Praise Less. Give Something More Valuable.
Looking down, Kentaro quietly said, “Amazing, that's great to hear.” He was visibly impressed.
Akiko smiled. It was nice to be acknowledged by the head of the department.
I winced. This was exactly what I had hoped would not happen – praise. Kentaro had praised Akiko for revealing a weakness she wanted to overcome, and that was the last thing we needed right now.
I sat quietly, just observing. I never praised people in a situation like this. To me, there was something much more valuable I could offer instead of praise.
Maybe Praise is the Answer?
Recently, I had an informal meeting with an HR team about their new initiative: developing a praise culture (褒め活). They were still working on the idea, and were curious what thoughts or advice I had to share.
Japan is not exactly known as a culture where praise is heaped on people. Seeing as most companies around the world take employee motivation seriously, important questions have seeped into the culture over the last decade or so: Do we criticize each other too much? Should we praise each other more? Is lack of motivation due to too much criticism and not enough praise?
My Japanese wife thinks a praise culture initiative is a wonderful idea. She often holds back praise, even when she notices something that impresses her. Wouldn’t it be transformative to let those thoughts out more often?
The HR team’s conclusion was reasonable, too: we need to change the company mindset around praise. Let’s do a “praise culture” initiative.
More praise = more positive team atmosphere = increased motivation = better work performance.
That’s an odd way to write a goal, but we have to keep something in mind: that’s the linear logic needed to obtain approval in most companies. The expectation of improving work performance acts as a powerful magnet. Few initiatives can receive approval if they don’t build a logical chain ending with improved work performance.
After listening to the HR team’s plan, I shared some thoughts and made a few suggestions. They listened attentively, asked questions, and showed a lot of interest. They were quite a lovely group of people to talk with, to be honest. I liked their enthusiasm and curiosity.
I was also fairly certain the “praise culture” initiative would follow the same path as nearly all initiatives – a brief spike of enthusiasm, hidden resistance, and gradually waning compliance with a few passionate hold-outs.
Messy Humans
“God, please shut up. Stop praising me!”
I didn’t say this out loud, but I was trying to think it into existence.
My boss was praising a proposal I had just shown him. He praised the proposal, the way I approach problems, and my performance. I felt obliged to thank him. Then he went back to puzzling something out on his laptop.
Complicating matters, his praise was genuine. I knew that, too. But I just didn’t want it. What I wanted was more of his time, attention, and a proper discussion.
I had come to realize over nearly 2 decades of work that praise often comes at the end of a chapter, not the beginning. Praise often closes the book, becoming a subtle cue for everyone to move on. Worse, it can bring another distracting social obligation – I need to shift my attention away from the discussion I was longing to have and make sure I properly thank the person who gave the praise I didn’t even want.
But there’s another layer below this. The projects I worked on were intrinsically motivating for me. I was absorbed in trying to understand the customer’s mind. That was all I cared about, and all I wanted to talk about, too. So praise threatened something deep within my soul: my motivation. If I let myself become motivated to receive praise from my boss, would I lose sight of the customer? That question bothered me.
But I’m a hypocrite. There have been many times in my career when the lack of praise pissed me off, or left me doubting myself and my work. So what gives?
I think the problem is our understanding of humans, actually. And that misunderstanding cascades into every initiative we try, crippling our potential for success before we have written the first line of our proposal.
Individuals don’t universally respond the same way to anything. It’s like plants and water. We know every plant needs water to thrive. But do you know what the most common cause of bonsai death is? Overwatering … or underwatering. It depends on the plant, and if you don’t understand the plant, you’ll kill it.
Humans add one more degree of complexity. We are not confined to acting like a bonsai or a cactus in perpetuity. In some contexts we become a bonsai hungry for water, and in other situations we morph into a cactus needing only a few drops here and there!
I am usually a cactus … until I become that hungry bonsai. And good luck predicting when that shift will occur, because even I cannot tell you that.
This is the nature of humans.
Rabbit Holes That Matter
It’s possible to overthink things and end up paralyzing everyone with nuance and minuscule details. We call that a rabbit hole. In business, rabbit holes are risky time eaters. But with most concepts used in company initiatives, going down the rabbit holes first can completely transform how you see the initiative.
Let’s dive into praise. There’s probably a lot more to this concept than most people realize at first.
The easiest question to start this journey is, if you start a praise initiative, does that mean staff have permission to start praising leaders, department heads, CEOs?
Even if you write that into the proposal, will staff actually do that? Probably not.
Why?
Because praise smuggles in judgment, permission, status, and acceptable answers.
When I praise someone in training, that indicates to the group that I have permission to judge that person’s behavior. The reverse is not automatically true. No one ever gives me praise, only feedback at the end if someone gives them permission to. Whoever praises is subtly signaling, consciously or subconsciously, their status relative to everyone else. Even if you are kind-hearted, the message is still “I have the right to judge you and praise you.”
The icing on the cake is that my praise endorses something – the “correct” way of thinking or doing something (according to me). Praise has an odd finality about it. It’s rarely felt as an invitation to debate.
So what happens when I praise someone in training? Regardless of my intention, it is often perceived as a request – accept my judgment as correct. Learn this, memorize it, follow James’ thinking.
I also might be raising the status of the person who got the praise, from the group’s perspective. If 10 people speak and I only praise two people, it can feel like I am raising the status of those two individuals. Humans are very sensitive to status, and status changes in particular.
In the process, what gets lost?
As it turns out, quite a lot. If I praise too much, a little James may start to occupy people’s brains in a way that crowds out their ability to develop their own judgment. I call this the “answer-seeking mindset” (答え探しマインド): trying to figure out what someone else considers correct instead of developing your own judgment.
Attention is limited, so the more people think about what I think or what the boss thinks, the less space they might have for thinking about what matters to stakeholders and customers.
Public praise can also make life harder for the person receiving it. I saw this several years ago. HR ran a leadership event, and at the start asked Mayumi to stand up. Mayumi had a good reputation as a leader, and her team was truly a high performance team. HR informed everyone that Mayumi was the kind of leader they hoped everyone would become. They assumed this would make Mayumi feel appreciated, and motivate the others.
The outcome was nearly the complete opposite. Mayumi was mortified, and the other members started looking for flaws in her thinking and behavior. This humiliated Mayumi, and she stopped sharing her thoughts on leadership after that. It was safer to not attract the attention of leadership with good performance, as she might experience a repeat of that last HR event.
Praise is not simple. People have complex feelings and reactions to praise. And their preferences are not stable across all contexts.
Exploring rabbit holes before settling on a promised outcome is crucial to the success of any initiative.
Questions, not Answers
Even once someone understands the complexity of individuals’ reactions to praise, they may still proceed with their initiative as originally planned. “Let’s promote a praise culture, hold events, ask people to run their own praise sessions, reward people for certain actions, take surveys, and report something back to management after several months.”
Initiative leaders are not stupid, nor stubborn. I think it’s mostly just a lack of awareness of other options coupled with a fear of not producing tangible results they can report. Seeing more options allows for more professional judgment.
There are two things to consider. The first is about the goal itself. The second concerns how to get there.
After nearly two decades, I feel pretty confident about what the aim of all initiatives actually should be: to improve professional judgment about how to handle complex business situations.
With the praise initiative, more praise should not be the goal. As a stark example, if someone ended up praising less at the end of the initiative, that would normally be seen as failure. But is that true?
When Naomi, a participant in one of my programs, finally started resisting the urge to praise her team members, the atmosphere relaxed and her team began taking more initiative. Would that have counted as a success or failure for a praise initiative?
An initiative shouldn’t start with answers. Just questions. Rabbit hole questions, to be more precise.
I assume most program coordinators would love to have more time for more exploration, but are hesitant because it sounds like an ever expanding philosophical discussion that will eat up time, resources, and produce nothing concrete.
That fear is valid, of course. The goal has to be about improving professional judgment, not just exploration or behavioral compliance.
Better judgment means you can see more detail than an amateur or novice, and thus have more options available to you. Judgment inherently entails risk – you can get it wrong, even as a pro. The more clearly you can see the details of a problem, the more likely your judgment will be sound.
To develop judgment, people need to explore the rabbit holes together, with an assumption that they may diverge in their interests, preferences, and strengths.
People don’t all need to end up behaving the same way. They need to end up with better judgment compared to before the initiative started.
The culture can evolve better through dialogue than narrow behavioral targets that ignore important nuance.
Initiatives designed around rabbit holes and improving individual judgment are more human, realistic, and also generate less resistance. If less praise is truly an acceptable option, resistance usually softens.
What’s More Valuable Than Praise?
Watching Kentaro praise Akiko, it was hard to not intervene. But that would shift the attention back to me, which was not what I wanted to do.
In fact, that’s kind of the heart of my approach. I don’t want people focusing on me, my judgment, my approval, my answers. I don’t want to be a distraction to others, especially when they are in a delicate state learning about their own mind.
What I try to give them, which I find to be more valuable in training, is time and space.
In that dialogue session, Akiko wanted to share that she had been making excuses for her lack of growth. One particular moment in our session caused her to see herself more clearly. Decades of self-deception falling away, revealing an uncomfortable truth, as well as a new direction.
All I wanted to give Akiko was my time with no distractions. No praise, no criticism, no advice, no suggestions.
My professional judgment at that moment was that she needed to sit with what she had found, and let it bake in her brain. The next movement in her story should come from her, not me. That might take a few minutes, a few hours, a week, or several years. Or perhaps she would start speaking again, or ask a question. With humans, you never know.
If I wrapped up her thoughts into a conclusion for her and put a bow on it, I might close a book she would benefit from keeping open.
As I get older, I see silence differently. My attention was focused on her, and I was giving her my time. She didn’t need my words, but I do believe my time and focused attention were helpful. I wasn’t asking her to adopt my thinking or answers. I was showing that she mattered, that her growth mattered to me, and that I would not interfere with something she might be able to do on her own.
If she needed help, I hoped I would recognize that, too.
But who knows, maybe she needed a little praise after all.
Comments