Autor: Voravee Ruengaramrut & Nattakarn Theeraleela
“Good managers give constructive criticism
– but truly masterful leaders offer constructive praise” (Fessler, 2017).
Praise is an intrinsic reward that we always tell each other at work i.e. ‘Good job,’ ‘Well done,’ etc. Those are the words that create the encouragement and can make all receiver delightful. However, only those words might not create long-term benefit in terms of people development.
Nowadays, various organizations focused on how to give constructive feedback but still lack of constructive praise. In addition, previous research showed that most managers not only failed to give the constructive criticism to their team, but they also bad at giving constructive praise as well. Hence, it’s a big issue for the organization. Most of research proves that giving constructive positive feedback helps employees feel valued, and leads to increased confidence and capability. Now, let’s discuss how to do constructive praise and why it is important.
When we say ‘Good job!’ or ‘Well done!’, it can create just one-shot moment of delightful for the receiver. However, if we want to create a long-lasting positive feeling and make that praise more effective for the receiver to be able to continue to improve their work, we need ‘Constructive Praise’. As a praise giver, before we compliment, we need to understand what is the reason that we praise other such as what’s the part that they do well or what’s the particular thing that makes you impress.
In the meantime, if you are a receiver, once a praise receiver gave the compliment to you without the explanation. You can act as active receiver, figure it out what is the particular part that impresses a praise giver as same as what are they expect next time or what you can do more for improvement. We might be familiar with giving feedback and think that only feedback can be a way to help people for development.
However, ‘Praise’ can be another way that can help people to develop themselves as same as let them know that their effort worth it. Moreover, praise also helps to increase passion and motivation of people to generate work and the tricky part, people love to hear the word ‘praise’ more than stand-alone ‘feedback’.
According to various studies, even managers fear to give feedback to employee and employees also fear to confront with the feedback from manager. As stated previously, stand-alone ‘Feedback’ might create the uncomfortable atmosphere, but constructive praise can be another way of communication that supports the communication activity in the organization as well as decreasing the tendency stress during feedback session or general conversation that happen daily in the organization.
References
QUARTS at WORK, “Good managers give constructive criticism—but truly masterful leaders offer constructive praise” https://work.qz.com/1010784/good-managers-give-constructive-criticism-but-truly-masterful-leaders-give-constructive-praise/