Leadership 101 – Catch them doing right!

We all have heard about praising team members in front of others while correcting them in-person. Well, I agree with this quote and have found it workable multiple times during professional and even personal fronts.

This becomes one of the basic qualities of a leader and even leadership training/courses teach us the same, to make sure your team members remain motivated and outperform every time.

Leaders also develop multiple ways to give shout-outs to their team members to let that spirit burning. We have seen a lot of unique ways by how leaders keep their team motivated by giving weekly and even daily shout-outs or special mentions. But this won’t last for long as leaders/manager end up maintaining a pattern to give shout-out i.e once a week or month. Team members also (sometimes) start assuming this as a part of management’s cadence and they start expecting “special mentions” even if they are just meeting their daily expectations or performing an inch better than their peers.

Here comes the philosophy of catching them doing right. Most of the Managers/Leaders always catch their team members doing wrong (or when something went wrong), and then they make sure to reach out to them with a teachable moment right away (this may be a good practice at high demanding work).
On the contrary, during shout-outs/special mentions, managers/leaders do reach out to multiple parties to collect data points for weekly/monthly shout-outs.
To keep the team motivated and maintain a thriving (for at least a per cent better) every single day environment, I believe leaders should follow a philosophy of reverse psychology by catching team members doing right rather than collecting their wrongs alone. A leader should always look out for “rights” done by his/her team member and make sure to acknowledge the same as soon as he/she finds.
I’ll be sharing a couple of ways (below) to achieve this and I believe leaders/managers will start seeing the results on very next moment. This practice of catching team members doing right should be accompanied by regular shares of teachable moments (will discuss the art of “Catch them doing wrong” in next post) and conventional weekly/monthly special mentions in team meetings.

• Remember, the act of catching them doing right and acknowledging their efforts should be done on a random basis (try not to follow a pattern, like a day, particular event, etc). Also, this shouldn’t be combined or confused with teachable moments or conventional weekly/monthly special mentions.
• It’s okay if you don’t want to involve the whole team to acknowledge such “right doings”. This could be done by sending a personalised “Thank you” email/note to team members.
  Example – You are a restaurant owner and one day you find one of your butlers removing extra lemon wedges from the lemon drink before serving to the customer (this was done to make sure lemon drink tastes & looks perfect by removing extra lemon from the drink). This was a small act of “customer first” which no cookbook/chef tells to do, specifically. Here, you get a chance to write a “Thank you” note and stick the same on this butler’s desk.
  Those couple of lines would not only make his day but also motivate him to keep doing what he aims to do for the customers and thrive to become better.
• Act of acknowledging the “right doings” should be spontaneous. This will boost the team’s confidence and make them bound that their leaders are observing every single effort they are putting to meet the organizational goal.

Let me know in the comments below how you think about this approach.
Also, if you want to discover this philosophy in detail and looking forward to applying this in your day to day operations, feel free to connect with me over connect@masteryinc.org