Think about the last three times you spoke to one of your people about their work specifically and at length. If you are like most leaders, at least two of those conversations happened because something had gone wrong. The proposal that missed the point, the client who was unhappy, and the deadline that slipped. When work goes well, it is noticed briefly, and then it becomes the new baseline, and everyone moves on to the next thing.
That pattern is not unkindness, and it is not unusual. It is simply what happens when leaders are busy and problems are the only thing that demands attention. But it teaches your team something you never intended to teach them, which is that the way to hear from you is to make a mistake. I want to argue that specific recognition is one of the highest-return habits available to a leader and that most companies treat it as a nice gesture rather than as management.
Why Praise Goes Missing
The first reason is that leaders assume people already know. You think somebody is excellent, you have thought so for two years, and it feels almost unnecessary to say it out loud. But nobody can hear what you are thinking. In the absence of any signal, people fall back on the evidence available to them, and the evidence is that you only appear when there is a problem. Plenty of strong performers quietly believe their leader is not particularly impressed with them, and their leader would be astonished to hear it.
The second reason is that praise has been pushed into events. Many companies handle recognition once a year, with awards, a certificate, and a photograph. Those things are fine and people enjoy them, but an annual event cannot do the job, because recognition works by connecting a specific action to a specific outcome while both are still fresh. Eleven months later it is a ceremony, not feedback.
The third reason is a belief that praise makes people complacent or invites a conversation about money. In my experience the opposite happens. People who know exactly what they do well are more confident about taking on difficult work, and the ones who never hear anything are the ones who eventually raise pay, because money becomes the only measure of worth they have to go on.
And there is a quieter reason that is worth admitting exists. Giving specific praise requires you to have paid close attention to what somebody actually did, which is harder than noticing that a problem landed on your desk. Vague praise is cheap because it requires no observation. It is the recognition equivalent of nodding while somebody is still talking, and people can tell the difference immediately.
VONJ TINGSON, PRESIDENT & COO
Saying good job is easy. Telling someone exactly what they did well is what makes them do it again.
Vague Praise Teaches Nothing
Consider what a person can do with the words good job. They cannot repeat it, because they do not know which part was good. They cannot teach it to anybody else. They cannot use it in a conversation about their own progress. It is pleasant for about four seconds, and then it is gone, and if you say it often enough, it stops registering at all, because everything gets the same response, whether it was ordinary or exceptional.
Now consider the same moment handled differently. You tell someone that the way they restructured the second half of that document is what made the client stop arguing, because it answered the objection before it was raised. That sentence does several things at once. It tells them exactly which behavior to repeat. It shows them you actually read the work. And it gives them language they can use with their own team. The same is true of the outcome. If nobody explains what the work led to, people assume it disappeared into the company and had no particular effect, and that assumption is corrosive over time.
Specific recognition is really a form of teaching, which is why I think of it as a management skill rather than a courtesy. Every time you name what worked, you are describing the standard more precisely than any written definition of a role could. People learn what good looks like in your company far more from what gets noticed than from what is written in a handbook.
It also has to be true. Praise given to make somebody feel better, or handed out evenly so that nobody is left out, is detected almost immediately and devalues the real thing. If the work was average, do not say it was excellent. Find the part that was genuinely good, name that, and be honest about the rest. A leader whose praise is known to be accurate has something genuinely valuable to give, and it costs nothing to hand out. A leader who praises everything has nothing left when somebody does something remarkable, because the currency has already been spent.
Say What And Why
The practical version of this is simple enough to start tomorrow. When you notice something good, say it within a day or two, while the person can still remember the choices they made. Name the specific thing they did rather than a quality they have, so the conversation is about a decision they can repeat rather than about their personality. Then explain what it led to, because the consequence is the part that makes it stick.
Do some of it in front of other people, because public credit does two jobs at once. It matters more to the person receiving it, and it tells everybody else what this company actually values, which is information they cannot get any other way. Be careful to name the people who did the work rather than only the person who presented it, since the most common recognition failure in any company is crediting whoever happened to be in the room.
Be careful about the shape of it too. Praise that arrives attached to a new request, in the same breath, is not really praise, and everybody hears the second half. If you want to tell somebody they did something well, let that be the entire purpose of the conversation, and ask for the next thing on a different day.
Write some of it down as well. A short written note, sent to the person and copied to their manager, lasts in a way that a comment in a corridor does not. People keep those. They reread them on bad weeks, and they bring them out when it is time to discuss a promotion, which makes your own decisions easier later.
Make It Everyone’s Job
If this only lives with you, it reaches a handful of people. The leaders who get real value from it make it part of how every manager in the company operates. Ask your managers, in the ordinary run of your conversations with them, who on their team did something good this month and what specifically it was. The first few times you will get vague answers. After that they will start paying the kind of attention that produces specific ones, which is the actual goal.
Put it into the rhythms you already have. A few minutes at the start of a team meeting for naming good work, a standing item in your management meeting, and a note in the weekly update. It does not need a program or a platform, and the moment it becomes a system with nominations and points, it usually dies, because people can tell the difference between being noticed and being processed. The test of whether it is working is not how many people took part but whether anybody could tell you, a week later, exactly what they were recognized for.
The cost of leaving this alone is not dramatic, which is why it survives. Nobody resigns over a lack of praise. They resign over an accumulated sense that the effort is not seen and then give a different reason in the exit interview, because the real one sounds petty, said out loud.
So pick three people today. Think about something each of them did in the last two weeks, work out what specifically made it good and what it led to, and tell them before the end of the week. Then ask each of your managers to do the same, and ask them next month who they chose. Ask them again next month who they chose and why. If a manager cannot name anybody, you have learned something about them that no performance report was ever going to tell you.