Success: point it out, make some more

When I’m talking to new managers I’m often asked about dealing with people and “how to get them to perform.” Finding a role where everyone can contribute and perform at their best can be hard and is a problem that’s nearly universal, so I understand the question. I talk about it quite a bit in my own book, and nearly every other management and leadership author does the same thing.

Success

One thing that we don’t talk about as often, though, is recognizing and rewarding success. If you just pay attention to people when their performance isn’t up to snuff, you miss a key opportunity to develop their leadership skills and confidence. Look for, and reward, meaningful successes every time you find them, and you’ll be building the confidence your team needs to become even more creative than they already are.

You can do this “from the trenches”

Fair enough, standard management stuff. But we’re leading from the trenches here, and we don’t have to stop with the standard stuff.

The fact is that, as I’ve pointed out many times before, we’re all leaders in some facet of our lives right now. Someone in your life is making decisions based upon the example you set. We don’t have to wait until we are formally managing a team before we start leading others to grow their own confidence and skills by recognizing and rewarding their success.

Point out good work when you see it

You know good work when you see it, right? Point it out. Mention in a team meeting that Sara did a great job reconfiguring the server last night to get payroll out. At the end of a release death march take your buddy from the next cubicle over who worked twice as long as everyone else to make it happen out to lunch. Or just pat someone on the back when you notice they’ve done a good job.

You’re doing several things at once when you take the leadership position of recognizing success in others. First, you’re learning what works and what doesn’t in a no-penalty environment. If a peer doesn’t respond well to your praise it doesn’t really matter (since it wasn’t expected to begin with), and this is a great chance to learn the lesson about human behavior that one type of reward does not fit all people. Odd though it may be.

Second, you’re proving by example that your team is a team. You aren’t jealous of someone else’s success, and neither should the rest of the team be jealous of the success of others.

Third, once you start paying attention to what other people do to become successful, you’ll have behavior to model for yourself.

Finally, you lead your team into a virtuous cycle. Once you recognize success in others they’ll feel good about themselves and you, and want to pay you the favor back by recognizing your own successes or helping you to achieve success if you’re struggling. Then you feel good about yourself, and so on. Feeling good is, well, good. But all of this success hunting will actually improve the performance of the whole team.

And you will have led the charge that helped everyone work more effectively.

This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.