“These look fantastic and you are doing a wonderful job. You are amazing Felipe. Never forget.”
This is a message I got from @ankushkjain some weeks ago.
He sends me things like this all the time. He acknowledges and appreciates me and my work at any moment he sees something that he likes and wants more of.
I’ve been working with Ankush K Jain as his business partner for more than a year now. There’s a lot that goes behind the scenes of his coaching business every week and recently I’ve also been helping him organise his school for coaches in the UK.
I’ve never received such constant drops of acknowledgement from any other person I’ve ever worked with. It tells a lot about the kind of leader he is being and how he lets people know what he wants.
Usually it’s more common to see managers and leaders using the opposite approach: punishing and complaining whenever someone doesn’t do what they want.
We create people into what we acknowledge them to be. So if we are seeing them as incredible leaders and noticing every little thing we appreciate about what they do daily, their attention will also grow into that.
The opposite is also true.
When we see others as incompetent we can’t help but notice every little thing they do wrong, which may also influence how they see themselves.
The research in the Solution Focus approach that I trained in shows that constant praise and acknowledgement is a far better predictor of high performing teams than negative feedback.
Of course there’s value in constructive feedback. But who we are being as leaders and how we see people speak a lot louder than what we say to people.
Keep acknowledging people into who you want them to be.
Love,
Felipe