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More rope for strong people
The natural pull is toward people who struggle, the way anyone who sees somebody drowning wants to save them. This approach does the reverse. Somebody crushing it gets more and more rope and is pushed as hard as possible, up to the point of breaking. People who make consistently good decisions are loaded with more of them until bad ones begin to show.
Why it works
Confidence feeds on itself, so a person on a run is able to do more. The team gets defended in public in front of executives, and nobody gets criticized in front of others. For people hired again and again, the message is that they know what to do and should go do it.
The trade-off
The trade-off is that a leader with no good mechanism for helping people improve lets them fail on their own, which can be frustrating to work for. Attention that never comes does not mean a person is failing. The old tropes point the same way: give the work to the busiest person, and ride your racehorses.
Why does confidence feed on itself?
Albert Bandura's 1977 work on self-efficacy identified mastery experiences, the memory of having succeeded, as the strongest source of a person's belief in their own ability. That belief shapes which tasks people attempt and how long they persist when things get hard. Success raises the belief, and the belief raises the odds of the next success. Bandura was a psychologist at Stanford University.
Why is public criticism so costly?
Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School published a 1999 study in Administrative Science Quarterly of hospital teams. It introduced the term psychological safety for a shared belief that a team is safe for speaking up and taking risks. Google's Project Aristotle, a multiyear internal study of its own teams, later named psychological safety as the most important dynamic of effective teams. Teams where people fear embarrassment tend to hide problems.
Why does overloading stars eventually backfire?
In 1908 the psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson published experiments on mice learning to avoid mild electric shocks. Performance rose as the stimulus increased, then fell once it passed a moderate level. The pattern, an inverted U, became known as the Yerkes-Dodson law. Later researchers applied it to arousal and stress in people.