What Is Your Praise Teaching Your Team?

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Welcome back - it's nice to have you here!

Before we dive in...

I can still picture a conference room from my early agency days.

We were trying to solve a client problem. One issue. One meeting. A room full of people doing their best to get it right.

Then another email came in. And another. And another. Within roughly 30 or 45 minutes, we'd received something like six to ten additional requests from the same client or client team.

You could feel the meeting changing. Instead of concentrating on the problem we'd gathered to solve, people were reacting to each new arrival. Someone would spot another message, and suddenly the conversation would shift.

The assumption was that every request needed a complete response, immediately. After all, we wanted to be good partners.

But someone in that room saw it differently. And I've carried that lesson with me for years.

A throwback to my Digitas days. Some of my most useful leadership lessons came from rooms like this.

🎯 THE MOMENT

I wish I remembered that leader's name.

But what I do remember clearly is the perspective. They weren't dismissing the client requests or suggesting we ignore them. They appreciated that everyone wanted to be responsive.

But they offered a much simpler approach. Acknowledge the request. Let the client know it had been received. Set a realistic expectation for when we'd respond fully.

Something as simple as: Confirmed received. We'll review this and follow up within 24 hours.

Or 48 hours, if that's what the work actually required.

That was it. No elaborate explanation. No frantic attempt to solve six new problems while we were still working through the first.

And there was a reason behind the advice. We'd already seen what could happen when speed got ahead of accuracy. In an earlier situation, a rapid response had contributed to incorrect information making its way into client work, creating additional effort to correct it.

The exact details of that incident have faded for me. The lesson hasn't.

Being responsive and being reactive are not the same thing.

Sometimes the most responsible thing you can do is slow the response just enough to get it right.

But here's the part I've been thinking about lately. If everyone in that room had been praised for immediately answering every request, what behavior would we have learned to repeat? And what would that eventually cost?

⚡ QUICK SPIN

A warning sign doesn't stop being a warning sign just because someone praises you for it.

We tend to actually reward behaviors without fully understanding what's producing them. The late-night response looks like commitment. The constant rescue looks like leadership. The packed calendar looks like momentum.

Sometimes those interpretations are accurate. Other times, we're applauding the very behavior that tells us something underneath needs attention.

And every time we reinforce it, we're teaching people what the system values.

🛠️ MY TURN

I've become much more interested in that distinction as my career has evolved.

I still work hard. Five years into building my business, there are nights when I need to put in extra time. That's part of the reality of building something.

But I no longer automatically admire the appearance of constant effort. I'm more curious about what's being accomplished, what it's costing, and whether the same approach will still work six months from now.

The other night, I was completely cooked. I finished dinner, brought my laptop to the couch, and thought I might get a little more work done.

I barely opened it.

The work hadn't disappeared. But I could tell that whatever I might produce in that moment probably wasn't going to be my best work.

There was a time when I might have treated that as a reason to push harder. Now I'm more willing to recognize it as information.

That doesn't mean I always get the balance right. It means I've learned that having another hour available doesn't necessarily mean having another hour of useful capacity.

And that distinction becomes even more important when other people are taking their cues from us.

If I'm leading a team, my behavior doesn't just affect my own calendar. It helps establish what's expected of everyone else's.

📚 THE BACKUP

There's a concept here from organizational research that gives this tension an interesting twist.

In Managing the Unexpected, organizational scholars Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe examine how high-reliability organizations maintain performance in environments where mistakes can carry serious consequences.

One of the principles they describe is preoccupation with failure.

The phrase sounds pessimistic. It isn't. The idea is that organizations become more reliable when they remain attentive to small problems, anomalies, and near misses instead of waiting for a major failure to prove something is wrong. In other words, an early warning is useful information. It's not necessarily evidence that someone failed.

Now consider how differently that can play out in an ordinary workplace.

A team member flags a process that keeps causing confusion. Another points out that a deadline is unrealistic. Someone admits that the work is taking longer than expected.

Those moments might not look as impressive as the person who swoops in later and saves the project. But which behavior makes the organization stronger?

The early warning? Or the heroic recovery?

Ideally, we value both when they're warranted.

But if we consistently recognize the rescue while overlooking the person who identified the problem early, we may be teaching people to wait until their concerns become emergencies.

And there's another layer here. Leaders don't always know what a visible behavior means.

Someone answering emails at 10 p.m. might be energized by the work and choosing to do it on their own schedule. Someone else might be compensating for an unclear process. A third person might believe they have to be constantly available to be seen as valuable.

Same behavior. Three very different conditions.

That's why the answer isn't simply to praise less or tell everyone to work fewer hours. It's to get more curious about what we're actually seeing.

And in an era when AI and other technologies make it easier to produce more work, faster, this matters even more. A tool can increase output without improving the system producing it.

If the process underneath is poorly designed, adding more speed may simply make the problems harder to spot.

More activity isn't automatically more progress. And more responsiveness isn't automatically better service.

🛠️ THE SYSTEM

So what can we do differently?

I think it begins by changing the moment between noticing a behavior and reinforcing it.

That moment is easy to skip. Someone goes above and beyond. We say, Great job. And sometimes that's exactly the right response. But if the same extraordinary effort keeps showing up, we owe the person and the organization a little more curiosity.

Imagine someone on your team has worked late several nights in a row. You could thank them for their dedication and move on.

Or you could say: “I've noticed you've been carrying a lot this week. Is this a temporary push that feels worthwhile, or is something about how we're working making it harder than it needs to be?”

That's not asking someone to bring their entire personal life into the office. It's not demanding that they explain their emotional state. It's showing enough interest in the person and the work to understand what's happening beneath the surface. And the next step is critical.

Don't make the conversation the solution.

If you discover that an unclear handoff is causing repeated late nights, improve the handoff.

If every client request is treated as an emergency, establish response expectations. If someone is reluctant to ask for help, examine whether the team's behavior makes asking feel safe and worthwhile. If a deadline genuinely requires an extraordinary push, recognize the effort while also making a plan for what happens afterward.

The goal isn't to remove ambition or urgency from work. It's to stop confusing preventable strain with high performance.

Try this in your next one-on-one...

Instead of starting and ending with “How's everything going?”, ask about the work behind the work. “What's taking more effort than it should right now?” Then listen for something you can actually change.

A good question creates an opening. A good leadership response changes a condition.

💡 THE SHIFT

We often think leadership culture is built through big things. Mission statements. Values. Strategy. Town halls. Performance reviews.

And those things matter. But culture is also being built in much smaller moments.

When you thank someone for answering at midnight. When you celebrate the person who rescued a project. When you overlook the colleague who prevented a problem before anyone else noticed it. When someone tells you they're struggling with a process, and you respond by praising their perseverance rather than fixing the process.

Those moments are instructions. They tell people what earns attention, what gets rewarded, and what they may need to keep doing to succeed.

The culture you're building isn't only reflected in what you say you value. It's reflected in what people learn they have to do to be valued.

That doesn't mean every leader needs to become a detective. It means we have to be careful about treating visible effort as the whole story.

Sometimes the person who needs recognition is the one who stayed late. Sometimes it's the one who raised the concern early. Sometimes it's the one who created a process that meant nobody had to stay late at all.

The leadership skill is knowing the difference.

🧭 THE REWARD-COST-CAPACITY FILTER

Here's a practical way to examine what you're reinforcing.

1. REWARD: What am I recognizing?

Is it a meaningful result, a thoughtful decision, extraordinary effort, instant availability, or a last-minute rescue?

Name the behavior, not just the person.

2. COST: What might be happening underneath?

What did the behavior require?

What might it be concealing?

Is this a temporary circumstance or a recurring workaround?

Don't assume you know. Ask.

3. CAPACITY: What happens if this becomes normal?

If everyone repeated this behavior for the next six months, would the team become more capable?

Or more dependent on urgency, workarounds, and individual sacrifice?

4. RESPONSE: What will I reinforce differently?

Maybe you still celebrate the extraordinary effort.

But perhaps you also recognize the person who flagged the problem early.

The colleague who improved a handoff.

The manager who developed someone else's judgment.

Or the team that delivered excellent work without manufacturing an emergency to get there.

Try this before Friday

Think about one behavior you've praised recently.

Run it through those four questions.

Then change one thing about how you recognize, support, or respond to it.

You don't need a new performance-management system to begin.

You need one more thoughtful moment before reinforcing the old one.

🤗 YOUR TURN

Think about the people who look most dependable in your organization.

What are you rewarding them for that you haven't yet taken the time to understand?

That question might lead to more appreciation. It might lead to a better process. Or it might reveal that the person you've been thanking for holding everything together has been quietly showing you where the system needs work.

👊 LET'S TALK

This is a big part of how I think about Transition Leadership. The operating system that helped a leader or business succeed at one stage isn't automatically the one that will support the next.

And often, the first clue isn't a dramatic failure. It's a repeated behavior that everyone has gotten used to.

In my coaching, I don't start with a prescription for how someone should lead. I want to understand the person, the environment, the expectations, and the pressures shaping their decisions.

That's also what I want leaders to practice with their own teams.

Not simply asking more questions. Understanding people well enough to recognize when the work needs to change, when the system needs to change, and when the most helpful thing a leader can do is stop reinforcing an expectation that no longer serves anyone.

That's where EnergyOS and Transition Leadership come together for me.

Better performance isn't only about what we ask people to do. It's also about the conditions we create for them to do it.

👉 adamwbarney.com

Cheers, Adam

P.S. I still think about that conference room. We were so focused on proving we could respond to every request that we risked losing the space to do the work we'd actually gathered to do. Sometimes a two-word acknowledgment and a realistic deadline are better leadership than a beautifully worded answer sent too quickly.

🔌 STAY PLUGGED IN

This week's Is Anything Real? conversation with Ande Lyons explores a different kind of organizational assumption.

Ande is the host of Don't Be Caged By Your Age and founder of the New England Podcasters Group. In Episode 85, “Age Is Not a Cage: Positive Aging, Reinvention, and Purpose After 65,” we talk about ageism, reinvention, purpose, and why experience can become invisible when our culture treats youth as the default signal of relevance.

One of the ideas Ande raises is that organizations can overlook the institutional knowledge and judgment of older professionals precisely when those capabilities could be most valuable. That connects to this week's issue in a way I find fascinating.

What a system notices isn't always the same as what the system needs.

In one case, we may overvalue visible urgency and heroic effort. In another, we may undervalue experience, perspective, and the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes one. Both invite us to question the assumptions behind our judgments.

Ande also talks about managing an energy portfolio as priorities and capabilities change with age. That's a particularly interesting connection to EnergyOS: sustainable contribution isn't about pretending our circumstances never change. It's about using our resources with more intention.

🎙️ Age Is Not a Cage: Positive Aging, Reinvention, and Purpose After 65 | Ep. 85 with Ande Lyons