How important is it to compliment employees who have done great work? I recently surveyed a company where the biggest statistical driver of whether employees would be inspired to give their best effort at work was whether those employees felt like their boss ‘recognized their accomplishments with praise.’ Simply put, if employees felt like their boss praised them for doing great work, those employees were inspired to give their best effort. But if they felt like their boss did not praise their great work, those employees were not going to give their best effort.
Given that this was such an important issue for the employees at this company, we would expect that all the managers would make an extra effort to recognize and praise their employees’ great work, right? Well, sadly no. It turns out that only 38% of employees said that their boss ‘always’ or ‘frequently’ recognized their accomplishments.
This is one of the biggest reasons why my research has found that only 29% of employees say they ‘Always’ know whether their performance is where it should be, while 36% of people say they ‘Never’ or ‘Rarely’ know. How are employees supposed to know whether they’re performing their jobs well when so few managers are recognizing their great work?
There is a psychological phenomenon that helps explain why many managers don’t recognize, let alone praise, employees’ great work. It’s called reason-based choice (from the research paper “Reason-based choice” by Eldar Shafir, Itamar Simonson, and Amos Tversky) and it works like this:
Using an experiment from the paper, imagine that you’re a juror in a child custody case following a messy divorce and you have to award/deny sole custody to one of the parents. You decide to base your decision entirely on the following few observations:
- Parent A has:
average income
average health
average working hours
reasonable rapport with child
relatively stable social life - Parent B has:
above average income
very close relationship with the child
extremely active social life
lots of work-related travel
minor health problems
Now, imagine that you’re asked “To which parent would you award sole custody of the child?” In the actual experiment, 64% of the subjects saw Parent B as the better choice. Why? Probably because Parent B has ‘above average income’ and a ‘very close relationship with the child.’
But now imagine that you’re asked “Which parent would you deny sole custody of the child?” Shockingly, 55% still chose Parent B! Why? Well, notwithstanding their positive attributes, Parent B also has an ‘extremely active social life,’ ‘lots of work-related travel, and ‘minor health problems.’
One of the big lessons from this is that if you’re looking for reasons to award custody, you’re likely to focus on Parent B’s positive attributes. And if you’re looking for reasons to deny custody, you’re likely to focus on Parent B’s negative attributes. The phrasing of the choice biases us towards focusing on, and using, some information more than others. Or put even more simply, if we’re looking for reasons to choose or award somebody, we’re going to focus on positive things. And if we’re looking for reasons to deny or censure somebody, we’re going to focus on negative things.
So, what does reason-based choice have to do with giving compliments to our employees? First we have to think about the mindset that many leaders bring to the workplace. Are they wandering around the office looking for reasons why people are doing great work and things are going right? Or are they wandering around looking for mistakes and reasons why things are going wrong?
The average leader spends more time looking for reasons why things are not working (the negative issues) than they are looking for all the reasons why things are going well. So, much like the juror in the study, if leaders are looking for reasons to ‘deny,’ they’ll likely miss all the positive (‘award’) things that are happening.
As an example, think about the last project status meeting you attended. If it was like the typical meeting, there was a lot of time spent discussing how things are falling behind (or are at risk of doing so), the risk points, scenarios for mitigating time and money overruns, and all sorts of negative topics. And there probably wasn’t a whole lot of time spent going around the room looking for all the wonderful things that have been happening.
What reason-based choice tells us is that if we spend our time at work looking for problems (e.g. reasons to deny custody), we’re going to find lots and lots of problems. And if we spend our time looking for positive things (e.g. reasons to award custody), we’re going to find many more examples of people doing great work.
Every leader has a choice as they go through their days; are they looking for reasons to ‘deny’ or to ‘award’? If leaders adopt the common ‘deny’ approach, they’ll keep finding all sorts of reasons why things aren’t working. But if they make the conscious choice to look for reasons to ‘award,’ they’ll be way more likely to recognize (and compliment) all the great work that their employees are performing. And that is likely to result in a significantly more engaged and inspired workforce.
Mark Murphy is a New York Times bestselling author and teaches the leadership course "What Great Managers Do Differently."
