Sixty years of research says that when you expect more from people, they produce more. It also shows you can’t fake it.

Someone on my team told me recently that I run SenseTe like Ted Lasso. I took it as a compliment, even knowing it wasn’t entirely meant as one.

There’s something real under the joke, though: expect more from people than they expect from themselves, and they almost always step up. Not instantly, and not without stumbles, but they do.

I used to think that was just my personal style. Then I realized it has sixty years of research behind it, and a catch that almost everyone misses.

The effect has a name

In 1968, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson gave an intelligence test to students at a California elementary school. They told the teachers which children the test said were ready to jump ahead that year.

The list was fake. The names on it had been picked at random. Those children still gained more than their classmates by the end of the year. The only thing that was different about them was what their teacher believed.

Rosenthal called it the Pygmalion effect. A classroom is not a company, so Dov Eden spent much of his career testing the same idea on adults at work. He changed what commanders were told about their incoming trainees, then measured how those trainees did. It worked the same way, and the biggest gains came from the people the system had already given up on.

You cannot fake it

Here is where most management advice falls short.

Researchers tried to teach it. In seven studies, managers were trained to do all the visible things: expect a lot, be supportive, credit people’s wins to their ability and not to luck. There was almost no evidence the training worked.

The behavior isn’t what matters. You can’t act confident in someone and expect them to grow, because people can tell when it’s an act. Every time. So this isn’t a skill you pick up in a management course. It’s a question you have to answer honestly about each person: do I actually believe they can do more than they are doing right now?

If your answer is no, cheering them on is useless. It sounds fake, which is worse than saying nothing at all.

The half nobody talks about

The other thing Lasso does, and what people remember, is pay real attention. He learns the kit man’s name. He asks the quietest person in the room what they think, and then he acts on their answer.

That is not just a nice habit. Google once studied what made its best teams better than the rest. The answer was not who was on the team. It was psychological safety, a term from Amy Edmondson at Harvard. It means people believe they can speak up, or be wrong, without paying for it.

Setting high expectations without that safety isn’t leadership; it’s just pressure.

If you tell someone you believe in them, but make it costly to make a mistake out loud, they will ignore your words and protect themselves.

That’s why I don’t apologize for keeping our workplace relaxed and fun. Fun isn’t a perk we tacked on; it’s what makes it safe to say “I don’t know” or bring up bad news early. When teams laugh together, they get to the truth faster. In an industry where a missed detail costs real money, that isn’t just culture—it’s risk management.

Why this matters more in lending

Underwriting rarely feels exciting, and financial services often settle for low expectations—especially when evaluating people who have been turned down before.

Which brings me to the finding I think about most. The effect is strongest where expectations were lowest to start with. The people who gain the most are the ones nobody was counting on.

That describes how we built CreditSense, and it drives how we build our company. We look at a borrower’s actual financial behavior alongside traditional credit scores, because a credit score mostly reflects what someone was permitted to do in the past. A thin credit history usually signals a lack of opportunity, not a lack of capability.

If I believe a score underestimates people, I have to believe a résumé does too.

What this looks like on a regular day

In practice, it means giving someone full ownership of a project before they feel 100% ready for it, and resisting the urge to step in when the first draft or launch is rough. Early in our company’s history, I handed our core infrastructure roadmap to an engineer who hadn’t managed a major system rollout before. The first two weeks were chaotic, but by month three, they were running the system more effectively than I ever could have. It also means being specific about what you see in people, taking the hit yourself when a risky decision fails, and giving honest feedback when you have doubts instead of pretending to be enthusiastic.

Optimism is just how this looks from the outside. Underneath is a conviction that most people operate below their true potential, especially if they’ve been counted out in the past.

The challenge is that you have to extend trust before you have complete proof. There’s no shortcut. Personally, I would rather be wrong about a few individuals than overly cautious with everyone.