A client of mine gives great feedback. Privately. In one-on-ones, he tells his team exactly what they did well and why it mattered. In front of other people, he goes quiet. Task done, box checked, next item on the list.
I asked him why the difference, and he said something I hear all the time. It feels like it should be enough that I told them privately. Public praise felt unnecessary, maybe even a little performative.
Here’s what I told him. Acknowledgment isn’t a nice extra you add once the real work is finished. It’s part of the mechanism that makes the work move faster.
Think about what happens inside someone when their effort gets seen. Not just seen by the one person managing them, but seen where their peers can witness it too. Something in their nervous system settles. The next task doesn’t require the same amount of second-guessing, because they already know their work registers, that someone is paying attention to the actual quality of what they’re doing and not just whether it got done.
Now think about the opposite. Work gets completed, and the only feedback is silence, or a private note nobody else hears. The task moves forward, but a small tax gets added every time. Was that even noticed. Does it matter that I got the detail right. Is anyone actually paying attention. That tax is invisible, but it slows people down, because uncertainty is expensive.
People double-check things they’d move through quickly if they trusted their work was landing.
Acknowledgment removes the tax. That’s the whole mechanism. It’s not about making people feel good for its own sake, though that matters too. It’s that confident people move faster than uncertain ones, and specific, public recognition is one of the fastest ways to build that confidence.
There’s a trap here worth naming. Vague praise doesn’t do the job. Great work, thanks everyone, doesn’t tell anyone what to keep doing. The acknowledgment that actually moves people is specific. Robert, the way you caught that dependency before it became a problem for three other teams, that’s exactly the kind of attention to detail that makes this whole system work. That sentence does something generic praise never will. It tells the person precisely what to repeat.
And there’s a second layer worth thinking about, especially if you manage a team of leads who manage their own teams. When you acknowledge someone in front of others, you’re not just building their confidence. You’re building the trust their own team has in them. A lead whose work gets publicly recognized by their manager becomes a lead their own people trust more.
So here’s the practice. Find one specific thing this week that someone on your team did well, something with real detail attached to it, and say it out loud where other people can hear it. Not a group email that goes to everyone about everything. One specific moment, named clearly, in the room.
Watch what happens to their next piece of work.
Much love,
Gretchen
