The Pygmalion Effect
When We Presume Past is Prologue
There is another factor to take into account, the Pygmalion effect. Rated high at the start, anyone stays high. Rated low at the start, he stays low.
Deming. Dr. W.E. The New Economics, 3rd ed. (p. 19)
Differences there will always be between any two people. The question is what do the differences mean? Maybe nothing. Statistical theory is required to answer these questions.
There’s also the Pygmalion effect. Once somebody gets a high rating he’ll always get it; once somebody gets a low rating he’ll always get it. Ranking creates competition between people, salesmen, teams, divisions. The competition is demoralizing. Ranking comes from failure to understand variation.
Deming, W. Edwards; Orsini , Joyce (edited by); Deming Cahill, Diana (edited by). The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality (pp. 52-53). McGraw-Hill Education. Kindle Edition.
THE AIM for today’s Digestible Deming post is to review an insight of Dr. Deming’s that often gets overlooked among the heavier-weight topics he takes on in The New Economics: The Pygmalion Effect. This is the phenomena of a self-fulfilling prophecy made manifest by management expectations of employees: Once a winner, always a winner, and once a loser, always a loser.
Dr. Deming would raise this either when debriefing the Red Bead Experiment or when providing proof on the futility of ranking people. Past becomes prologue, and eventually an employee’s behaviour changes to meet management expectations of them. Why bother reaching for the stars when your fate is already determined by a performance management lottery or managerial caprice? When the impact of the system is abstracted away, it’s no better than rewarding the weatherman for a nice day.
Obscure Reference
A figure from Greek mythology, Pygmalion is a sculptor and later king most known for falling in love with one of his statues which is then granted life by the goddess Aphrodite. In 1912 English playwright George Bernard Shaw, was inspired by this myth (along with many contemporaries) to create a play by the same name about an expert in elocution, Henry Higgins, who accepts a bet to transform a Cockney flower girl, Eliza, into a duchess merely by changing her speech. Higgins’ experiment turns out to be a wild success, with Eliza being accepted in upper class society but at the cost of her discovering afterward she now belonged neither in high society or the lower class where she began.
In The Deming Dimension, Dr. Henry Neave reveals that Shaw’s play was Deming’s source of inspiration in referencing the Pygmalion effect, noting that he was fond of quoting a passage in his lectures to underscore the predictive effect of management ranking on staff behaviour: “Treat me like a little flower-girl: I’ll be a little flower-girl; treat me like a lady: I’ll be a lady.” (p. 384).
In The New Economics, Deming also provides a footnote referring to Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen’s 1968 book about the phenomena in education, Pygmalion in the Classroom, which also inspired his thinking in his writing and seminars.
In his 2003 HBR article, Pygmalion in Management, J. Sterling Livingston relates two stories that illustrate the effect management expectations can project into employee engagement and achievement:
Example 1: Low Expectations
In 1961, Alfred Oberlander, manager of the Rockaway district office of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, undertook a series of experiments designed to understand the effect of management expectations on employee performance. He discovered there was, at least in his organization, a link in both the positive and negative outcomes that was dependent on the behaviour of the manager, especially in the latter case.
As Livingstone observes in the article: “Managers are more effective in communicating low expectations to their subordinates than in communicating high expectations to them, even though most managers believe exactly the opposite. It usually is astonishingly difficult for them to recognize the clarity with which they transmit negative feelings.”
At the Rockaway MetLife office, this was demonstrated by a manager who oversaw a group of agents he believed had zero chance of being high achievers, yet tried to keep this expectation to himself. The impression leaked through his actions and demeanour, ultimately leading to staff resignations. When one agent was leaving, he mentioned how sorry he was to see them go and received a curt response: “No, you’re not; you’re glad.”
What eventually came to be recognized in the company was that getting assigned to his unit of “Bad News Bears” was tantamount to being forced out of the company for being a poor performer, despite the manager’s vehement protests to the contrary.
Example 2: High Expectations
Livingstone relates a story found in Rosenthal and Jacobsen’s book (Pygmalion in the Classroom) about how profound positive management expectations can be on an employee’s performance that almost perfectly mirrors Shaw’s protagonist, Eliza, but with a much happier ending, known as “Sweeney’s Miracle”.
James Sweeney was a professor of industrial management and psychiatry at the University of Tulane, and also oversaw operations of their Biomedical Computer Center. He believed, through confidence in his own abilities, that he could teach even a poorly-educated man to operate and program their computers. He decided to prove his theory by selecting a recently-hired janitor, George Johnson, at the Center for an experiment where he would teach the man about computers.
In the course of his tutelage under Sweeney, Johnson was doing well and learning a lot, but was almost waylaid after someone at the university insisted he undergo an IQ assessment before being allowed near the computers. Johnson took the test and scored quite low, yet he continued to defy expectations of him because of Sweeney’s convictions and unwavering faith.
Unlike Eliza, who found herself unmoored, Johnson prevailed and would eventually become responsible for onboarding new employees to the Center, training them on computer operations and programming.
An important takeaway from this story, when viewed through a Deming lens, is that high expectations aren’t enough: Methods and participation of a good manager are essential to success.
Summary
A manager’s disposition and engagement is an important component in a system that can determine how well their team will achieve their goals, but it isn’t the only one. Consider what the Rockaway and Sweeney’s Miracle experiments reveal: It is insufficient to gather and group people and either exhort or ignore them into better performance. System changes and methods are required, necessitating active leadership. As Deming observes in Out of the Crisis:
Support of top management is not sufficient. It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what they are committed to—that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated. Support is not enough: action is required. (p. 21)
Reflection Questions
Consider the Pygmalion effect in the context of Dr. Deming’s comments and the stories related in Livingstone’s HBR article. What assumptions or theories did the two managers in the stories have about variation and people? In the outcomes of each, to what could you attribute success or fault, as Dr. Deming noted in the equation x + (yx), where x is the input of an individual and (yx) is the impact of the system on the individual’s performance? Is it safe to draw the conclusions made by Livingstone in the article? What other factors should be considered?
In your own experiences and observations: How have you, or others you know, been pre-judged or ranked on performance in school or at work? How were expectations communicated - overtly or tacitly? What was the effect on performance? Did you or other people succeed due to, or in spite of, these expectations? What was management’s disposition - more like the Rockaway MetLife manager, or James Sweeney? Have you carried the lessons learned from these experiences forward at home or in subsequent roles over your career? In what ways?