praise as recognition

Leaders sometimes carry a belief that praise leads to contentment and inertia. They think that the praised employee will have a sense of having arrived and stop working as hard.

A consistent premise of my coaching is praise can have quite the opposite effect. Praise can be one of the most generative moves for a manager or colleague to make. 

We heavily discount this because of our cynicism and our fear of being foolishly optimistic. We may even have a misguided belief that praising someone in fact shames them a little by suggesting that they are the weak kind of person who needs praise.

To overcome this set of assumptions, I find myself having to rebrand praise as “recognition” for those I coach. I tell coachees: it's not praise, it's just recognizing. You don't have to feel bad about doing it. You don't have to add a lot of qualifiers to it. It counts if you just say, “it's good that you do this,” or “thank you for doing this.”

We often want to save our praise for moments where people have gone above and beyond. We do this with a sort of inherent subtext that praise makes people inert - either stops them from moving forward or caps the pace of their progress at its current level. If their inertia occurs as they’re going above and beyond, that's not as big a deal as being inert around simply meeting expectations.

In this line of thinking, you should reserve your praise for things that are okay to sacrifice, because praise can sap motivation. My assertion is the opposite: praise everything you want to see continue, because praise is the clearest signal you can give about what we value and want to see around here. Your people will act on that signal. 

-ben