Management through Compliments
Inducing behavior by praising it
“I love how freaking fast you work.”
I remember receiving that Slack message from Avery, one of the best leaders I’ve worked for. She was the COO of the startup, and I’d begun doing projects with her a few weeks before. We would meet with a client who wanted to buy data, try to understand what they were interested in, and then I would go back and prepare an analysis that we could share with the client as a proof of concept.
I had not thought of myself as a particularly fast worker to that point. But getting that unexpected compliment from her certainly changed the way I thought about my work. It made me take pride in doing things quickly and added energy to my work process. I have no doubt it made me do better work, faster.
I think it’s clear that giving thoughtful compliments to people you work with is beneficial. It makes them feel appreciated and like their work has value. But what I didn’t realize is that you can compliment behaviors that you want to see more of, as a way to encourage people to embody that behavior. By complimenting something, you make it part of their identity and something that they want to protect.
Let’s assume that I was not in fact a particularly fast worker, and that Avery really appreciated it when I did do things quickly and wanted me to be faster. I think a natural action would have been for her to ask me to increase my speed of execution:
Joe, just some quick feedback — I’ve noticed that you sometimes take a little while in turning around requests from clients. It’d be super helpful if you could do these as quickly as possible so that we can accelerate our sales pipeline. Thank you!
This would have left me feeling defensive and maybe a little resentful. I probably would have started working faster, but it would have left me with less energy and less creativity to put into the work.
By instead complimenting a behavior that she wanted to see more of, Avery gave me a brand new source of pride in my work that I wanted to live up to.
There are a few caveats to this approach. I don’t think this is appropriate for someone who is actually underperforming; you need to give direct feedback in that case. And I suppose there is a risk that I would have taken her compliment as reason to relax and slow down, because I was working fast enough. But I think that if you are a respected leader like she was, and you have a reasonably motivated employee like I was, this risk is quite small. I think “management through compliments” can be very effective in these situations and encourage people to consistently display new strengths.
"And I suppose there is a risk that I would have taken her compliment as reason to relax and slow down, because I was working fast enough."
Admittedly, I could see my own negativity bias potentially holding me back from giving this compliment due to this exact concern. But, like you said, the risk is likely quite minimal, especially with good employees. Furthermore, you could arguably measure the passion & commitment of an employee by seeing how they respond to a compliment like this (e.g. in the rarer case that someone does "slow down", that might tell you something about that person).
TL;DR management compliments always make sense .. ? **unless you have a clearly under-performing employee
Since there are usually many more ways to do something wrong than to do something right, we learn more by trial and success than by trial and error. A criticism, often necessary, points out one of many possible errors. A compliment recognizes and reinforces a success.