The last thing you praised out loud told your team more about what matters here than any objective you have written.
I praised somebody for working through a weekend once, and did not think about it again for about a year.
It was meant kindly and it was deserved. They had pulled something difficult out of a bad spot, and I said so in front of everybody, because that felt like the right thing to do.
What I thought I was doing was recognising effort.
What the room heard was what gets noticed here.
Several people adjusted. Not dramatically, and not because anybody told them to. They simply had new information about what is valued, and they used it, in the way anybody would.
I had not praised the outcome. I had praised the cost of the outcome. And the whole team wrote it down.
Praise is the clearest instruction a leader ever gives, and almost nobody treats it that way. We agonise over feedback. We plan difficult conversations, sometimes for days. Then we hand out the most directive thing we own in about two seconds, between other items, because it feels light.
It is not light. It is the cleanest signal available, because it arrives with no ambiguity attached. Criticism gets softened, hedged, delivered privately and interpreted twelve different ways. Praise arrives in public, in plain language, and everybody believes it.
Which makes it worth knowing what yours has been asking for.
It is a simple enough thing to check. Think of the last three things you praised out loud in front of other people. Not what you meant by each one. What each one would have taught somebody listening who did not know you well.
When I did this honestly the first time, the answers were responsiveness, thoroughness and availability. All perfectly good things. None of them the things I would have named if you had asked me what I most wanted from that team.
There was nothing wrong with any of them. They were simply the ones getting reinforced, and something else was quietly not.
I do not think this means praising less, or praising strategically, which people can smell from a considerable distance.
It means noticing that the small generous thing you say on the way past somebody’s desk is doing more work than the development plan you spent an afternoon on.
What was the last thing you praised, and what was it really asking for?