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The Trick to Creating Superstar Employees? Think of Them as Superstar Employees. Research shows that your attitude towards your employees may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By Elizabeth Dunn

This story appears in the January 2018 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

Viktor Koen

In 1963, a pair of researchers named Robert Rosenthal and Kermit Fode assigned a dozen psychology students an experiment: Train rats to solve their way out of a maze. Rosenthal and Fode told half the students that they would be training "maze bright" rats, selectively bred for their exceptional maze-running prowess, and the other half that they had on their hands "maze dull" ones, bred for the opposite trait. Five days in, the "maze bright" rats could complete their task twice as fast as the competing group, which is what you might expect when you pit uber-rats against dimwits.

Related: 8 Mindsets That Will Set You on the Path to Success

But here's the thing: All the rats in the study were, in truth, pretty much the same.