Last week I wrote about the Pygmalion in the workplace effect. This week I am digging a little deeper.

If you haven’t read that blog, here’s the bottom line: Harvard researchers told managers to expect certain members of their teams to become high performers in the year ahead. In reality, they had randomly picked those team members. However, their performance was directly impacted by their managers’ higher expectations:

By expecting randomly selected people to flourish, managers created that very reality.

J. Sterling Livingston, who conducted the Pygmalion in the workplace study, observed something else:

This self-fullfilling prophecy did not