I just saw an interesting video on YouTube about “Growing Up as the Smart Kid.” It talks about how those of us who got good grades basically made being smart our entire identity. There are reasons we struggle as adults but I want to discuss one of them in particular.
At Change:Healthcare, where I was employee #3, I worked on modeling health insurance claims data for saving consumers and employers on their healthcare costs. I frequently crunched claims numbers for potential clients for our sales guy. One day he came to me and said, “We have a meeting tomorrow morning and I need you to make a presentation on their data.” This alarmed me as it usually took a week or longer back in those days to prepare data since I was doing it all in Excel. However, I pushed myself very hard through a sleepless night and killed it the next day. I had accomplished something I felt very proud of.
The salesperson didn’t seem to notice the effort I had put in or how far above and beyond I had gone at a company where I didn’t feel I was well paid and owned very little equity in (despite selling for $143 million, I made under $5,000 when Change:Healthcare was eventually purchased).
So I went to him and asked him why he didn’t say thank you or show any appreciation. His response was simple:
“Why would I thank you for doing your job?”
That struck me hard. The concept that just because I was paid for something I didn’t deserve praise seemed odd to me, as someone who learned a long time ago that “please” and “thank you” can get you almost anything and open doors previously closed. This was also in the South where courtesy was much more common. Not to mention, as the YouTube video pointed out, I was raised on praise for getting good grades and it was something that was particularly important to me.
Sadly, this mentality that being praised for work was unnecessary seems to permeate society (or at least my career). I had a misunderstanding with a CEO once who didn't understand the release date I quoted him was an estimate. He had added dozens of features and we were months away from being able to release to production, yet he called me up that day and asked what time the site would go live. Despite my trying to explain to him we couldn’t, he told me he had briefed investors that we’d be live that day (without discussing with me).
I’ll never forget the next 24 hours. I put in a Herculean effort to finish everything necessary for our site to go live and somehow achieved it. All for little to no traffic thereafter. It was just to make investors happy.
Did he say thank you? No. Absolutely no praise at all.
At another company, I worked 100 hour weeks relentlessly and would get woken up by calls at all times of the day from the CTO. In the 9 months I was there, I wrote four times as many lines of code as the next employee down. Was I ever thanked? Of course not. In fact they were so resolute in finding ways to tell me I wasn’t doing a good job, on a quarterly review, the put down that I didn’t properly capitalize a variable’s name. That was the only negative they could think of.
What I really don’t understand is praising employees is perhaps the cheapest (it’s free) way of motivating them. Everyone wants to feel good and proud of their work. I and a group of people I’ve worked with for a decade are working on something new and I make sure to always go above and beyond to thank each employee for their contributions, especially when they put in extra time or get something done exactly how I had hoped. And when I ask for things, appending a “please” takes no effort at all. It’s how I’ve operated my whole career with people who report to me.
The way they react is incredibly positive. They know their work is appreciated and are always hungry to do more. In many ways, I think appreciation is worth just as much as monetary renumeration.
So my biggest takeaway after always showing courtesy to my employees is that it’s absolutely a strong motivator if you want happy, hard working employees. Not to say I also don't lay down the law when I need to, but that dichotomy of “You did good” vs. “This isn’t enough” is better than always keeping employees wondering where they stand.
So want to get more work out of your employees? Start by saying “Thank You” more often. It’s so little to you but goes so far for them.
Now if only praise went up the ladder as well…