Learning Something Useful For the Rest of Your Life
How about learning something useful by giving awesome compliments?
How easy do you find it to pay great compliments? An authentic compliment. Difficult for you? Seemingly a common thing, right? But difficult to do uncommonly well, don’t you agree?
As a leader or even as a peer, great compliments have never been more critically important than today. Not because they are expected, but to help in team motivation and engagement. While everyone is wrapped up in their own performance, people hardly take the time to recognize the work of others.
Whether you’re dealing with bosses, subordinates, or peers, a well-placed compliment will make you valuable, noteworthy, and better suited for leadership.
Why compliments?
When you recognize people’s skills and achievements, it makes you seem more selfless. Your attention to detail is appreciated. And if you believe what some scientific studies have to say on the subject, people who pay others compliments are seen as smarter. And more humble … a critical leadership quality.
Be specific
Understand what motivates people you work with and focus on paying compliments that will give attention to those things. For a business leader, it may be addressing and inspiring a crowd of subordinates. For a secretary, it may be her knowledge of office details. Regardless, compliment them accordingly, in the most natural way possible.
Timing is essential
Compliments are all about timing. They are usually most effective immediately after someone does something they deserve praise for. It’s right after the fact that most people want to hear that they did well. Let time pass and they will calm down, or convince themselves that they did well and don’t need anyone else’s approval.
But timing also involves calibrating someone’s mood. If you see a co-worker in a slump, a well-placed compliment might motivate him and remind him that what he does is significant.
The bottom line
“I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”
For some reason, many of us have been conditioned to be more afraid of failure than we are of inaction. However, failure, in addition to being inherently valuable as a learning process, contains within it the chance of success. And no matter how small that chance is, it’s better than the chances of success when we choose not to even try
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