THE LEAFLET
April 25 2024
reveal and remark as sunscreen, recognition frequency trackers, brass tacks for good vibes
REVEAL AND REMARK AS SUNSCREEN
Telling people what they’re doing well is the surest way to (a) help people identify productive behaviors that they should replicate in all their work; (b) give people a blueprint for future success; (c) boost people’s identity as a high-performer, and thus the effort they pour into work; (d) create positive feelings of growth, momentum, and success; and (d) help under-performers identify patterns that will lead them out of the dark.
“Reveal and Remark”: Habitually telling people what they are doing well is the single most powerful move a leader can make.
I say “reveal” because, per (a) and (b) above, it’s not always obvious to people what behaviors they’re doing well that you think they should replicate. I say “remark” (and not “throw a huge party”) because all it takes is a simple acknowledgement of the positive, repeatable behavior.
Your most important job is to (1) notice every good thing you see your team doing, and (2) tell them what they’re doing well. Habituate it. That’s it. Reveal & Remark as much as you possibly can.
Read the rest here.
RECOGNITION FREQUENCY TRACKERS
It’s amazing how much can be accomplished by providing teammates with positive feedback as a way of teaching them what behaviors to repeat. It’s shocking how often, across wildly different contexts, the single most transformative leader behavior that I can recommend is the same: A Recognition Frequency Tracker.
In that spirit, I recommend that every leader do the following:
Set up a Recognition Frequency Tracker (or use THIS template): In the first column, list each of your direct reports. Across the first row, write the dates corresponding to one day of the week when you have 15 minutes free in perpetuity.
Set up a “Recognition Reflection” calendar event for 15 minutes weekly and attach your tracker.
At the designated time each week, jot down the piece of specific positive feedback you gave to each of your direct reports.
If you didn’t give such feedback to one of your direct reports, make a note of what feedback you want to give and then either (a) go give it (Slack, text, pop into their office, etc.) or (b) calendar yourself a reminder to do so before the end of the week.
Reminder prompt: What behavior did I observe this week that I wish they repeated all of the time?
While you’re here, use today as your first entry in your tracker.
Read the rest here.
BRASS TACKS FOR GOOD VIBES
Team vibes seem low? Everyone is waiting on you to fix it.
Previously, I wrote about the difference between morale and culture, and how to boost morale while also linking these moves to mission fulfillment. The best ways to proactively create a positive culture are also the best moves for reversing a negative trend in team vibe: Institutional triggers for enhancing morale that are connected to high performance and mission achievement.
The best way to do this is to pre-plan how and when you’re going to celebrate as a team.
- Monthly/quarterly (outcomes-focused): How do you celebrate when something important, mission-critical is achieved?
Example: Whatever your team’s equivalent of “karaoke night every time we raise another $100,000 in donations” is.
- Weekly: What rituals do you have for celebrating good moves people made over the past week that, when scaled and repeated, will lead to success on the big milestones?
Example: Some kind of weekly team-wide celebration of people who actively demonstrated the core values (praise celebrations, gratitude circles, and so on), where the kudos always identify a great behavior and tag it to one of the values.
- Daily/hourly: What are you doing to call out the good, repeatable behaviors you see?
Example: Reveal & Remark and Recognition Frequency Trackers
As previously noted, building culture is about linking vibe-enhancement to performance and mission-fulfillment. Don’t sit back and wait for this to happen on its own; set up the institutional triggers that ritualize this connection.
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Poet David Whyte on despair:
To see and experience despair fully in our body is to begin to see it as a necessary, seasonal visitation, and the first step in letting it have its own life, neither holding it nor moving it on before its time.
Buddhist Pema Chodron on arrows to the heart:
If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart.
Writer Maggie Nelson on the limitations of evasiveness:
I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric