Surviving the Workday

Dear Ms. Theologian,

At my office, people tend to be quick to send emails  (cc’d to the boss) when someone messes something up.  I’m trying to start a tradition of sending positive emails (cc’d to the same boss) when someone does a good job.

I wrote this one this morning:

To: Secretary
CC: Partner
Subject: Your work on the Anderson file

I really appreciate how quickly you did that for me.  You’re a lot of help, especially when things are busy, and you do a really good job.
 Thank you!

But to me that sounds slightly awkward. Also, I keep thinking of that scene in “Baby Mama” where Steve Martin rewards an employee with “Five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact.”

Why is praising so much harder than criticizing?  Any advice on making the praise e-mails sound more natural?  I’d really like them to be memorable at bonus time, at least as much so as the criticism has been.

Thanks,

Wondering about Praise

 Dear Wondering,

First, and most importantly, great tradition to start!

You know, Ms. Theologian wonders about this praise-fault-finding issue too in her worklife, but she thought it was part of the problem with her being an editor/writer. In fact, one time she started keeping track of all the praise she received in a little notebook, but because she received praise so infrequently, she became upset. At least she knew why. Apparently this is more widespread than she thought.

So there are two things here:

 1. The Awkwardness  Ms. Theologian thinks praise is often awkward if it seems contrived in any fashion. As a teacher, you learn that students know if you are full of baloney when you give praise. Adults can sense this too (though we may receive less of it in general). Ms. Theologian was just reading The Power of Written Praise for work, which describes how praise can be effective, but not all praise and not all the time. So you might read that and think of how to be sincere and grateful in your praise, which is the direction in which you were heading.

2. The Why Is This So Hard? question  We live in a cynical culture where people are rarely praised (or given attention) for being good. At least it’s not necessarily routine.  It’s not just a problem of cynism in our culture; it’s what many of us do professionally (e.g., editing, writing, reviewing, inspecting, checking, doublechecking). And those of us who don’t do it professionally often do it as a part-time task (e.g., teachers grade papers, managers review employees). What of course is problematic here is that spending all of our time pointing out what is wrong does not necessarily make anything right.

Keep up your positive feedback plan!

-Ms. Theologian

P.S. To write to Ms. Theologian, send an email to ms dot theologian at gmail dot com.