You may have heard before that a key to building your employees self esteem is to praise and praise often. This sounds like great advice, but there is a right and a wrong way to offer compliments.

Strangely enough praise can be a double-edged sword. It feels great in the moment when we hear applause or we are told that we’ve done a wonderful job on something, but this is not long-lived.

Consider this scenario, a child grows up hearing how beautiful she is.  What are the long term implications of this? She may begin to tie up all of her self-worth in being beautiful. She may get upset when she is not told she looks beautiful and this is not simply her being “high maintenance.” She may have no sense of personal self-worth and have to look to external sources for almost constant validation. Imagine how it might go if this person received criticism. It could be devastating.

I recommend skipping the praise and instead offering positive feedback.  

And I like the idea of feedback because here you are focused on behaviors and skills of the person, not a specific achievement or attribute.

Let’s say you have an employee that has just completed a year-long intensive project that had lots of ups and downs and they managed to get it done on-time without having to overly involve you in the process. You are delighted with the outcome.

When discussing the project with the employee, instead of offering praise (“Great job on the project”), focus on some behavior or skill that was important in completing the project and offer feedback (“You are really good at adapting to any changes that come your way.”)

This can be a tricky distinction at first, but can you begin to see how the second comment builds self esteem and the first is really just a temporary accolade. Plus, being adaptive to change is an important skill and you’ve just communicated this to your employee and that you think this behavior was important in their success.

What kind of behavior do you think they’ll be focused on in the future? Done right, positive feedback is good for your employees and your business.

You may recall when you were a kid or when playing with your kids the activity of connect the dots.  The fun of this game is that as you connect the dots, assuming you do it correctly, the dots come together to reveal a bigger picture.

The same thing goes for communication.  In fact, if you want people to really “get” what it is you’re communicating, you have to connect the dots.

People only understand ideas in relation to ideas they already have.  All memory and knowledge is built this way.

When we were young, we were shown a dog and told, “This is dog.”  Now the image and the word were linked.  Everything we learn going forward is acquired the same way, by connecting what we already know with something else.

What Does Your Audience Already Know?

So when we’re trying to get our message across, we need to evaluate what does my audience already know.

What are they familiar with?

What is it that I want them to know and how can I bridge the two.

We can do this factually step by step or we can use metaphor.  The metaphor, of course, should be one that your audience is familiar with and can relate to.  Most likely, your metaphor will act as the first dot.

Then even if your final dot doesn’t fully connect with your audience, they can fill in the space between because they understand the metaphor.

This is true whether you’re talking to one person or a hundred.  With one person, it is easier to see when they’re missing dots, they usually will scrunch their eye brows or get a glazed look.  Or maybe you haven’t seen that one before?  If you have, you know what I’m talking about.

On a larger scale with groups, you can check in with larger groups of behavior such as people moving or shifting in their chairs.  Also, the questions they ask will also give you feedback about how well they were able to connect the dots.

Pay attention to the feedback you get.  It is valuable in understand how well your message came across as well as understanding the mindset of those in the audience.  Whenever there is missed communication, simply go back and give them more dots.

The best form of customer service is getting it right the first time. But as we know, that doesn’t always happen. In doing training and consulting, I get to fly all over the world. And as unbelievable as it may be, when it comes to commercial travel, sometimes things don’t go as planned. Shocking…I know.

But on this particular occasion, I had to call Delta customer service to get an itinerary issue resolved. I called after hours and worked with a representative for about an hour.

At the end of that time, she informs me that she can’t solve the problem because it is after hours and that I need to call back during normal business hours. This, of course, would have been helpful to know an hour previously. I call the next day and the problem is resolved. Semi-happy customer.

Later that week, to my surprise, I receive a letter from the representative I spoke with first apologizing that she wasn’t able to resolve the issue and that she added a few thousand Skymiles to my account for my trouble. She certainly didn’t have to do that, but it was a nice touch. Was it enough to overcome the fact that my next Delta flight was cancelled, probably not, but at least it is a check mark on the positive side.

While interactions with customers may not always be perfect, it is important to have strategies in place for damage control. Considering the lifetime value of a customer, it is unbelievable to think that more companies don’t have customer recovery tactics in place.

In this case, Delta made a gesture of good faith with virtually zero cost. What about your business? What can you do that would be cost-effective if one of your customers has a less-than-desirable experience?

Certainly success is a good thing. But that’s not to say that it doesn’t have negative consequences. (Is that a triple negative?) Anyways. In the real world, success is not always clear cut.

Could we have been more successful?

How might our current success impact future success?

What tradeoffs did we make?

In the academic world, success can easily be evaluated based on grades. I sometimes teach university classes and when I do I am always fascinated by how students evaluate their success and respond to feedback about their performance.

As you can imagine, when someone gets a 100% on an assignment, I don’t hear from them very much. Of course, you would expect to see that the lower the grade the person got, the more likely they are to complain. But what is interesting to me is that I receive more “inquiries” about grades from students who make A’s (but don’t get 100%) than any other grade level.

You would think that if you got a “C” that you would be upset and try to fight for a “B”. But what I think happens is that the students who get A’s want perfection.

They hunger for it.

They strive for it.

They demand it.

The B and C students are perfectly content. They know what they need to do to pass and they do it so they’re not surprised. But the near-perfect students want perfection and so it burns them up.

Of course, when they ask for clarification it is under the guise of “doing better next time” but anyone can see it is because they want you to prove to them why they didn’t get 100%.

While such requests can be tiresome, I have to admire their commitment to their goal.  I would probably do the same in their shoes.

But remember what happens when they actually get 100%.

They get satisfied.

They feel a sense of accomplishment.

They’re happy.

Which is what we all think we want. But, even though the 100% students receive feedback in their papers as well, they aren’t hungry to improve their performance and so they rest of what they did yesterday. They don’t take action. They don’t try anything new. And they don’t learn. That’s what sucks about success. People become complacent.

It is critical in life and in business to never stop growing. If you’re getting the results you want, make sure that you don’t stop learning, growing, and expanding. Think back to a time when you didn’t have that success…remember the drive and passion you had to make it happen and bring it back. That’s what it takes to get to the next level.