The paradox of expectations (Will Leicester City F.C. fall at the last hurdle?)

At the start of the season Leicester City were 5000/1 on to win the Premier League. I suspect at that time they would have been happy to avoid relegation. Now they are five points clear at the top of the league and looking good for the title. All the football talk is will they do it or will they crack. I hope they keep going and win The Premiership; their free flowing counter attacking style is fantastic, a breath of fresh air. It’s as though they are playing with freedom from fear or any burden of expectation. And they are certainly punching above their weight having just beaten Manchester City 3-1 ‘away’ with the starting eleven players costing £20m versus their opponents’ £200m.

What would it be like if your staff were all free to perform at their best and fully express their talents in service of your organisation and its customers? What if they were free from the burden of expectation?

And yet part of the job of the leader is to set high expectations for the organisation and constantly raise standards of delivery. Without doing so would be to accept the status quo and an inevitable decline into non-competitiveness, mediocrity and boredom.

So there’s the paradox – people raise their game to meet the challenge of high expectations and yet at the same time perform at their best when free from the burden of expectation.

Wrestling with this apparent paradox I asked Sue, my wife, about her thoughts on expectation as a primary school special needs teacher. She said she has massive expectations for what her students will achieve; though she chunks their learning down into small steps and then guides them along the path. Also that if she showed her students what she expected them to achieve in a year’s time it would almost certainly freighted them off at the start.

I wonder how his players would have responded if Claudio Ranieri declared at the beginning of the season that he expected them to win the Premiership and if they didn’t they were out.

It will be interesting to see how the rest of the season develops and how the weight of expectation from having a five point lead will affect Leicester’s tactics, style and results. And, if they do finish on top, how they perform next season as defending champions with all the associated expectations.

Parting thought – how do you handle the paradox of expectations in your team or organisation and how are your people responding?