Why should a manager treat their staff optimistically?

People tend to meet expectations, their own, and those of the people who they have a relationship with.

I assume most people have encountered, even if 2nd hand, "Pygmalion In The Classroom" - the 1968 study of kids and teachers expectations.

I see no reason why the same dynamic does not work in business.

"Keep the trains running" leads to management denial?

My son and I played with with his train set a couple of days ago. We had made "an accident track" - a perilous system of curves and hills where trains regularly fall off.

Now if he only had one or two trains then they would have enough space between them, and no accidents would occur. But he put on lots of trains, and they travelled at different speeds because of variations in battery power, and so we saw accidents. Lots of accidents.

And I found myself saying "Keep the trains running". A phrase that I have heard from numerous CEOs in companies that I have worked at. A phrase which I had always thought of as management padding when a more honest "we have made changes, you will not find them easy, you have not felt the full impact of all these changes yet, so we expect you to keep doing your job despite the change". Or a more cynical "look, just make the changes work and quit moaning, cover up our mistakes".

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