Work­ing in my home office Fri­day evening, I pecked away at the key­board, vaguely aware that I had turned on the tele­vi­sion to pro­vide some back­ground noise as I fin­ished up the week's projects.

All activ­ity came to a stop, how­ever, when the words uttered by a woman in the broad­cast caught my full atten­tion. CBS Evening News was run­ning one of those folksy, upbeat seg­ments that typ­i­cally usher view­ers into a week­end men­tal­ity.  "When you expect the best," said the woman from Ohio, "That's what you're going to receive."

The woman was Jackie Sypherd who runs Sypherd's Cycles in a small town seem­ingly best known for its cit­i­zens' uni­ver­sal trust in peo­ple. (The full story can be viewed here.)  Ms. Sypherd's shop rents out bikes, and cus­tomers are not asked to pro­vide a deposit or leave behind a driver's license. She sim­ply trusts the cus­tomers to return the rentals–always has and pre­sum­ably always will. In 28 years of busi­ness, nobody has ever absconded with a bicycle.

For me, the story was both refresh­ing and famil­iar. Here at Impact Learn­ing Sys­tems, we develop train­ing that revolves around a cen­tral theme of the HEART Model™–the E in HEART stand­ing for "expect the best."

I've never worked with the bike shop in Ohio (or for that mat­ter CBS Evening News), but I have worked with a num­ber of other organizations–both big and small–that have come to rec­og­nize just how pow­er­ful this mind­set can be.

Man­agers who expect the best from their employ­ees tend to get bet­ter results than those who doubt the poten­tial of their team. Sales reps who expect the best send a sub­tle mes­sage through their atti­tude and behavior–an atti­tude that often con­vinces the cus­tomer to close the deal. Most impor­tantly, per­haps, I've seen time and again how peo­ple who expect the best from them­selves rarely disappoint.

How it works I can't really say. But think of the placebo effect (it's up to 90 per­cent effec­tive). And stud­ies have shown that ath­letes who visu­al­ize a win­ning per­for­mance are far more likely to achieve it than those ath­letes who do not.

I guess it all goes back to the age-old motif of the self-fulfilling prophecy: If you expect a sit­u­a­tion to turn out poorly, you're essen­tially guar­an­tee­ing that it will. Might as well expect the best!

In her pro­fes­sional life, Vasudha is a suc­cess­ful con­sul­tant who reg­u­larly works with lead­ing com­pa­nies on the top­ics of ser­vice, val­ues, and mis­sion. She has authored four books, all pub­lished by McGraw-Hill.

Vasudha Deming

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