Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader's Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You

by Frances Frei

The good news is that the most effective mechanism we know for accelerating human progress taps into our natural devotional impulses. The idea is simple: catch someone in the act of behaving exactly as you want them to behave, using sincere and specific praise. Describe the behavior in enough detail so that they can replicate it. Take it from Dweck and focus on things that a person can truly control. Rinse and repeat on a very regular basis. The specific part matters a lot. Sincere but nonspecific praise is easier to dispense, but it rarely helps someone improve, since they’re not entirely sure how to recreate the magic. For example, telling someone they did a “nice job” after a meeting generally doesn’t help, since the recipient has to guess what they did to earn it. In contrast, telling someone, “The way you took two competing ideas and articulated what was in common between them was really effective in breaking the stalemate,” has enough detail so that the listener knows what to do more of the next time. Another word for this, of course, is positive reinforcement.