Your praise has stopped meaning anything to your team

You end most conversations with your team on something kind. Great work. Thanks for this. Really appreciate it. You mean every word, and you would be surprised to learn how little of it registers.

Watch what happens when you say it. The person nods, says thanks and moves on. Nobody walks away from it changed, and nobody mentions it to a colleague later. Have you ever wondered why the thing you say most often seems to land the least?

Praise that covers everything tells people nothing

Praise does its work as information before it does its work as warmth. It tells someone what you noticed, what you valued and what you would like to see again. When the same three words greet a careful piece of analysis and a routine email, they stop carrying any of that.

Your team works this out quickly. If everything is great, then great is simply how you sign off. The words become part of the furniture of the meeting, pleasant and invisible. Then the one time someone does something genuinely difficult, you reach for the same phrase, and it sounds exactly like the last forty.

There is a quieter cost as well. People who cannot tell what you value will guess, and they usually guess at whatever is most visible. They put their effort into what gets noticed rather than what matters. Is that what your praise is rewarding at the moment?

Say what you saw

The fix is small, and it takes a little more effort each time. Name the specific thing. "Thanks for the report" becomes "putting the risk on page one meant the committee read it before anything else." The second version proves you read it. It also tells them which part to do again.

Specific praise is harder to give, because you have to have paid attention. That is part of why it works. People can tell the difference between being thanked and being noticed, and they remember the second one for a long time.

You do not need to make a speech of it. One concrete sentence is usually enough. What did they do that someone less careful would have missed?

Notice the work nobody sees

Most praise goes to outcomes, and outcomes tend to be visible. The deal closes, the launch goes out on time, and everyone can point at it. Some of the most valuable work on your team never produces a moment like that.

Think about the person who spotted a problem early and quietly fixed it, so the crisis never arrived. Or the one who gave up an afternoon to get a new colleague up to speed. Nothing went wrong, so nothing got said. If you only recognise what makes noise, you are teaching your team that prevention does not count.

Who on your team has not heard anything specific from you in the last month? Is that because they did nothing worth mentioning, or because their best work is the kind that leaves no trace?

Be careful with public and private

Some people want recognition in front of the room. Others would much rather you said it quietly, one to one, and find the public version uncomfortable. Neither preference is wrong, and you will not know which is which unless you watch or ask.

Public praise also sends a message to everyone else listening. When you give it, make sure you could explain to anyone in the room exactly why that piece of work earned it.

Praise and honesty belong in the same relationship

Some leaders hand out praise freely because the harder conversations feel uncomfortable. The warmth fills the space where honest feedback should be, and people sense it. If you never tell them when something fell short, your praise starts to sound like politeness.

The reverse holds too. Criticism is easier to hear from someone whose praise is precise. When a person knows you notice the good work in detail, they are more willing to believe you judged the problem fairly.

You can keep praising as often as you do now, provided each time says something you actually noticed. Who on your team did something this week that you could describe in one exact sentence? Tell them tomorrow.