“My boss is not really the type to tell me what I do well. He’s more in the camp of ‘no news is good news’”—a client told me last week. If you find yourself in the description of this boss, you might want to reconsider your approach. I will tell you why.
People in the corporate environment chronically underuse positive feedback.
I work with an incredibly international client base and, let’s get real for a second, sometimes “positive feedback” is seen around the world as an over-the-top, unnecessary hyperbole coming from the American school of management.
For instance, a client of mine joked recently that her team could tell how guilty she felt for making them work hard, by the number of exclamation points she used in her emails: “Thank you!!!!” meant she probably asked them to pull an all-nighter.
This is not what I am talking about. Positive feedback does not have to include “awesome,” three qualifiers, or four exclamation points, to be effective. In fact, quite the contrary.
There is another barrier to providing positive feedback: some people genuinely find it embarrassing to get a pat on the back. Since it is cringe-worthy for them to receive, they will likewise not dish it out, either. After all, do not do unto others what you don’t want others do unto you, right?
Wrong. In fact, the amount of positive feedback needed to sustain engagement and motivation can be wildly different between people. We all need a certain baseline of encouragement, of course. Beyond that, there are those of us who would be fine with “getting on” and rarely be given praise; and those of us who genuinely need constant external validation.
This is not weakness and one cannot “get over it.”
As a leader, you should know that you likely have people in your team whose quality of work will improve if you give them a continuous dose of positive feedback.
A leader’s ability to inspire and build trust is usually not about a big one-time event, but about the sum of incremental behaviors over time.
Plus, positive feedback can be practically helpful. I sometimes like to call positive feedback “reinforcing feedback” because it reinforces an approach or behavior: people should know it’s working so that they keep doing it.
If I have convinced you to give positive feedback, how can you do it well, so that you do not fall in the trap of the schmaltzy, over-the-top, or disingenuous praise?
- Make it specific, just like you would constructive feedback. A colleague of mine calls the often-used “good job!” the “lukewarm bath feedback:” it’s not cold, it’s nice, but it doesn’t hit the spot either. It’s… blah. I wrote before about my favorite framework for providing feedback—Observation-Impact-Listen-Suggestion—and you can absolutely use it for positive feedback as well.
Rather than “Good job just now!” it is much more powerful to say “I noticed you asking some powerful questions in the meeting just now. I especially liked the question ‘what would success look like for you?’ That really got us exploring an important topic that wouldn’t have otherwise come up.”
- Keep in mind the 5:1 “magic ratio” of positive-to-negative interactions. Researcher John Gottman coined this phrase to describe that fewer than 5 positive interactions to every 1 negative interaction uncannily predicted the demise of the relationships he studied in his lab. Yes, this applied to personal relationships, but work relationships are not that different. When I discuss this with my clients, they are often surprised by how much positive credit is needed to “buy” us the ability to say something negative without damaging a relationship. Even if you do not aim for 5:1, can we do 3:1?
- Careful about only offering praise. I used to work with a partner for whom everything I did was great. To be honest, after a while I started to doubt she was being sincere. We all need constructive feedback to learn and grow.
- And finally, consider giving compliments about something that the other person does well, that is different from what you do well. Appreciating people’s differences builds connection as I wrote here.
Positive feedback—when done well—is an easy way to build connection, reinforce good behavior, and motivate people to do more. Why aren’t we doing it more?
