Successful leaders set high expectations for their team members and challenge them to tackle lofty goals, much like effective teachers and coaches do. How you set and raise the bar matters a great deal, though. To get it right, leaders can learn a lot from what the most effective teachers and professors do.
The best educators strive to give assignments that are desirably difficult — challenging enough to stimulate learning, but not so taxing that students give up prematurely. Leaders can do much harm if they set expectations in a way that frustrates team members or even induces unethical behavior as individuals scramble to meet overly ambitious targets.
Leaders need to do more than just identify the appropriate difficulty level of tasks. They need to engage in four additional strategies to foster both employee development and high performance.
Demonstrate belief in potential
First, leaders need to demonstrate their fervent belief in employees’ potential to achieve their goals. Consider the research by David Yeager and Geoffrey Cohen. They have demonstrated how a teacher’s belief in their students can impact performance.
In Yeager and Cohen’s experiment, teachers asked students to write essays and provide detailed feedback on the drafts. Some students received a note with the feedback: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” Others received a note that simply stated, “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.” Students who received confirmation of their teacher’s expectations and belief in their abilities tended to revise the essays more frequently, produce better work and achieve higher evaluations both from the teachers and independent evaluators.
Create a safe space
Leaders also need to make it safe for employees to acknowledge their mistakes and ask for help as they tackle challenging assignments. Students often resist seeking assistance because they don’t want to be perceived as inadequate by their teachers. Employees fail to ask for help for similar reasons. Educators have learned that offering low-stakes assignments before major exams or projects can be an effective way to stimulate learning. Students have an opportunity to practice critical skills, receive developmental feedback and test new work strategies. Moreover, teachers incorporate peer feedback into their classrooms so students can gather advice and input without having to ask their teacher for help.
Learning and development professionals must create these types of formative opportunities for employees in the early stages of major projects. Simulations and other experiential exercises, often involving teamwork and collaboration, can be powerful tools for offering employees a low-stakes opportunity to experiment with new methods, garner constructive feedback, and discuss errors and mistakes. Then employees can apply these newly learned skills to the difficult projects to which they have been assigned. In addition, chief learning officers and their staff members can help employees find mentors from outside their unit or department. Employees may be more willing to discuss mistakes with these mentors to whom they do not report in the organizational hierarchy.
Instill confidence
Leaders can give people confidence on tough assignments by sharing stories of adversity and perseverance. Too often, employees believe that senior leaders experienced a smooth path to success. They don’t have a strong appreciation for the hurdles that leaders faced along the way. When employees encounter obstacles, they become frustrated and demotivated, believing they don’t have the same ability or skill as their managers. In a worst-case scenario, employees give up because of these feelings of inadequacy. Alternatively, they blame the organization for failing to provide sufficient training and support.
Consider the research by Columbia Professor Xiaodong Lin-Siegler and her colleagues. They demonstrated that young students learn better when they comprehend the hardships and struggles of scientists who ultimately achieved groundbreaking discoveries. The scholars compared students who read stories of the remarkable accomplishments of Einstein and Curie with others who reviewed narratives that documented the scientists’ numerous hardships, dead-ends and failures. The latter group of students, who came to appreciate the messiness of this challenging work, tended to perform better academically in their science classes.
What’s the lesson for leaders? Tell stories of the setbacks you experienced before significant career accomplishments. Describe how you overcame those obstacles. Make it clear the path to success is not linear.
Coach your people in active learning
Finally, leaders need to coach employees on the most effective methods for learning new skills required to accomplish a challenging task.
In the classroom, students often employ passive approaches to learning. They study by rereading the text or highlighting their notes. These strategies seem useful to students, but they often do not translate into good learning outcomes. Instead, students who engage in active studying approaches tend to perform better. They quiz themselves or each other, for instance, or they solve novel problems that require them to apply knowledge they acquired. These active strategies require students to repeatedly retrieve knowledge and work with it. Moreover, students who execute the same task over and over do not learn and improve as much as those who vary the task that they perform. Some variation injects additional difficulty, but it actually enhances performance over time.
Managers should coach employees to employ similar active strategies for developing new skills. If an employee is learning a new software program, for instance, rereading the instruction manual will do little good. Instead, managers should encourage employees to learn by doing. If an employee is learning a new process or technique, managers should coach them on how practice doesn’t always make perfect. Varying the task that is practiced may be more impactful than precise repetition of the same procedure.
Setting the bar high is no small feat. How you establish targets and coach employees through a challenging process matters a great deal. As managers offer stretch assignments, team members must develop and apply new skills. Employees often need help identifying and applying the appropriate learning and skill acquisition strategies. Learning and development professionals have an important role to play coaching managers as they establish lofty goals, communicate with team members, and help employees overcome mistakes and learn something new.
