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A good friend of mine’s Father taught at the University of Regina, Al Derges was one of the best professors, ever.  You can even see for yourself here, an almost perfect rating on RateMyProffesors.com.  My time spent at University had very few memorable classes to say the least, but Al had more than one exceptional class and this one had some significance for me recently.

Pygmalian in Management was a Harvard Business Review article we were to read and write a response to.  It’s a great story and I encourage you to read it but the moral is “a manager’s expectations are the key to a subordinate’s performance and development.”

What we expect out of people is usually what we get.

I coach volleyball, high school senior boys.  When I go into a season I expect the best from them, nothing less.  This year we began the season with only one returning player, so we were a very young team, if not the youngest in the league.  Rebuilding year everyone thought, I’m sure even some of the players had thought that as well, but not the coaches.  The head coach and I decided that we were going to set goals as a team this year and expect nothing less but 105% of effort to get there.

Our season was far from perfect, finishing fourth place over all, we went into quarter finals as slightly favored to win, we did.  Semi finals we were under dogs, we won.  Finally we made it to the city final, fourth place up against the first place team.  The team knew what us coaches expected out of them even though we were a long shot to win.

On the back of our team room, sticky tact to the door resides a piece of paper stating our goals, one of which was to win city finals.  We did.  Even losing the first set and coming back from a deficit of six to one in the final set, our expectation of the team to do better than anyone else would expect won us a championship.  I don’t take credit for the win and it probably was a host of other reason WHY we won but I am positive that we never would have got anywhere if we didn’t have such high expectations of the team.

The next time your staff underperforms or you’re looking at how to motivate someone, stop and instead of studying them this time, maybe look at YOUR expectations of them, it’ll be interesting what you find.

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Last Saturday morning I was woken at 9:45 by my doorbell.  No one comes to our house that early, it could be an emergency I thought to myself, so I staggered out of my room.  My room mate, in the same state (squinting eyes, wearing the pants from last night) was a step a head of me and opened the door.  To our dismay we found no one, just a little, old man leaving the yard going to the neighbors house.  We thought nothing of it except for how mad we were at this little, old man that got us with the ol’ ring and run trick.  Back to sleep.

Two and a half hours later I finally woke from my sleep and decided to check the temperature before I left the house.  Standing on the front porch something in the mailbox caught my eye, it was a “Heaven, how do I get there?” pamphlet.  The little, old man didn’t ring and run our house for nothing, he woke us up to ensure we got this pamphlet in time.  I think you understand the title for this post now.

Heaven’s a touchy subject, but I think Church is great, I try to go as much as I can and this has nothing to do with Church in general.  This has to do with the specific Church that lets this little, old man walk around neighborhoods ringing doorbells to try and get their message across.  Let’s think about this for a minute, how many people will answer the door, find that there’s no one there but grab the pamphlet that was left behind and say “You know I have been wondering for a while, how DO I get to Heaven?”  I’d be willing to bet no one.

So why ring the door bell?  The pamphlet isn’t time sensitive, I don’t need to read it immediately do I?  What ever happened to mail delivery etiquette and just leaving it in the box that it was intended for?  If your message is a difficult one to get across you may not want to piss people off before you tell them.

So do you want to know how to make me hate your organization no matter who you are?  Wake me up on a weekend to tell me your message, I guarantee I will hate you.

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If your job wasn’t to market your company anymore but to market a Super Hero instead, what would you change?  What would you do differently?  Try for a minute as a thought exercise to put yourself in the shoes of a Super Hero marketer.

Pick one, Batman, Ironman, Superman, Wonder-women or Wolverine, which ever you like, you are now their marketing manager.  What does the super hero want out of this? (What is their goal?)  Who’s your target?  How can you get to them?  How do you tell people about a Super Hero?

This shouldn’t be that difficult; after all it is a Super Hero right?  The storey’s already  “sticky” all you have to do is encourage it, right?

If all businesses were like this then we wouldn’t need to market them to the extent we do today.  If the story’s good enough it will spread won’t it?  Thus saving money on advertising.  One could come to a conclusion that maybe you shouldn’t be focusing your efforts on marketing so much but on transforming your business into a Super Hero.

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