THE IMPORTANCE OF SHOWING YOUR TEAM RECOGNITION AND APPRECIATION

Dr John Gottman is probably the Western world’s foremost marriage researcher (until my wife finishes her PhD in marriage and then I will change my opinion on the subject).  

Gottman has tracked married couples for more than three decades now and has discovered a number of factors which cause some marriages to thrive and others to fail.  

One of the key factors that he has identified which not only keeps marriages together, but makes them happy, healthy, and stable is the “positive to negative ratio”. He and his team have identified a ratio that good marriages have at least five positive comments to every one negative comment.  

I’ll often ask leadership participants if they can guess the ratio prior to telling them, and I’m surprised how many people over the years have guessed that the ratio of negative comments is higher than the ratio of positive comments in good marriages. I then go on to tell the course participants that a Harvard Business School research project into the characteristics and attributes of high performing teams also identified a positive to negative ratio, and it is exactly the same as Gottman’s ratio of 5 to 1. 

Decades ago, I met with my boss who was in the process of handing me my own leadership portfolio. As part of the handover, he made the following comment to me: “You won’t hear from me unless something goes wrong”. I understood his intent and what he meant at the time: “I trust you with this area of leadership, there is no need for me to micromanage you, so you should take silence to mean that I’m happy with your performance”.  

Although I understood that he was trying to say something positive and affirming, that he trusted me to lead in this area of the organisation without constantly looking over my shoulder, he failed to recognise that effectively managing people’s performance means giving five times more positive affirmation than negative commentary ‘when things go wrong’. No doubt he had grown up under leadership that had said the same thing to him, and he had mistakenly come to think that effective leadership meant leaving people to their own devices in a vacuum devoid of recognition, until something goes wrong.  

The Harvard research was clear on the 5 to 1 ratio but commented on the necessity that constructive feedback not be “sugar-coated” or played down- it was also a vital part of high performing teams’ effective execution. 

So, my boss was right not to ignore addressing areas of my subpar work but failed to realise that lack of performance on my part could be partially attributed to a lack of positive recognition on his part in the first place. Not only is positive recognition naturally expected when people deliver on results, but it also puts ‘money in the bank’ (preferably in a 5 to 1 ratio), so that when the tougher subjects need to be discussed, then there is a healthy relational surplus to weather the withdrawal of a tough conversation.