic?” to “Would you like a Bag?” Australia inspired millions of their consumers to make a more ecological choice, even bans or taxes. Stores were leveraging what they knew to be more powerful than laws or taxes: expectations. In other words: social capital.

(Learn more about how a simple trip to the grocery store changed my life in my book, Bag Lady: How I Started a Business for a Greener World and Changed the Way America Shops.)

Three Ways to Use Expectations for High Performance

You, too, can start expecting excellence and watch people around you rise to the occasion, building your own social capital and culture for high performance. Here are three tips that will help you get better results from your team.

  1. Make your expectations explicit often. You don’t need to be heavy handed, but repetition is necessary. By repeating lightly that you expect someone to be great at something, most of them will go the extra mile to prove you right. It takes a while for the message to sink in. When you are tired of saying it, they are beginning to hear you. End meetings on a positive note, smile and ask people in passing how it’s going and reinforce your expectation. For most people, it’s like a drug. They will do what they need to do to get your approval.
  2. Change the question to change expectations. Sometimes, you have to shift how people think by asking the right question. Instead of asking, “did you get that report done?” try asking instead: “When can you get that report done?” Instead of asking, “How are you doing?” try asking instead: “how can I help you succeed?” Take an interest in their success and see how far they go.
  3. Celebrate Excellence. When someone reaches for a goal and gets even close, be sure to celebrate. Recognizing and celebrating wins can be as simple as a high-five in the hallway, a shout out during a meeting, or taking time to tell someone one-to-one “good job!” Remember that high performers can achieve four to eight times the productivity of average performers, so monetary recognition can be a win-win move that goes a long way to backing up your confidence and encouraging even more growth.

Often, people will test you to see if you really do expect everyone to pitch in. Be determined to live up to your word and repeat often your expectation that the team will achieve even ambitious goals. Give them time and build trust. Expect that everyone will rise and increase performance. Don’t make exceptions and resist the temptation to tag some people as low performers.

Dedicating yourself to a growth mindset and expecting everyone to learn and grow will initiate a virtuous cycle of success and effort that will take you farther than you ever thought you could go.

If you consistently expect excellence around you, you will begin building a culture of high performance. Remember that they are responding to your expectations.