Specific praise is good praise
About a month ago, I blogged about an article examining praise in a major Danish newspaper in which I’m quoted as being all in favor of praise. Katrine Dahl who is currently writing her phd thesis on collaborative writing processes sent me an email saying:
And I am quoted in that same article for saying something to the effect that general and superficial praise can be pointless or at its worst negative.
Praise should be specific and concrete (as should criticism!). Don’t say: I love your website. Do say: I love the way you create a friendly community on your website by actually reading and commenting so sincerely on the comments made by your readers. You pay attention to detail. You listen to their stories and connect them with your ideas. You try to give useful advice. You are not afraid of being open about your flaws. I specifically noticed the way you replied to N’s comment, that was…
Giving specific praise is extremely difficult. Paying attention, analyzing, reflecting is necessary. We need to get engaged, to get into stuff, to care.
Unlike sending off non-commital superlatives in all directions, which is pretty easy, but not particularly useful in any other terms than making the receiver feeling momentarily good about herself (which is a very good thing, I am totally with you on that).
The point is, that in order to learn from praise, so that we can do more of what it was that we did well, we need to know specifically what it was.
This dimension of praise is often overlooked. It shouldn’t be. The psychological dimension and the learning dimension of praise can so easily go hand in hand. In fact, I am convinced that the psychological benefits of praise are greater if that praise is given in a specific way.
I could not agree more – praise needs to be specific to be valuable. Thank you Katrine for adding to the topic in such a positive, interesting and useful way :o)
simplerich » It's all about praising praise... specifically specific praise Said,
June 7, 2007 @ 3:49 am
[...] you keep on hearing it. That means it bears repeating. Alexander Kjerulf in his blog over at positivesharing.com shares an e-mail that talks about the most effective kind of praise. It refers to the most [...]
Vanessa Said,
June 7, 2007 @ 5:27 am
Wow, what a good point. I am forwarding this article to a couple of my coworkers. Unfortunately, our boss has a way of constantly berating the amount of time we spend at work, then feels guilty about it, and gives very general, sweeping compliments. I feel that this article is pretty clear about more effective, and considerate praise.
Thank you (I have your site on my igoogle and love reading it).
Vanessa
Chris Sims Said,
June 7, 2007 @ 7:01 pm
Compliments and criticism are the two edges of the feedback sword. So, this generalizes well to ‘feedback must be specific’. In particular, you want to clearly describe the behavior that you observed. For instance: “Bob, I see that while you were fixing that bug you also added several new tests and refactored the module.? Now that Bob knows exactly what you are going to compliment him on, tell him about the impact this will have: “That will really make it easier for people to work in that module in the future, and probably prevent some bugs too!? At this point, if we were delivering criticism, we would request a change in behavior. Since we are giving a compliment, we can simply say thank you: “I really appreciate you doing that. Thanks.?
You… are great! Said,
December 14, 2008 @ 9:58 pm
[...] Specific praise is good praise. [...]
Lars Hoffmann Said,
December 17, 2008 @ 3:05 pm
Certainly! A psychological experiment of school children on praise showed that general abstract praise caused the children to quit quicker and become more easily frustrated than children receiving specific praise when faced with math pieces they could not solve! Quite interesting.
Substralificering – fem tips til at få samarbejdet til at gro « Katrine Dahl Clement Said,
March 11, 2011 @ 10:56 am
[...] siger også vores egen Chief Happiness Officer Alexander Kjerulf og øser ud af sin glæde, og god ros er specifik, har jeg en gang sagt ovre på hans blog Positive [...]