Work Daze

Before you even start reading, let me tell you right at the giddy-up, this column really isn’t very good. So, if you’re expecting some inspirational, or useful, or even mildly entertaining insights into working life, you probably won’t find them here.

Still reading? That’s good, because you’re about to find yourself wildly impressed with my brilliance. It’s not because I’m brilliant, or even bright. It’s because I carefully manipulated your good judgment by an extremely useful and little-appreciated business technique – managing expectations downward.

People brought up to be positive, glass-is-half-full types do not grasp the power of downward expectations. These optimistic, over-achievers doom their best efforts by repeatedly assuring their managers of success. With their supervisors expecting them to complete every project with 110% effectiveness and efficiency, these positive stinkers find themselves walking on – and often, falling from – a career tightrope when faced with even the slightest set-back.

For the 110% crowd, a 99% success rate represents abject failure. This is never a problem for those of us who operate at about 30% of capacity. For us, successfully finishing even 50% of an assignment represents a major accomplishment.

According to a recent “Cubicle Culture” column by Jared Sandberg in “The Wall Street Journal” there are many psychological reasons to support managing expectations downward. Sandberg quotes Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, on the psychological phenomena of “anchoring.”

Defined as “the tendency to overvalue an early piece of information, such as an expectation set by an employee,” anchoring psychology suggests that “later updates have significantly less influence on our view of the situation.”

In other words, if you accept every important assignment with a “Can do “attitude, it may be difficult to recalibrate expectations, even though you are immediately handed five additional even more important assignments from five even more important managers, in the process of which you also happen to get hit by a cross-town bus on your way to heart-transplant surgery.

A far better strategy, according to business psychologists, is to set your anchor in deep in the muck. “Boy, that looks really difficult,” you tell your manager. “I don’t think there’s a chance in heck that I will be able to get it done.” This way, even if you never lift a finger on the project, you’re covered. And if you do lift a finger, you’re a hero. The “Can do” person can break a finger, and still be considered a bum.

Another psychological factor that favors managing expectations downward comes from another professor at another business school – Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago. [Don’t these professors have anything better to do than pontificate to the media? No wonder America’s top managers are so lame. Their business school professors can’t teach because they’re spending all their time trying to appear on Oprah.]

Epley’s researches lead him to the conclusion that while “breaking a promise is bad, exceeding a promise is often not worth the effort.” To which my research produces a major “Duh.” How many times have we busted our humps to get a job done, only to have the accomplishment totally ignored by our bosses. Like the time you actually arrived at work at 9 AM, or stayed until 5:05 PM. Did anyone throw rose pedals on your work station, or offer up a laurel wreath for your fevered brow? I think not.

But make some silly little mistake, like leaving a laptop full of sensitive client data on the bar at the Kit Kat Klub, or setting the boss’s new Jaguar on fire, and suddenly, you’re “irresponsible.”

Fortunately, for people like thee and me, managing expectations downward is not really a problem. Our managers expect so little from us that even the simple act of staying awake until lunchtime is considered a major accomplishment. For those of us who live and breath failure, there is no need to manage expectations. Your bosses have none.

Of course, if you still believe that a positive attitude is still is the best way to get ahead, I can only refer to my new personal hero, Harold Wolfe, a retired software engineer interviewed for the “Cubical Culture” column. In his long career, Mr. Wolfe volunteered for nothing, hesitated when asked to work overtime, and when asked how soon a job would be done, would respond, “I’ll have to think about it.”

As this wise man so wisely explained, “If you meet high expectations, they only expect more from you.”