When you were a junior in high school, struggling through American Literature class, did you ever wonder why you would often turn in two papers that you felt were of equal quality, yet you would receive a B on one of them and an A on the other? When you left class with both papers in hand, trying to decipher the teacher’s rationale for the discrepancy, you got home and read over both papers. Yet, you still couldn’t find any significant difference between the paper that you wrote on The Scarlet Letter and the paper that you wrote on The Crucible a few weeks later. If anything, you felt that your second paper which you got a B on seemed even a little bit better than the first.
After you could not find any major discrepancies between your writing styles on the two papers, you tried thinking back to your process as to how you went about drafting and editing the two different papers. Prior to the first paper that you turned in, you scheduled a writing conference with your teacher to review your rough draft. Before she read your work, you told her that this was the first five-page paper that you had ever written and that you tried your hardest, yet you didn’t feel that you had a strong enough grasp on the material and you were eager to hear the ways in which she could suggest improvements to your paper. In other words, you unknowingly set the bar low and decreased the level of her expectations. When she read your first paper, she was pleasantly surprised with your work as it was significantly better than she had expected. She gave you a grade of an A, as she walked away from her experience grading your paper with confidence in your ability to surpass her expectations as a writer.
Over the next few weeks, you enrolled in an after school writing program, and you met with your teacher every day during your free period to tell her about all of the new things that you had been learning and about how much you felt that your writing skills were improving. One day when you were feeling particularly excited, you told her that you thought that writing might be your life calling. After pouring all of your energy into showcasing your new and improved writing skills in your analysis of The Crucible, you turned in your second paper, eagerly awaiting your teacher’s feedback. Yet, when you finally got your grade back a few weeks later, you looked down and were surprised to find a subpar B staring back at you. How could this be?
While you were busy fine-tuning your writing skills and sharing those personal insights with your teacher, you were unknowingly building her expectations. Now that the bar was set much higher, the same writing style that earned you an A on your first paper was no longer good enough (in your teacher’s mind). Your teacher then knew that you had the potential to perform at a certain level, so beyond being judged more critically in comparison to your own previous capabilities, your work may have even been evaluated differently than your classmates' work. So while your friend Jimmy turned in a paper much worse than yours and walked away with an A, you stood there dumbfounded, wondering where you went wrong. The flaw in your logic was not in your product, but rather in your process.
Our teachers’ and managers’ impressions of our work are often not based solely on the final product that we turn in, but more so on how we manage their expectations throughout the process. No matter how talented we may be, if we set sky high expectations, we are always going to fall short of the person that we claim to be. Through setting high expectations internally and setting external expectations that are slightly lower than what we believe we can achieve, we are setting ourselves up for success.
For example, if you tell your manager or teacher that you are going to get through 100 pages out of a 200-page document by Friday, yet you proceed to fall short of your goal and turn in only 90 pages, you are going to fall short of their expectations. Rather than performing better than they expected you to perform, over promising puts you in a personally stressful position that often doesn’t work in your favor.
Even if you think that with some certainty, you will be able to get through 90 to 100 pages of the document by Friday, you should only agree to have maybe 80 pages done by Friday. Then if you turn in the same 90 pages that you would have in the case above, you will be exceeding their expectations rather than falling short of them. Even if your teacher or manager ends up with an equivalent quality of work in their hands, (in the case of under promising and over performing) the fact that they received more than they internally expected will leave them feeling positive and confident in your ability to manage your own performance. If you happen to fall short of your personal goals as a result of unexpected distractions and only turn in 80 pages by the deadline, you will still have kept your promise and met the agreed upon expectations, reinforcing your ability to meet deadlines and keep your promises.
While it is important to set your internal bar very high to keep striving for personal improvement, setting the bar out of reach externally only sets you up to fall short of your promises and to struggle to meet external expectations. When you set expectations that are realistic and externally agree upon performance metrics that are slightly below your personal capabilities, you are giving yourself the buffer zone that is necessary to succeed time and time again.