Brain Fertilizer

One thing that struck me as I was driving to work with the kids*:

If something is important enough that you hammer a mistake with a punishment (even if merely a "don't do that"), then it is certainly important enough to hammer the success when they do it right. In fact, you should aggressively praise correct behavior quite a bit.

Much of good parenting and good leadership is catching someone doing something right so you can praise them for it.**

If leadership is the art of influencing people to do what they don't naturally want to do (and it is), then your tools fall into two groups: positive reinforcement of wanted behavior and negative punishment of unwanted behavior. You should have a much heavier toolbox for the positive reinforcement side. It boggles my mind that so many would-be leaders don't actively seek out ways to positively motivate their subordinates. It is inexplicable to me that someone who would sweat blood for 5 hours over an award package won't spend 5 words to praise a good performace. I understand the idea is that if one person gets an award, the rest will work harder to try to achieve that same award...but their are problems with that concept:
-awards don't motivate everyone
-awards only go to the person who did "the best"...thus a person gets the same reward for coming close as they do for not trying: nothing
-when one person wins a few of the monthly or quarterly awards, it actually demotivates those who feel (rightly or wrongly) that reputation may matter more than actual achievement

Consider how much a pat on the back can mean to someone who has been sweating and laboring without expectation of anyone noticing...it costs 5 minutes of time, and maybe 30 minutes of observation to know who deserves it and when it would have the greatest effect. Compare that with the 5 hours of pain/frustration in trying to write an awards package, and a good leader should easily be able to tell where the time is better spent.

...not that writing awards packages aren't important. But if you spend more time observing your troops to know when/where pats on the back will do the most good, then you have a better idea of what your troops are doing all the time, which makes awards packages easier to write. While a leader certainly can't be expected to remember everything that 15-20 subordinates did over a full year, it is disheartening to a subordinate if the leader has no idea what you accomplished at all...

Simply put, if you don't know what your people are accomplishing, what exactly are you leading?

*continuing to run with the idea that parenting and leadership of adults have many common aspects

**Which is an apt description of "setting up your subordinate for success"