THE LEAFLET
February 13 2025
why we assume correction is better than praise, praise and recognition, good kings embrace constraints
WHY WE ASSUME CORRECTION IS BETTER THAN PRAISE
As a species, we have evolved over a very long time to identify and respond to threats. In the social world we inhabit, acceptance and rejection is often subtle and implied. The threats can be fuzzy or faint, easy to ignore.
At work, these threats are often far more explicit. It’s easier to tell at work whether you're being accepted or rejected: You're hired or fired. You're promoted or not. You're given feedback in specific meetings and the feedback is either good or bad. Work is a much more complete receptacle and mirror for our shame.
At work, we are reasonably encouraged to predict and prevent threats at all times. And it's hard to say to a human being that that's not what they should be doing. Our hard wiring and the social cues all point in that direction.
A leap of logic we often make is that what’s most valuable at work is that which avoids and corrects for underperformance. On the surface, just relying on the defaults, it seems like we should be prioritizing corrective feedback. That’s the way we minimize threats.
In fact, we spark more growth and achieve more, faster, if we master the habit of giving praise.
In the most effective, joyful schools where I’ve worked, teachers know that you'll have way less defensive, self-serving behavior if students and colleagues feel accepted and safe. And they are vastly more likely to feel that way if they know their strengths are going to be noticed when they’re shown.
Sparse praise confirms for people that threat reduction is the smart game to play. Consistent, ready praise opens up other games that enable greater growth and are more enjoyable for everyone to play.
-ben
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PRAISE AND 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
Read the rest here.
GOOD KINGS EMBRACE CONSTRAINTS
In The Eagle and The Hart, Helen Castor paints vivid pictures of kings and courts and intrigue from over 600 years ago. One that hit me square in the jaw: Aged and beloved King Edward III dies. His young son Richard assumes the throne at the age of ten. Very crudely summarized: things went swimmingly for old Ed. They go right off the rails for young Rich.
Why?
One reason Castor points out: Edward III used his court to his advantage. He courted them. They knew what they could count on from the king (a redress of reasonable grievances, when they brought them). They knew they had a forum for identifying and addressing problems - not just problems of their own, those of the entire realm, the problems they were expected to solve as a group. Edward maintained that forum by undertaking innumerable annoying, shadowy, diplomatic conversations with individuals and groups that, in every instance, had far less power than he did.
Teenage Richard, by contrast, kept counsel with a small number of yes-men and minimized his exposure to everyone else, shuttling from one of his rural estates to another. He left court and parliaments to their own devices only to swoop in with harsh (sometimes lethal) retribution for those he thought challenged his authority. He eventually gets deposed by his own cousin.
Two takeaways here, for me:
Even a king leads within constraints his people impose. There is no real leadership by dictate alone. Edward III and Richard II ruled during an era of widespread belief in the divine right of kings, an era where direct criticism of a king could be considered treason and therefore punished by death. They still faced constraints and those constraints weren’t historical circumstances alone (a poorly organized army; an embittered French enemy). They were also the constraints of other people, especially the people nearest to them. The preferences and patterns of those other people are ignored or assumed away at the leader’s peril, even in cases where the leader has the greatest possible concentration of power.
In times of leadership transition, more communication, more relationship-building, more joint problem solving are needed, not less. As a new leader, or a new leader who is too [young/old/feminine/masculine/Black/white/etc] compared to their predecessors, it can be tempting to believe that the absence of open, obvious dissent is evidence of universal assent. It can be tempting to leave the bully pulpit empty, for fear of overdoing it, for fear of abusing the privilege of the post. This is likely a mistake. Richard left his court to draw their own conclusions. Edward wrote his conclusions out in plain view and even invited the court to write with him. Maybe paradoxically, maybe ironically, Edward’s approach, which sounds conciliatory, even submissive, earned him far greater power than Richard’s.
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Cartoonist and blogger Tim Urban on gnarly problems:
Often, the key to succeeding at something big is to break it into its tiniest pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece.
Poet W.H. Auden on routine and ambition:
Routine, in an intelligent [person], is a sign of ambition.
Psychologist Jack Bauer on our sense of well-being:
It appears that well-being has more to do with interpreting meaning in one’s life than with interpreting life as turning out well without a stated reason.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric