The Power of Professional Praise (aka Public Affirmation)
Are you a natural at how to praise someone at work?
“Professional praise”, as some call it, plays an integral role in forming interpersonal relationships in the workplace. Whether you’re a leader of a small team or a large multinational corporation – as long as you have a leadership capacity – knowing how to praise someone at work is a fundamental part of your leadership development. And if it hasn’t been a priority for you, now is the time to start paying attention and picking up the skills of knowing how to praise someone at work.
In this article, my experience as a leadership coach comes to the forefront as I share about the power of praising your team at work in boosting motivation and lay down the ground rules of exactly how to build a culture where public affirmation is the norm.
It sounds simple enough. Yet, I believe many would agree with me that finding a leader who champions a culture of meaningful recognition is rare. A common “retort” I’ve noticed in my leadership coaching sessions is this: “Why is there a need to praise people at work? Aren’t they just doing their job?”
Let’s break down the real impact that happens when you practice “professional praise”:
It impacts employee engagement and motivation.
Praise is often directly linked to whether your employees feel that their efforts are appreciated. When they realise that their leaders are intentionally acknowledging their efforts, it naturally boosts their morale. Employees who feel recognised are more likely to demonstrate higher levels of engagement and motivation.
It impacts productivity and performance.
If your team is disengaged and unmotivated, you can be almost certain that they are delivering the bare minimum at work. Their mentality is: I want to get this task over and done with.
But when your team is engaged and motivated because of the recognition that they feel, they will feel a sense of loyalty and ownership to deliver to their best ability. This changes their mentality to: I want to deliver excellence in my work.
Naturally, this raises productivity and performance levels.
It impacts your turnover and talent retention.
Any Singaporean would know how our founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, engineered what others call an “economic miracle” in an island without natural resources. The resource he tapped upon instead was our human resource (aka human capital).
Your employees – or your human resource – are significant assets that fuel the engine of your team and organisation. When you intentionally communicate to you employees that their contributions are valued, it doesn’t just boost their ego. What it does is that it creates in them a sense of fulfillment.
When your people feel valued and fulfilled where they are, they will not want to leave. This not only helps you in reducing turnover, it also helps you to retain talents who will continue to contribute to the team’s success.
It impacts your culture and values.
If you as a leader incorporate praising your employees into your day-to-day culture, the rest of your team will start to notice it and pick it up themselves. Before you know it, this builds a culture of praise and affirmation. This breeds a culture of collaboration and unity instead of a culture of competition and individualism.
When you praise your people consistently, you are showing them that their efforts and successes should be celebrated collectively. More importantly, it creates the mentality that they are all in it together.
If one succeeds, everyone succeeds together. If one fails, everyone shoulders the responsibility together.
HOW TO PRAISE SOMEONE AT WORK 101
Being an executive coach in Singapore, I am constantly reminded of how our “Asian culture” is not a culture that is used to giving praise or even receiving praise for that matter. So here are the principles I always share as part of my executive coaching sessions:
Praise your people publicly
As a leadership coach, I adopt this with my team as well. The idea is always to praise in public and correct in private. Be it during physical meetings, Zoom meetings, or even in the company chat group, make it a point to publicly acknowledge that you notice their contributions.
Gather the whole team and let them see the value of celebrating each other’s successes – both the little wins and the big ones.
Go into the specifics
It’s all in the details. In my executive coaching sessions, one thing I primarily get the leaders I coach to adopt is to be as specific as possible when they praise their people at work.
Saying a one-liner like, “well done” shows little effort on your part.
But crafting an actual acknowledgement – what part of the presentation stood out to you, what idea they came up with during the meeting, how they handled a difficult situation – takes effort and shows them how much you care.
Be consistent until praise becomes natural
Whatever you do, don’t make it seem forced. Your employees will be the first to pick up on your body language. They will know if you are not sincere or if you are just going through the motions.
The only way to make it natural is to do it so consistently that it becomes second nature to you. In fact, you might find yourself praising your people at work subconsciously!
Respect the effort not the outcome
Focus on the process and the effort it took to get there instead of focusing on the end result. Be aware of your unsung heroes. More often than not, we tend to give attention to the most outspoken individual and neglect the efforts of the quieter individuals.
When you train yourself to be aware of the effort, it shows that you are not solely goal-oriented but that you are people-oriented, and you value their development as much as (or perhaps even more than) what they accomplished.
Make “Professional Praise” the Norm
Everyone wants to work in an environment where their efforts are recognised and they feel valued. Such an environment is created when leaders pick up the baton and begin to praise people at work.
Now that you know how pivotal praise is, the time to start practicing it is now, especially if you are a leader reading this.
It will take work, especially if you are new to it. But if there’s anything that I can assure you from my years of journeying with other leaders as an executive coach: it’s worth it.
