We have a fantastic team at GreenMellen, but that can lead to situations where if someone on the team is doing a great job with their work, it can often go unnoticed.
“Of course they did great work on x, that’s their job“.
It’s explained much more eloquently in Patrick Lencioni’s book “The Ideal Team Player“. Patrick says:
All too often in life, we see people do what we want them to do and we say nothing, assuming that the behavior has become natural for them, an easy standard. We justify our lack of praise by claiming that it would be embarrassing to the employee to call attention to a behavior that she sees as something fundamental. What we’re failing to realize is that the point of praise is not only to reinforce the behavior in that employee, but also to reinforce it in everyone else.
In our case, we intentionally try to notice times when our team is exemplifying our core values, and their consistently excellent work can make it tricky to find those moments. The best solution I’ve found is for Ali and I to take some time to look at our five core values each week and try to come up with specific situations where they’ve been best exemplified by our team.
It’s imperfect, but creating that intentionality (versus just hoping something will pop out) had helped a lot.
Do you have any ways to make sure that the excellent day-to-day work of your team doesn’t go unnoticed?
