underestimating self and team

Across the organizations I’ve led and advised, people naturally underestimate what they can do when they don’t have a goal to shoot for. Each of us individually can be the worst judges of our max capacities. 

A great leader confronts this tendency and changes the very identity of teammates. With a leader’s direct prompting, individuals who previously sold themselves short develop powerful beliefs about what they can do and overcome. Those beliefs deepen when these individuals hit goals they might not have had the confidence or ambition to set for themselves. 

The unintentionally low expectations we have for ourselves often apply to the team around us as well. Unless you are super lucky, you have probably had more experiences of mundane dysfunction on teams than experiences of big, improbable success. Most of the people you lead have first-hand experience that informs their skepticism of leader talk in general and leader-issued goals in particular. 

These two patterns can converge and constrain, like the jaws of a handcuff. My low expectations for myself apply at scale to my team; plus, I haven’t often seen a team hit a big ambitious goal.

When you’re setting a big goal for the team, then, it can help to do it as a description of success instead of a prescription of belief. You’re getting the team to say with you “this is what success looks like” rather than “this is what you, skeptical teammate, predict will happen, based on your work history and analysis of our circumstances.” Clarity about the outcome you’re chasing will serve you and your team better than debates about the probability of achieving that outcome.

-ben