I recently came across an article authored by Jean François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux from Ivey Management Services. In the article entitled "Managing Smart: Enabling under-performers to become valued contributors," Barsoux and Manzoni discuss their thoughts around "The Set-Up to Fail Syndrome" and how it affects individual performance. It is important here to consider the difference between the identification of the behaviors/competencies that identify top performance within our organization and encouraging an individual to perform their best and strive to achieve that level of identified performance. According to the "Set-Up to Fail Syndrome," a focus on top performance can lead to managers inadvertently identifying or classifying workers into those who they feel are top performers and those who they feel are underperformers. This type of identification then affects a supervisor´s behavior towards those individuals and in fact contributes towards future "top performance" or "underperformance." This is an interesting topic in the field of education and has relevance in business. The discussion brings to mind the famous experiment conducted by a woman who ran workshops to emphasize this phenomena. Her workshops emphasized how this "Set Up to Fail Syndrome" or "Self Fulfilling Prophecy" comes to be. In the workshops, participants were divided into two groups by eye color. One group was pulled aside and told they were smarter while the other was pulled aside and told how they were not as smart as the other group. For the remainder of the workshop, the leader treated the corresponding groups according to their label. It certainly led to a great deal of frustration - and this was only an exercise. In the end, those individuals who were labeled as "not as smart" did not perform as well as the other group. In essence - they lived up to their label.
The "Set Up to Fail Syndrome" being discussed by Manzoni and Barsoux, however, takes place more invisibly. No one is outwardly told that they belong or do not belong to one group. However, human behavior is guided by beliefs. Once an unconscious decision has been made by a manager to classify an individual as "an underperformer," their behavior towards that individual may in fact contribute to confirming this perception. This is not an isolated phenomena - it plays out with children and their parents, and in numerous other human interactions. So what is the lesson here? Whenever you feel you are ´labeling" an individual or "pigeonholing," this is a signal to be cautious. In order to encourage all individuals to achieve their own level of top performance, we must remove barriers. A large part of this is to provide challenges to individuals at every stage of learning, development and growth to encourage them to stretch their abilities and achieve more.
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts and comments on this topic.
The article can be obtained from:
Ivey Publishing
Ivey Management Services
C/o Richard Ivey School of Business
The University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario
N6A 3K7
Reprint #9B03TB10
March/April 2003
