Getting better results by giving excellent praise and recognition

Feeling like praise is just fluff? Think again. In this episode, we uncover why smart leaders use specific recognition as a high-impact tool to boost engagement, productivity, and team loyalty. Learn how the Action and Impact Principle can transform your feedback, motivate your team, and keep your best talent around longer. Packed with research insights and real-world examples, this episode is your guide to mastering the art of meaningful praise. Hit play and discover how a little recognition can make a big difference in your tech leadership journey! 🚀💬

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome back to another episode of the Gain the Lead Leadership Podcast. Today we're going to look at the topic of raising the impact of praise and recognition with your employees. Now, maybe you think, why do this? You know, I, I don't need praise. I am motivated without it. Well, that's great if you are. However, most of the human beings out there do thrive on praise, and it's, it's a very easy leadership tool to use with a very high impact. Let's look at the impact. There's plenty of research into praise and the power of it. One of the biggest research institutes the Gallup Institutes, they found out that employees who receive regular recognition are about four times more likely to be engaged in work and being engaged leads to an up to 17% higher productivity. Or the Harvard Business Review highlighted how positive reinforcement is a strong motivator, also on a neural level, activating the brain's reward system, releasing dopamine, which leads to lots of good feelings of pleasure and satisfaction, and that this positive feedback was correlated with work motivation five times more likely to stay with their current employer, is what the Work Human Research Institute found out. And well, we all know the consequences of having to look for a new employee. On top of that, if you look at the negative side of research, then when companies or external institutes conduct exit interviews, so that's an interview conducted after an employee has already decided to or had left the organization, then you find in the top four, five points depend really irrelevant to which of those. But in the top four, five points is always the topic. I didn't feel appreciated enough. And with a simple tool of praise, we can well ensure that we're raising motivation and reduce the likelihood that people leave raise their productivity, and also for us, it makes it easier to lead them . Now in this podcast, we're going to look at three things. Number one, how do you know if an employee's praised enough? Number two, what is the key mechanism for good and effective praise? And number three, a practical exam pulled that brings it all together. So how would you know that an employee is receiving enough praise from you? Well, just imagine approaching them, talking to them and asking them the question. Hey, employee, what do you think are the three things that I appreciate about your work most? Just picture them in front of you. If they can quickly come up with an answer, with only little hesitation, and they sound confident about what they're saying, you can be sure they're being praised enough and you can keep doing what you're doing. If they hesitate or they're not really quite sure, or they say, well , I think it might be this or this, then we can be sure more praise is going to have a positive effect on them . Now, the most important mechanism for praise is what we call the action and impact principle. The action and impact principle means explaining to employees the behavior you've observed them showing and the positive impact that that has. So that of course means watching employees carefully, you know, what are they doing, say, catching them at doing great things so that you can share in a good level of detail the actions they have taken and how these actions lead to benefits. And that can be benefits for you. Benefits for the team, benefits for specific members of the team, benefits for other teams in the organization, benefits for the the company itself or the customers and so on. The impact of praise executed with this principle is that the employee understands that clear link between their behavior and positive impact , which motivates them to continue doing that behavior and also knowing exactly what behavior it is that you will appreciate, colleagues will appreciate that company will appreciate, and that that behavior gets them good results . It raises their sense of self-efficacy grows their level of ownership because they know it's their actions that are generating the good results or at least contributing to the team's good results . Let's have an example of what this can exactly sound like in the real world. So I had an employee, Jack and , uh, Jack had a challenge with a dev team. There was some back and forth between who was responsible for some issues. Uh , the dev team were basically saying the user stories were written in incorrectly and up to then Jack had been trying to point out that they just weren't interpreting them properly anyway. So Jack decided to sit down and prepare for the next meeting. And he prepared very well to listen carefully to know that this team was gonna react usually with some more negative and attacking statements. And he'd got ready to be prepared to listen, stay calm, ask questions, understand them, and had three or four different solutions in his pocket that he'd like to discuss with them to improve the collaboration. I already thought that preparation was excellent . Then I was lucky to be in the meeting. So I saw Jack doing this and it worked very well. After the meeting, I took him beside , uh, and said, Jack, I'm very impressed with what you've done. I then described the action. So Jack, you know, in that meeting when the dev team was starting to attack and they were blaming you and blaming us for the poor quality of our user stories, what was very impressive was how you kept calm, you took a moment to breathe, you said, I agree, there are some challenges there, and , uh, you agreed that it could be better. However, you then said, you're not quite exactly sure what it is that they would need. If they would be prepared to go through a couple of examples with you and share their detailed thoughts on where they'd need extra input, this instantly calmed them down, right ? It's , it's your calm way of reacting it , reacting to them. That really calmed them down. They started explaining in detail. Both teams got much more relaxed and then you are able to share your well-prepared solutions, integrating their inputs. And that is what's led to a great result in this meeting. So now the problem is solved. It's gonna save us four, five hours per month in the future. That team's happy. You are happy. I promise you, the rest of your colleagues in the team are gonna be happy about these meetings being shorter and easier with your new ways of working. You've really helped the team today. Now , as you can imagine, Jack was very happy about that and going into the next meetings with this team, he kept up that level of preparation. He kept up that self-confidence to relax, take a step back, don't react to their negative comments, but work positively with them and continuously got better results. Now, that's an example of action impact feedback. Another benefit of action impact feedback is that you can share this in front of a team as well. So I didn't do this in this case, Jack got to talk about it, but I could have stood up in front of the team and said, Hey, because Jack did these five actions that's now got us this result as a team, that would make Jack feel great. And it would also make it possible for everyone else in the team to copy those actions to also get great results and also get appreciation and good feedback. So what can we avoid in praise? Well, the other type of praise, basically just saying, you are great at something. You're so talented, you're so gifted, you're special , uh, the team can be so happy to have you here. That kind of praise typically backfires. Yes, of course, initially for the employee. It feels good. It feels good to be able to say things like that to people and has a first initial positive result . It has also two negative impacts that can happen. The first one is the overinflated ego. Yeah . So if people get told that their talented gifted special grades excellence , uh, they tend to believe that eventually, which leads to them feeling that they're superior to others , um, which can lead to them treating team members poorly. Um, and also can lead to overinflated salary expectations that can be challenging to manage and, and bring back to, to a flaw level. The other potential negative impact of uh , let's say character oriented or genius oriented praise is that people don't know what to continue doing. It's not that clear. So you can see changes in the behavior, which are not the ones that you would actually really like. Um, plus, you know, how much effort does someone really need to put in if they're already a genius? So that can also lead to the performance going down , which brings us straight back to action. Impact oriented praise. Strong praise shows employees that it's the actions they're taking that are delivering real world valuable results for different parties. And it's, it's their actions that are making that link. It makes them feel strong, confident, and it makes them want to continue those actions. Plus, if we do praise in this way, it has an additional benefit towards just saying, good job, great job. Well done. 'cause good job, great job well done. Takes two seconds to say, if I'm gonna describe the actions and the impact, I can quickly be spending 90 seconds, two minutes, five minutes. And taking this time to talk about things people are doing well is a big and strong form of recognition and appreciation from your side as well. So it has an additional impact . Now, one last thing. We're in a hybrid world and that means that , uh, we see less and less of what our employees do. So maybe you see a great result an employee has a has achieved, however, as they were in their home office, you didn't see how they did that. So it's a bit difficult to do that action, impact oriented praise. However, it's actually quite easy. We just use questions. What you can always do is describe the impact. Tell the employee about what the impact you've seen and that that's very impressive. And then say, you know, I'd love to find out how you did that. What did you do? And take time to ask questions, to listen carefully. Summarize what they're saying, confirm what you think is good about what they're saying. Um, and just keep asking deeper questions until you really understand, you know, questions like, how did you proceed? What kind of challenges were there ? How did you overcome them? Um , what did you learn? What are you proud of ? And let them talk . And you can easily fill 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 minutes of showing your true appreciation to your employee. And this kind of appreciation is very honest, very trustworthy, never sounds over the top because it's realistic and based on what's happened and can really strengthen your relationship to the employee. Motivate them to do extra efforts , motivate them to stay longer in the team, be more loyal, be easier to lead, and potentially be a , a good role model for their colleagues too . That brings us to the end of this , uh, gain the lead podcast on praise. I hope you enjoy praising, enjoy being praised. Happy leading, and I'll see you in the next one .