Well today we talk about something called the "Pygmalion Effect". In short the "Pygmalion effect argues that your expectations of performance from people directly reflects the performance they give you. which is to say that if you have high expectations from a person he invariably delivers high performance, but if your expectations are low from a person he invariably will deliver lower performance. Many a times we subtly convey our expectations from people in various ways and means which can have an impact on that persons productivity. One most common mechanism to convey expectations is the quality of the work you delegate to your people, if you consistently delegate routine and less challenging work to your team member you are subtly communicating your expectation levels to that person, over time this can impact the team member negatively instead of helping him improve he further deteriorates and feels undervalued and untrusted.
In a nutshell you need to identify and set expectations from your team members which should drive them to improve and exceed their capabilities. One way to do this in my experience is to consistently raise your expectations of performance from your team and communicate the same to them time and again, keep re-iterating the fact that they can do better than what they have been doing, help them identify and work on their areas of oppurtunity and with each improvement raise the bar of performance expected.
