There’s a phrase I heard in the military: “treat him like a child and he’ll act like a child, treat him like an adult and he’ll act like an adult.” You saw thi

There’s a phrase I heard in the military: “treat him like a child and he’ll act like a child, treat him like an adult and he’ll act like an adult.” You saw this from time to time where a soldier would just fuck up everything. Their “boss” would start treating them like a child, never trusting them to do something right, always watching them like a hawk, etc. Unlike the civilian world, you can’t just fire someone, so there was quite a bit of shared experience in handling these types of situations. Eventually someone would notice and tell the “boss” that phrase. The “boss” would force themselves to trust the person, to let them make their own mistakes just like an adult. The “trouble-child” would miraculously start performing so much better in 99% of cases. It was like magic. I’ve been on both sides of that coin in my short 5 years in the military, but I see it from time to time in the tech world too. Unless there’s someone around who knows how to fix it, it will spiral out of control like you saw.