The Dangers of High Expectations

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Hengchen Dai, Berkeley Dietvorst, Bradford Tuckfield, Katherine Milkman, and Maurice Schweitzer have published a fascinating new study about the dangers of high expectations. Their article is titled, "Quitting When the Going Gets Tough: A Downside of High Performance Expectations."   They note that high expectations can be a very positive force.  For instance, when teachers set high expectations for students, they often achieve good academic results.   Why?  Research suggests that high external performance expectations elevates self-expectations.   

However, the scholars examine what occurs when someone with high external performance expectations hits a roadblock or obstacle early on during a particular effort. they argue the following: "We propose that when initial performance is poor, compared to individuals who face low expectations, individuals who face 6 high expectations will be more concerned about their public image and experience greater embarrassment."  How do individuals cope with this embarrassment?  For some people, persistence may be the right strategy.  They persevere so as to eventually succeed and thus avoid the embarrassment of not meeting external expectations.  For many individuals, though, an opposite reaction occurs. They begin searching for an exit strategy so as to avoid the embarrassment of unfulfilled expectations.  In particular, they hope to find an exit strategy with a "plausibly valid excuse" for quitting, thus enabling them to blame the initial poor performance on unforeseen or uncontrollable circumstances.  

To test their hypothesis about exit strategies, they conducted a study of over 300,000 men's tennis matches.   They showed that, "After losing the first set of a match, players who are expected to win (favorites) are significantly more likely to quit than players who are expected to lose (underdogs)."  A subsequent experimental study confirmed these results.  

What then should we do? Should we lower performance expectations for talented individuals on our teams? Of course not. What we must do, though, is be ready to coach, support, and encourage those who might encounter early setbacks.  Leaders need to focus on how one can learn from an initial failure, rather than seeking to assign blame.   They cultivate a growth mindset among their team members.  

Why Design Thinkers Need Grit

Lili Ermezei, Creative Strategy Director at Wonder Agency, makes the case in this terrific blog post that, "Being gritty is essential for successful design projects."   I agree wholeheartedly.  Some teams struggle during the design thinking process generate meaningful insights from their field research.   They settle for conclusions and interpretations that are superficial.  Others struggle because they converge too rapidly on a solution.  They fail to gather and accept sufficient user feedback, and they don't iterate effectively.   

Enlightened trial and error requires grit.  You have to be able to persist despite multiple failed prototypes and experiments.  You have to encounter numerous instances of negative feedback and persevere.  Many people become frustrated with the non-linear nature of the design thinking process. Grit certainly helps in this messy process.  

Can You Have Too Much Grit?

Amy Morin writes in Forbes this week about an interesting new study about grit. The study, is titled "When the going gets tough: Grit predicts costly perseverance." The authors are Gale Lucas, Jonathan Gratch, Lin Cheng, and Stacy Marsella.  Note that a lengthy stream of research over the past decade or so has extolled the benefits of grit.  What is grit? University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth defines grit as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." Duckworth has studied grit extensively in her academic career. She has found that intelligence is not always a good predictor of academic or professional success. Grit matters. For instance, she has found that, at West Point, a cadet's grit score is the best predictor of success in "Beast Barracks" – the incredibly challenging, six week summer training regimen that all new cadets must endure. Grit predicted success more so than intelligence, leadership ability or physical fitness.

The new study by Lucas and her colleagues examines whether grit may come with some negative consequences.  Could it be possible for someone to exhibit "too much" grit in some circumstances, leading to poor results?  In a series of studies, Lucas and her colleagues had subjects tackle very challenging tasks.  What did they find? 

Across three studies, we found that higher grit individuals invest more effort and persist in tasks that are not going well. Grittier participants were less willing to give up when failing even though they were likely to incur a cost for their persistence. In Study 1, grittier participants were able to complete fewer problems in an anagram task where some of the items should have been passed over (i.e., unsolvable items). This provides initial evidence that they persisted at a cost to themselves, in this case the cost of getting to attempt more problems. Because we incentivized performance (with entries into a lottery for $100), it seems that grittier participants were specifically trading off greater chances at monetary gains to persist at the more difficult questions. Compared to participants with lower grit, grittier participants not only increase effort when they are losing a game (Study 2), but also are more likely to stay and keep fighting a losing battle when they could quit (Study 3).

Persistence & Creativity

Brian Lucas & Loran Nordgren have conducted a series of interesting studies about creativity.  They find that people tend to underestimate the number of creative ideas that they can generate.  The scholars asked people to generate ideas on a particular topic.  Then they asked them to predict how many more ideas they could generate if they continued thinking about the topic.  The subjects then continued to try to generate ideas.  

The scholars found that people underestimated how many ideas they could generate by persisting for that additional period of time.  Moreover, outsiders judged the ideas generated after persisting as of higher quality than the ideas generated initially.  

The study shows the value of persistence, but it also demonstrates that we sometimes downplay its importance. I think it's because we often think of creativity as a flash of brilliance.  It's not.  It's hard work! It takes time to reflect, think, make connections among disparate concepts, and synthesize ideas.  

When is grit beneficial, and when is it not?

Angela Duckworth has been of the leading researchers on the topic of "grit" - something she defines as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals.”  She has found that grit can be a powerful predictor of academic achievement.   In short, she argues that academic achievement is not just a matter of raw intellect; grit matters a great deal. 

Now Magdalena Grohman, a faculty member at the University of Texas at Dallas, has questioned whether grit may be as powerful a predictor of creative achievement.   According to Grohman, "These are 'no results' that we are actually excited about. Creative achievement and grit, intellectual creativity and grit, everyday creativity and grit: no effects whatsoever."   She found that "openness to new experiences" did help creativity, but grit apparently did not.  Similarly, Yale's Zorana Pringle conducted a study in which she asked students to evaluate their peers in terms of the generation of creative and original ideas.  Grit scores did not correlate with high peer evaluations on creativity.  Grohman speculates that grit may be very useful in structured environments and tasks, but perhaps is less useful to individuals when they are embarking on ill-structured, creative endeavors.  More research certainly will be done in this area to explore this rather interesting set of new findings.

Recruiting People with Grit

What is grit?   University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth defines grit as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals."  Duckworth has studied grit extensively in her academic career.  She has found that intelligence is not always a good predictor of academic or professional success.  Grit matters.  For instance, she has found that, at West Point, a cadet's grit score is the best predictor of success in "Beast Barracks" – the incredibly challenging, six week summer training regimen that all new cadets must endure. Grit predicted success more so than intelligence, leadership ability or physical fitness. 

Now Josh Jarrett and Kristen Hamilton have launched a new startup, Koru, that leverages the concept of grit to help companies find great employees.    According to this Fortune article written by Erin Griffith, "Koru seeks out recent college graduates who possess grit, or tenacity, or resilience, but lack real-world experience, and help them land jobs at fast-growing companies. Koru does that by through intensive four-week training programs, hosted at by the companies looking to recruit raw talent."   

In short, Koru identifies students who appear to have a high level of grit, puts them through an intense, but short, program to both train them and test their determination and perseverance.  Part of the training involves working on short-term projects with real companies looking to recruit individuals with grit.  Ultimately, Koru tries to match these high grit individuals with employers seeking people with this crucial trait.  Koru makes money both from fees collected from hiring companies as well as tuition collected from recent college graduates who enroll in their four-week program.  Hamilton comments, "Hiring mistakes are expensive.  We realized a degree and GPA is not a good signal. We're looking to be that signal."

The Power of Grit

Paul Tough has written a thought-provoking new book titled, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.  Tough reviews and examines the extensive academic research which has demonstrated that attributes such as perseverance, conscientiousness, and self-control matter a great deal when it comes to explaining why some people succeed and others do not (ok, his last name fits the subject matter, does it not?).  In fact, researchers have questioned why two children with the same cognitive ability end up achieving very different results in school, work, and beyond.  They have come to conclude that grit matters... and it matters a great deal.  Perhaps most people won't find those results surprising... I certainly do not.   Work ethic, persistence, and resilience have always been known as important attributes that we admire.  What Tough argues, though, is that perhaps we aren't fostering these attributes sufficiently in children today.  In my view, the argument holds for teens and adults as well.  I am enjoying the book and encourage others to take a look - not just parents, but anyone who leads people.