#101 – Celebrating Bright Spots in Leadership | 52 Life Lessons – Lesson 20

[00:00:03] Welcome to The Working Well Podcast, an episode 20 in the 52 Life Lessons series. When was the last time you caught someone doing something exceptionally well? I'm not talking at their annual review or during some quarterly employee recognition day. I mean during the normal flow of a workday. A thoughtful comment in a meeting, a well-handled client conversation, information that's delivered early enough to prevent a crisis, someone quietly helping a colleague without being asked. Did you notice it? And more importantly, did you say anything?

[00:00:33] Most leaders are highly trained problem detectors. We see the missed deadline or the typo in that report, the awkward client interaction, the metric that moved in the wrong direction, or the person who somehow managed to reply all to the message that only should have had one or two people on it. Our brains are excellent at finding what is wrong. Decades of research has highlighted a well-established negativity bias in humans that causes us to give greater attention and weight to threats, problems, and negative information.

[00:01:02] That ability is important. We don't want to lose it. Businesses can improve if leaders ignore hard facts or weak performance, poor behavior, or uncomfortable truths. But there's another side to leadership that receives far less attention. We must become skilled purveyors or practitioners of identifying what's working and understanding why it worked so we can help people repeat it. And this is what I mean by choosing to celebrate the bright spots.

[00:01:28] Now I first began learning this lesson as an athlete. Like most athletes, I had many coaches, and each of them had a different style. Some were exceptionally good at helping me see both sides of my performance. They'd identify what I was doing well, explain why it mattered, and then show me where I could improve.

[00:01:45] Now I left these conversations feeling challenged, but also capable. I understood the gap, and I believed I could close it. Other coaches focused almost exclusively on mistakes. Every missed play, poor decision, or technical flaw, or momentary lapse in concentration became another correction. And technically, much of their feedback, and technically, much of their feedback, it was accurate. But accuracy alone doesn't make for useful feedback.

[00:02:10] When all you hear is what you're doing wrong, eventually you stop hearing instruction and just start hearing a verdict, hear people nagging at you. You become more cautious, less creative, less engaged, you become frustrated, and you stop experimenting because making mistakes feels dangerous. I noticed that under those coaches, I didn't improve as quickly as I did under the coaches that helped me see both sides of my performance. And I also enjoyed the experience far less.

[00:02:37] Now years later, when I became a coach and a personal trainer, I remembered that feeling. I began deliberately looking for things that my athletes and clients were doing well. Perhaps their technique had improved on a certain rep or an exercise. Maybe they showed up on a difficult day, completed an exercise that they had previously struggled with. They made a better food choice or handled a setback without abandoning the entire plan. Those moments happened every day, and they often looked small from the outside.

[00:03:05] But once they were recognized, they started to become evidence. Evidence of change. Evidence of agency. Evidence of what that person was capable of. That the process was working, and that progress was already happening throughout the journey. Now my clients, when I started doing this, they immediately became more engaged. I noticed they were working harder, staying longer, enjoying the process more, and they generally achieve better results.

[00:03:32] It turns out that people tend to repeat actions that are noticed, reinforced, and connected to meaningful progress. Yeah, I know, it's not groundbreaking. The fact is, most people don't do it. Particularly leaders in the workplace. Now as a parent, I watch this same pattern unfold with my children. Kids are astonishing learning machines. They're constantly experimenting, failing, adapting, and trying again. You can see their confidence change in real time, depending on the feedback they receive.

[00:04:01] When we notice and speak directly to their effort, the curiosity, kindness, persistence, and improvement that they're doing, we help them understand which behaviors matter. When we only appear with a red pen after something goes wrong, we unintentionally teach them that our primary role is to evaluate their failures. Unfortunately, despite understanding this as an athlete, a trainer, and a coach, and a parent, I didn't always apply it well as a business owner and a leader.

[00:04:28] During the early years of building my company, obviously I was carrying a lot of pressure. There were clients to serve, bills to pay, systems to build, people to manage. And like any entrepreneur, 400 small fires that required immediate attention every day. I became very good at noticing gaps. I saw the inconsistency here, that missed detail, a process that hadn't been followed, and maybe a customer experience that fell short of what I expected.

[00:04:55] I was tuned into that every moment of every day. But what I often failed to see, or at least I failed to communicate it to my team, were the hundreds of things that people were doing every day that were awesome. They were caring for our clients. They were solving problems and sharing ideas and covering for each other. They were investing their energy in a company that I had created. But too often, the only time they heard from me was when something needed to be fixed.

[00:05:24] Now, in my head, I believed I was maintaining high standards. From their perspective, it likely felt as that nothing they ever did was quite good enough. And sadly, I had lost some excellent people because of that mistake. Their departure affected our clients, our team, the performance of the business. And it was a painful reminder, despite the good intentions I had, those good intentions don't cancel out poor leadership habits.

[00:05:50] I had created an environment where criticism was immediate, but appreciation was just assumed. I assumed that appreciation is expected of what they do. Hey, they're getting paid, so it's just their job. And I still hear versions of this mindset from leaders every day. But that's just their job. Why should I congratulate someone for doing what they're paid to do? Other people say, oh, well, they're adults. They shouldn't need positive reinforcement.

[00:06:20] Yeah, of course they're adults. Adults still want to know whether their work matters. They still want useful feedback. Adults still want to understand whether the effort they're making is contributing to something valuable. Being employed and getting a paycheck doesn't remove someone's basic human need for competence, connection, meaning, and progress. I also want to be very clear that this doesn't mean that you need to hold a parade because,

[00:06:48] you know, Steve in accounting submitted his expense report correctly. It doesn't require participation trophies, forced compliments, or confetti cannons. It simply means noticing when people demonstrate the behaviors, judgment, effort, and values that help the team and organization succeed. Research supports the business case for this type of recognition as well.

[00:07:13] There was a major meta-analysis of organizational behavior change, and it found that structured reinforcement approaches were associated with an average 17% improvement in task performance. And this varied a bit across different types and settings of the reinforcement. In a series of experiments, Adam Grant and Francesco Gino found that expressions of gratitude increased people's willingness to help again, largely because being thanked made them feel socially valued.

[00:07:43] Now, this isn't about making work feel like a kindergarten class. It's about understanding human behavior well enough to create better performance. People in profitability are not competing priorities. When done properly, recognition strengthens both. One of the most powerful examples of this principle that I come across is from work led by Jerry and Monique Sternen in rural Vietnam. They were facing widespread childhood malnutrition.

[00:08:10] And the conventional approach would have been to study everything that was going wrong, bring in outside experts, and develop a large program, and then tell families what they needed to change. Done all the time in different initiatives. Instead, the team asked a different question. Were there children in the same impoverished communities who were healthy despite facing the same limited resources? Turns out there were. The team studied those families and discovered several uncommon practices.

[00:08:40] Some caregivers were adding tiny shrimp, crabs, and sweet potato greens from the rice fields to their children's meals. They were feeding smaller amounts more frequently and actively helping the children eat. So the resources were already present. The knowledge was already present. The solution was already happening. It was simply hidden inside the success of a few families. So instead of lecturing the rest of the community, families practiced these behaviors together.

[00:09:07] The early village program produced a dramatic reduction in malnutrition and became an influential example of what's now called the positive deviance approach. Peer-reviewed research describes the same underlying process. Identify people who are succeeding despite common constraints. Discover the uncommon behaviors contributing to those outcomes and help others practice them. This is why bright spots matter so much to organizations. They're not merely happy stories.

[00:09:37] They're data. Somewhere in your company, a manager is already running amazing meetings. A team may have figured out how to reduce customer complaints. An employee may be building unusually strong relationships across departments. Or a location may be retaining people while comparable locations are losing them faster than you can keep up. So before launching another expensive transformation initiative, perhaps we should be asking, who's already succeeding? What are they doing differently?

[00:10:06] How can we recognize it, learn from it, and make it easier for others to practice? And there's an important warning here. More feedback is not automatically better. There was a landmark meta-analysis by Abraham Kluger and Angelo Denisi that examined more than 600 feedback effects. Now, feedback improved performance on average. But in more than a third of the cases, it actually reduced performance.

[00:10:31] Feedback became less effective when it pulled attention away from the task and towards the person's identity or sense of self. And that's important to understand. Saying to someone, you're a superstar, it may feel nice. But it provides very little useful information. Compare that to, Nancy, I love how you handled that meeting. You noticed their frustration, you slowed the conversation down, and you asked questions before trying to defend our position. I could see their posture change.

[00:11:01] That decision, I felt it really helped rebuild the trust and turn the meeting around. That feedback identifies the behavior. It explains the impact. It helps Nancy understand what to repeat. And it also signals to everyone else what good leadership and customer service look like in practice. And that's far more valuable than a generic great job. Even though a sincere great job is considerably better than complete silence.

[00:11:29] Now, many leaders tell me they already recognize people through annual reviews, employee rewards, quarterly meetings, or formal recognition platforms. And they're useful. But culture isn't built during formal events. It's built in the 10 seconds after the difficult client call. The little brief interaction in the hallway. The moment where you have right after the moment to provide specific and measurable feedback of the bright spots.

[00:11:59] What worked well. Most people use that 10 seconds to talk about the things that didn't go well. Someone could knock it out of the park. And a lot of leaders would be like, yeah, that was great. I noticed when you said this, I think we can do this better next time. And so the ability to just tune your brain into looking at what went well. What is the action that they took that I can reinforce that I want to happen again next time.

[00:12:25] So when a leader notices someone that prepared thoroughly, maybe they helped a colleague challenge an assumption respectfully. They admitted a mistake. They brought calm into a stressful room. Recognizing those in the moment make those moments compound. It signals, I want more of this. And that starts to become scalable across the organization.

[00:12:48] It's important to note that when the big, say, town hall message, the marketing message that the company sends out doesn't match the day-to-day experience of the employee. That's when a formal recognition plan can actually create more cynicism. If the day-to-day reaction is that when people just get nitpicked or only the red pen comes out, they get only recognized for things that they do wrong. And then every quarter someone gets a recognition award.

[00:13:18] That doesn't go as far. And in fact, it can create that animosity because you're like, why does this matter? Hoo-hoo, yay. I did one thing right in the last hundred days. So you can't ignore people for six months and then expect to repair the relationship with a certificate and a branded coffee mug. The daily reality will always win. There's a phrase called see it, say it, and scale it. And this is a simple three-step process that leaders can start using today.

[00:13:47] So first is see it. Train yourself to look for what is working. At the end of a meeting, ask yourself, what did someone do that improved the outcome? At the end of the day, a reflection on where did I see effort, judgment, progress, courage, care, these types of things. And this doesn't just apply externally. It applies to your own behavior as well.

[00:14:09] See, high performers are often excellent at identifying their deficiencies and terrible at recognizing their progress. Celebrate your own bright spots. And that's not arrogance. It's accurate self-assessment. You're probably a high performer. You're probably doing many things right each day. But how often do you actually recognize that? The second part is say it. So you've seen it. Now we want to say it. Don't assume people know.

[00:14:37] Make the recognition timely, specific, and sincere. Name what the person did, why it matters, and the impact that it created. 10 meaningful seconds today will often have way more influence than 10 paragraphs in a performance review that's next quarter. And the third step after see it and say it is scale it. Once you identify a bright spot, get curious. What allowed that success to happen? Can the behavior be repeated? Can the person teach it to others?

[00:15:07] Is there a system, a habit, or an environmental factor that helped? So celebration isn't the end of the process. It's the starting point for learning. Now, it's important to say here, choosing to celebrate the bright spots doesn't mean ignoring reality. It means facing reality more completely. Yes, acknowledge the mistake. Address that missed standard. Have the difficult conversation that needs to be had.

[00:15:32] Then look for what can be learned, what remains strong, and what positive action can happen next. And this connects back to the three gifts practice from an earlier episode. Even in painful circumstances, we can search for learning, growth, and constructive action. We can't always control what happens, but we can choose where to direct our attention, how we interpret that experience, and what behavior we reinforce next. So here's my challenge for you.

[00:15:58] In the next 24 hours, catch one person doing excellent work. Now, don't wait for a massive accomplishment. Notice the preparation, the care, the effort, the judgment, the improvement that they made, or the way that they positively have affected someone else. And then tell them. Be specific. Be genuine. Take 10 seconds to make that invisible visible. Because what leaders constantly or consistently notice, name, and reinforce, what I like to call recognize, reward, and reinforce,

[00:16:28] that eventually becomes the culture of the team and eventually of the organization. And when we choose to celebrate the bright spots, we don't lower our standard. We show people how to reach it. Thanks so much for listening. Hope you've enjoyed episode 20 of the Working Well podcast in our Life Lesson series. We have another interview coming up next week. Please reach out. Let me know who you'd like to see on the podcast, what topics you'd love to hear, and feedback on the episode. You can check us out at timborris.com and the Working Well podcast.

[00:16:57] We'll chat soon. That wraps up another episode of the Working Well podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Now, which guests or topics would you like to see featured on the show? Message me through LinkedIn or on the contact page of timborris.com with your ideas. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Tim Borys with Fresh Wellness Group, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thank you.