Give Positive Feedback Just For Doing Their Job! - Part 1

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Manager Tools – “Give Positive Feedback Just For Doing Their Job!” (Part 1 of 2)
Date: July 6, 2026
Hosts: Sarah and Mark

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Episode Overview

This episode tackles a foundational but frequently misunderstood aspect of management: why and how to give positive feedback to team members—not just for extraordinary achievements, but for the consistent, everyday behaviors that meet expectations. Sarah and Mark challenge the common managerial mindset that feedback is only warranted for mistakes or “above and beyond” performance, arguing instead that frequent, specific positive feedback for doing the job as expected is essential for trust and effectiveness.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Core Question: What Should Managers Give Positive Feedback For?

• There’s a misconception among managers that positive feedback requires something remarkable or unique. This episode’s central theme is pushing against that idea: any correctly performed, expected behavior merits positive feedback.
  • Quote:
    “Is there anything too small for positive feedback? Again, no.” – Mark (00:20)

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2. Sooner and Smaller: The Feedback Principle

• Managers should give feedback quickly (“sooner”) and for even the smallest behaviors (“smaller”), rather than saving it up for major issues or reviews.
  • Quote:
    “Sooner and smaller. Not later and longer.” – Mark (01:37)
• Waiting to address issues (positive or negative) until they build up turns feedback into a daunting “conversation about an issue” rather than a light, ongoing process.

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3. Most Things Going Right Go Unnoticed

• The reality is that most things in organizations are going well or according to plan—the business wouldn’t survive otherwise. Yet, managers tend to focus on errors, feeding a negative bias.
  • Quote:
    “The vast majority of things that happen in your organization are good... if they weren’t, your company would go out of business.” – Sarah (02:20)

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4. The Road to Negative Feedback is Paved with Positive Feedback

• Effectively delivering corrective (negative) feedback depends on a foundation of trust—trust built by frequent positive feedback.
  • Quote:
    “The silver bullet for negative feedback is positive feedback. And they miss hundreds of opportunities to give positive feedback every day.” – Mark (04:50)
• If managers focus only on pointing out mistakes, they damage relationships and reduce the impact of future necessary corrections.

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5. Why Managers Miss Opportunities

• Many managers don’t even see the small, positive moments, because they aren’t looking for them. There’s an unhelpful bar set where only exceptional performance deserves acknowledgement.
• Everyday, standard performance (reliably meeting deadlines, showing up, communicating professionally) is typically ignored for feedback.

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6. Reframing Feedback: It’s About the Future, Not the Past

• Feedback—positive or negative—is meant to support and shape future behavior, not dwell on past errors or assign blame.
  • Quote:
    “Feedback is about encouraging positive future behavior. It’s not about examining the past.” – Sarah (08:11)

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7. A Simple, Effective Feedback Model

• While the Manager Tools feedback model is recommended (“Can I give you some feedback? When you do X, here’s what happens...”), the key is to have a simple, repeatable framework. Lack of a standard approach leads to procrastination and overthinking.
  • Mark’s summary (paraphrased, 07:08):
    If you don’t use our model or a standard one, giving feedback becomes longer and later because you hesitate or need to process every instance anew.

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8. Timeliness: The One-Week Rule

• Do not give feedback (positive or negative) more than a week after the event. After a week, “let it go.”
  • Quote:
    “If it’s been over a week, don’t mention it. Let it go.” – Mark (12:13)

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9. The Middleman Test: Empathizing with Direct Reports

• Imagine if your boss only criticized mistakes and never noticed your good work. That’s demotivating and erodes trust. Your team feels the same if you don’t point out their good, standard performance.
  • Quote:
    “Suppose your boss never mentioned any of the good things you did, but always pointed out your mistakes. How would you feel about that boss?” – Mark (17:26)

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10. Trust is Built Through One-on-Ones—even More Than Feedback

• While positive feedback matters, regular one-on-ones—focused on what matters to your team—are the best trust-building tool.
  • Quote:
    “You have to engage in behaviors outside of feedback that are about building a trusting relationship.” – Mark (19:10)
• Recommendation: 12 weeks of one-on-ones before starting regular positive feedback, then 8 weeks of positive feedback before introducing negative feedback.

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11. How “Just Doing the Job” is Actually the Manager’s Dream

• If your whole team delivered every expected behavior—no more, no less—your work life would be transformed. That’s a result worth acknowledging with positive feedback.
  • Quote:
    “If the folks on my team just do exactly what I asked them to do, the way I asked them to do it, my world cracks open... why are we not giving more positive feedback for all of the things our team members do well, not even well, just to a standard expectation?” – Sarah (25:09)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “Sooner and smaller. Not later and longer.” – Mark (01:37)
• “The vast majority of things that happen in your organization are good… because if they weren’t, your company would go out of business.” – Sarah (02:20)
• “The road to negative feedback goes through positive feedback.” – Mark (05:34)
• “Feedback is about encouraging positive future behavior. It’s not about examining the past.” – Sarah (08:11)
• “The silver bullet for negative feedback is positive feedback.” – Mark (04:50)
• “You can’t build trust by just giving positive feedback... The way to build trust is by talking to people about what’s important to them.” – Mark (19:10-19:30)
• “If you want to give more negative feedback, once you’ve built trust, give lots of positive feedback.” – Mark (24:07)
• “12 weeks of one-on-ones before you start positive feedback, then 8 weeks of positive feedback before negative.” – Mark (23:35)

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Key Takeaways for Managers

• Give positive feedback often—even for basic “doing the job” behaviors.
• Don’t wait for something extraordinary to acknowledge good work.
• Timely, specific positive feedback builds the trust necessary for effective corrective feedback.
• One-on-ones are essential for trust; build the foundation before introducing feedback systems.
• Most employees wish their consistent hard work was appreciated. Don’t miss the chance!

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:09 – Episode purpose and questions addressed
• 01:25 – The principle of “sooner and smaller” feedback
• 03:00 – Why most things in organizations are actually going well
• 05:11 – Three-point outline for the episode
• 08:11 – The future-oriented purpose of feedback
• 12:13 – One-week rule for delivering feedback
• 14:00 – Why positive feedback is the route to building trust
• 17:26 – The “middleman test”—feeling negative bias from above and below
• 19:10-19:30 – Trust, positive feedback, and effectiveness of one-on-ones
• 23:35 – Recommended rollout for one-on-ones and feedback
• 25:09 – The vision of a team that “just does its job” and what that means for managers

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Conclusion:
This episode reframes feedback as a daily, positive act foundational to all other aspects of management—not a rare or special event. Positive feedback, even for everyday expectations, is not only allowed but essential. One-on-ones and a structured approach to feedback build the trust that makes all other performance management effective.

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Transcript

[Sarah]

Welcome to Manager Tools.

[Mark]

This is Sarah and I'm Mark.

[Sarah]

Today's podcast give positive feedback just for doing their job.

[Mark]

Part 1 of 2 as always, our content has been crafted by Humans me and is now certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are what should I give positive feedback for? Does positive feedback require a special or unique contribution? No. Is there anything too small for positive feedback? Again, no.

[Sarah]

If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening.

[Announcer]

A virtual interview training that actually teaches you how to interview. Not just tips, not just frameworks on a slide. The Effective Hiring Manager conference is a live, practice driven day where you learn behavioral questioning, structured note taking and calibrated evaluation available virtually because hiring mistakes don't wait for travel schedules. Join us with Sessions starting on July 16th. For more information please visit manager-tools.come ehmc

[Sarah]

we are talking today about feedback. Specifically about feedback. Giving more positive feedback.

[Mark]

Yeah. And smaller, simpler.

[Sarah]

Yeah.

[Mark]

Lighter. Yeah.

[Sarah]

What is it that Matt Bintliff says? Shorter and smaller, not later and longer. Is that it?

[Mark]

Sooner and smaller.

[Sarah]

Sooner and smaller.

[Mark]

Not later and longer.

[Sarah]

Not later and longer or not longer and later?

[Mark]

Yeah. Yeah. If your boss has something to say to you, if you make a mistake one time, would you rather she give it to you then hey, you made a small mistake here, maybe work on that. Or would you rather she wait until there are seven or eight instances and and then for it to be a bigger thing? I call that having a conversation about an issue. Right. Rather than just giving feedback and who wouldn't want to know sooner, right? I'd rather know sooner.

[Sarah]

Yeah. And folks, the same thing is true of positives in that why wait till somebody's done something, well multiple times to give them a positive. You're not reaping any of the rewards those first six times that they did it.

[Mark]

Right? Exactly.

[Sarah]

But one of the things that, that we find to be true, I mean I just been talking to people about management all week it seems obviously and we notice especially when we're doing our effective manager conferences is the vast majority of things that happen in your organization are good and most, most the people within the organization managers and probably are more prone to this, this false narrative. But most of us don't realize that that's true. And when you're in the organization, when you're actually doing the work, it's easy to see all the mistakes. But folks, of course the majority of things that are happening are good because if they weren't, your company would go out of business.

[Mark]

You know, I was thinking about this, Sarah this is just like our own selves. We beat ourself up for all of our mistakes. I mean, I know successful people who are constantly talking about what they don't do well and how they're frustrated and you know, and, and sure, what they say is some of that frustration creates a drive to get better. Agreed. Although too much frustration does not help drive. Right. It depresses you, it makes you less willing to take, take risk. But this is just an extension of that. We're surrounded by people who love us, who care about us, who believe in us, who don't want to hang around us because we're terrible. It's because we're good. But our internal self talk is, you know, I'm too fat. I, you know, I should work out more, I should work harder at work, I should be a better father, mother, brother, sister, whatever. When in fact the people around us are generally incredibly happy. And I hate to be dark, but people don't talk at funerals about all of your mistakes. They talk about how wonderful you were, how, how kind you were, how giving you were, how much you were good, brother, sister, mother, husband, father, whatever.

[Sarah]

Yeah. And folks, the problem with this in the organizational context really is that many of us as managers think it's our job and it's the part of our job that we hate the most to give negative feedback. But the thing is, to our previous conversation, it's backwards thinking. The road to be able to give negative feedback and have it be effective negative feedback, do what we want it to do, that is change behavior is really through positive behavior. And we're putting a far too high a bar on what behaviors actually deserve positive feedback.

[Mark]

Yeah, exactly. A lot of managers admit what they want, they secretly want. And we get this question all the time. Really. I just want a silver bullet. I just. You just need to tell me how to talk to my people about when they make mistakes.

[Sarah]

It's a diet pill.

[Mark]

Which is. Yes, exactly. Which just absolutely shows how they're focused on their own thing. They did the wrong thing. They don't realize that the silver bullet for negative feedback is positive feedback. And they miss hundreds of opportunities to give positive feedback every day. Literally hundreds.

[Sarah]

Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. So we've got a three part outline today. First, we're going to start by discussing the fact or talking about the fact that the road to negative feedback goes through positive feedback. Then most managers can't see the opportunity because they're not looking for it. And then finally look for small positives your team members doing their jobs.

[Mark]

Yeah. And in fact, on the look for small positives, I recur back to our podcast that met Bitliff. Inspired, actually, about smaller and sooner, not larger and later. And we're going to give a bunch of examples. I think the podcast is actually called eight Examples of Positive Feedback. Right. Just trying to get people started, just giving them a little germ, a little catalyst to get them going and thinking differently about it. And almost no one talks to me about that cast. And I don't think we did a good enough job in that cast. About lowering the bar, the thing you said earlier, the bar is too high.

[Sarah]

Yeah.

[Mark]

Right. We're waiting until something really great happens as opposed to the day to day that people do that never gets noticed because we're not even looking for it.

[Sarah]

Yeah.

[Mark]

Okay. So the start is the road to negative feedback goes through positive feedback. Totally agree. Now look, we're going to start with a caveat here. Or as Sarah would say, caveat.

[Sarah]

Caveat.

[Mark]

Caveat. Good French pronunciation. Yes. And we know that some of you are new to us. Okay. We're always getting new members and we sometimes operate under the curse of knowledge. I use the example of a freshman English teacher in college and the freshmen are always coming to her being freshmen and only knowing high school stuff. But she's getting smarter every year. She's reading more, she's studying more, she's writing papers, she's talking to her colleagues, she continues to learn, she continues has insights about her business. This is what happens to us when we become managers, senior managers, directors and so on. It's like the joke that every 40 year old always thinks 20 year olds are stupid because they've forgotten that they were just like that when they were 20. That's why this whole generational management stuff is total idiocy. And we've talked about it actually as a scam. So we know you might be new to us. And you don't know the manager tools feedback model. And so we've linked to it at the bottom of this cast. Now look, this guidance about giving feedback, you don't actually have to use our model. You don't. Our model is one we've tested. It works. It takes 10 seconds, it's easy as pie. All you have to do is practice it 10 or 15 times and you'll have it. You'll never forget it. Hey, can I give you some feedback when you do X? Here's what happens. When it's good, that's a good thing. When it's bad, can you work on that? That's all it takes. Right. But you could use other words if you wanted to, although those words should be similar every time, so you don't have to think about it. But if you don't use our feedback model, you're going to struggle because you're going to be breaking the two foundational rules of feedback.

[Sarah]

Absolutely. The first of those is feedback is about encouraging positive future behavior. It's not about examining the past. It's not about digging up the past. Feedback is not a root cause analysis either. No matter how many people I talk to who would like it to be that, especially managers, I find they want to dig through the under underlying parts of it. For those unfamiliar with the underlying principles of feedback, both positive and negative feedback share the exact same purpose to encourage positive behavior in the future. That's why there's only one feedback model for both positive and negative instances. And I gotta tell you, Mark, the way that I talk to managers about the feedback model and the need for feedback makes it crystal clear to them the purpose of feedback. Because I say to everyone all the time, why on earth, if you can't change the past, do you bother talking to people about what they've done at all? And it's always like, oh, we're trying to give them information to help them do their job better. I'm like, oh, okay, better future. You're not trying to reward people or punish them.

[Announcer]

Right.

[Sarah]

And they're like, absolutely not. It's all about the future. So managers know it's about the future. Intellectually they do. But there's. There's this. There's mental. I don't even know how to explain it. There's. There's this disconnect between what we say we want or what we say we're doing. And then in the moment, what we feel like we want or we feel like we're doing.

[Mark]

Right. Well, I would argue if you're a young professional, you're in your 20s, maybe 30, all of your examples have been people correcting you.

[Sarah]

Yeah.

[Mark]

If you do poorly on a test, they give you a. Yeah, exactly. You made a mistake there. You did that wrong. Right? Yeah. That's why we tell people you can actually use the feedback model on your kids. It works. The American Family association is asked to license it. We're like, no, because we never tested it on families and teachers and coaches and everybody. They point out your mistakes.

[Sarah]

Yep. You're absolutely right.

[Mark]

Yeah. And I'll tell you, I really enjoy. I admit I drew it, but that Diagram we have at the Effective Manager conference where we show them the positive and negative in the morning, the behaviors, and then the noon thing. That is. Okay, now you've learned about a good thing or a bad thing, what are you going to do? And everybody wants to focus on the past when in fact you. In both positive and negative feedback's case, the goal is positive behavior in the future. That's why there's only one model, because we only have one goal and that's why there's only one tone. We don't give negative feedback with grit between our teeth like, you made a mistake. We don't do that. We say, hey, when that happens, when you did that, that wasn't helpful. Can we do that differently next time? That's all we're focusing on, the positive outcome we want in the future. There's nothing you can do about the past. If there is something you do about the past, you shouldn't be listening to this podcast.

[Sarah]

Yeah, you have bigger fish to fry, dude. You can travel time.

[Mark]

Seriously, bigger fish to fry. Good. So the second foundational rule, first, of course, is, as Sarah said, feedback is about encouraging positive behavior in the future. Okay. The second of the foundational rules is that feedback is so critical that managers who do not have a standard framework to deliver it. Therefore, our model end up coming up with what to say each and every time. And because of that, because they have to process it and they don't know what exactly to say, they don't have a readily available script. Even though you don't have to be perfect with our feedback script, they hesitate and they have to think it through and they have to go, oh, I mean, you write that down and then think about what I'm going to say when in fact, that's not useful. Right? Because the more time you think about what to say, the longer it takes. Going back to Matt Pintliff's part, you know, it tends to be longer and later because you've wasted too much time. And for the record, if you're wondering how long you can wait to give feedback about a behavior, positive or negative, the answer is one week. Okay, if it's been over a week, don't mention it. Let it go.

[Sarah]

Exactly. So, folks, as Mark mentioned earlier, in this cast, we encourage you to listen to or read if you are a licensee and have access to our show notes, the guidance on the Manager Tools feedback model. Again, there's a link at the bottom of this podcast and you can find many topically similar podcasts in and around the Feedback kind of topic at our website. Manager-tools.com and all of the links at

[Mark]

the bottom of this page will show up on this podcast webpage.

[Sarah]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark]

So if you're. If you want to go to the website and type in the title. Right. What's our title here? Give positive feedback just for people doing their jobs. Right. If you type that in, it'll take you to the page and all the links will be there and you can listen to the website or you can find them on your podcast tool.

[Announcer]

Whatever you use, your team understands you. But does that mean you're communicating? Well, there's a difference between being heard and actually connecting. The Effective Communicator conference reveals that your natural communication style works for all. Only about 25% of people you lead. The other 75% need something different. And most managers never realize that gap exists. We'll teach you how to read behavioral cues, adapt your style and reach. All of them available for individual managers and full leadership teams. Learn more at Manager Tools.

[Mark]

Now, having said those two foundational principles, why does the road to negative feedback go through positive feedback? And the reason is simple, guys. And if you think about it, it's really simple. Because if you don't give positive feedback to professionals who do many good things every day and only focus on their negatives, you will destroy your trusting relationship with them.

[Announcer]

Yeah.

[Sarah]

Which now again, go. Going back to our models is the only reason we're doing one on ones at all, frankly. So why would we spend all this time and energy and effort in one on ones only? To destroy all the goodwill built by focusing exclusively on negatives. Exactly. Now, we again know many of you don't believe that you think, wait a minute though, they will know I know they're doing good things and they do know that. But most of those good things are just them doing their job, for which they surely don't need me to tell them, good job just for doing your job. Like, good job just for showing up on time. Good job just for coming to the meeting. And what's more, my job certainly includes talking about mistakes and other failures because those have to be corrected immediately.

[Mark]

Yeah.

[Sarah]

And you know, one of the things that I think is that the trickiest part about this, this conundrum is if we say let's. And I'm making up data here, because this isn't, this isn't a true ratio. But let's say there's 100% of a person's behaviors and let's say 10% of them are negative. Let's say 10% of them are above and beyond.

[Mark]

Okay.

[Sarah]

Which means 80% of them are just acceptable standard, just them doing their job, doing their job. Right. Now because you, manager, human being, if you will, are an error finder, you're prone to see more of the things on the negative side than you are the things on the above and beyond side. So you're more likely because now we're already ignoring 80% right out the gate. Right?

[Mark]

Right, yeah.

[Sarah]

Now if you're more likely to see the negative side and you're not even counting the 80% of things that they're doing because they don't count as good enough to be discussed now it's feeding back into that all we talk about is negatives thing as managed.

[Mark]

That's exactly right. And yeah, we agree you're going to give them feedback, you're going to tell them good job on the stuff where they went above and beyond. But to them they're doing 80% positive and your feedback is 90%. Yeah, that's right. You're right. It's 90% good and then above good. Right, right. But your feedback is 50, 50 positive, negative. I've never done that simple like anecdotal math in my head. That's pretty damning, folks.

[Sarah]

If 80% of the things on your team aren't being done well, to my previous point, your organization goes out of business. More importantly, as a manager, you lose your job because they're like, oh, whoa, whoa, this team is doing very poorly because under 80 is really, really bad. So yeah, it's really. Now you're taking 90% positive, you're trying to turn that into only 50% of the equation which immediately does a disservice to the people. Immediately.

[Mark]

And people don't do the math, but they feel it.

[Sarah]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mark]

Here's the other thing, the other way to think about this. This also the thinking that you only have to focus on negatives because you want to get negative feedback and you don't realize there's this passel of positive feedback just waiting to be given. Because of all the good, the 80% that meet the standard every day, it fails what we call the middleman test. The middleman test is based on the principle that whatever you think of your boss, your directs probably think of you within a standard deviation or so. If you apply that test here, suppose your boss never mentioned any of the good things you did, but always pointed out your mistakes. How would you feel about that? Boss, we know how you feel because we've all felt it like your boss didn't trust you, didn't respect you, and didn't recognize all the energy and successes you brought to the organization.

[Sarah]

That's exactly it, folks. The boss who only gives negative feedback because positive feedback is just doing one's job destroys trust, which weakens the value of the negative feedback that they want to give. We managers who want to perfect our negative feedback by focusing on it, ruin the value of it over time.

[Mark]

Yep. It's just small time thinking, that's all it is, folks. We're not trying to accuse you of anything. We've been there.

[Sarah]

Yeah, exactly. I still fight the battle every day in my mind.

[Mark]

Yes. I didn't know this when I was a manager, quote unquote in the army. I didn't know it as a manager or an executive, a Procter and Gamble or in my own company, Horseman Company, before, until I started gathering data and started digging into it and discovering, oh my gosh, we've got it all wrong. No wonder managers are hated. Or at least. Yeah. So we need to make a couple other points here about positive and negative feedback and trust. First, you can't build trust by just giving positive feedback. Okay, I know we just said, hey, you gotta get the road to negative feedback goes through positive feedback, but there's another stop on the road. And I'm sorry about this, but it's true, because we've tested it on hundreds of thousands of managers. Positive feedback is helpful, no question, and it does build trust. But the way to maintain a foundation of trust regardless of your feedback behaviors is to conduct manager tools one on ones. And by the way, I shouldn't say it exactly like that. You have to engage in behaviors outside of feedback that are about building a trusting relationship if you really want a foundation of trust, so you don't actually have to use our model for one on ones. But just to be clear, the way you build trust with another human being is talk to them about things that are important to them. That's what makes you a good conversationalist. That's why people will like you when you meet them for the first time. You ask questions about them and you focus on them and people say, wow, that person's a great conversationalist. They really liked me. They seem curious about me. I was interesting to them. They really were excited to talk to me. Which is true, by the way. If you're a good conversationalist, it will make you excited about talking to other people, even if they don't ask you a single question about yourself. So by the Way we tried for several years at Horseman company to figure out what is the right model, the first one on ones we ever taught. I admit it. I admitted it a thousand times in public conferences that we taught managers going first in one on ones. That was a massive error, by the way. Managers took 28 of the 30 minutes. Yeah. So we've tested a lot of different models and our present one on one model is the best model for trust building behavior that we've ever tested. By far. Nothing even comes close. Direct goes first, you go second. The direct gets to talk about whatever they want to talk about, even if it's something you don't want to talk about, because otherwise they never get a word in edgewise. Right. Because you're setting the agenda all the time. Yeah, that's what happens.

[Sarah]

What I often say to my managers when I'm talking to them is you're never building a relationship when only one person is talking and they have work falling out of their mouth.

[Mark]

Oh my gosh.

[Sarah]

Because that's what happens. Right? Only one person ends up talking. You can't build a relationship when only one person does all, all the talking

[Mark]

and they talk about what they're interested.

[Sarah]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark]

Yeah. And we all know what it's like to meet somebody like that. Right?

[Sarah]

Right.

[Mark]

It's. It's terrible. Like that person's selfish.

[Sarah]

Yeah.

[Mark]

Why should I trust them? They're selfish. They're always going to save themselves first.

[Sarah]

Yeah, exactly. So again, folks, first, you can't build trust by just giving positive feedback and no one on ones. And second, we highly recommend you start building trust with one on ones before you even start using our feedback model at all. And we know that this is slower than you want to go, but as Mark's co founder Mike Ozen likes to say, with people, fast is slow. And if you introduce too many new managerial behaviors all at the same time, they will all fail simultaneously. And I mean, do not get me wrong, we are the epitome of speed. We love speed. But again, to our past conversation, all of these things were born of data, born of trials. And we tried for decades to speed things up and to have this rollout go successfully but more quickly. And we haven't solved that yet. So if there's a way to do it, we haven't found it and we haven't proven that any quicker than what we recommend will even work.

[Mark]

Trying with hundreds of thousands of managers and we couldn't get it. We recommend 12 weeks of one on ones before you start positive feedback. And then 8 weeks of positive feedback often occurring during your one on ones before you even introduce negative feedback. Yeah, so I'm not going to sum up, but I'm going to just say something really important because it's in bold on the show notes. So folks, by the way, if you don't like my voice, Sarah sounds great, but if you don't like my voice, you can always in your licensee, which is a good reason to become a licensee, you can read these. And the great thing about reading them is it's a lot faster to read them first. And you don't have to go find your recording. You can print out the show notes and keep them by your desk and refer to them whenever you want to. And based on our license agreement with you, if you become a licensee, you can share them with your direct so they can learn about what you're learning. Why wouldn't you? So if you want to give more negative feedback, the thing to do once you've built trust is to give lots of positive feedback. For many of you, when that happens, some of your directs we admit, usually your best ones. That's what our data say. Actually, our data doesn't say that. It's very clear from the data that the, that the inference we should make is that the best ones want negative feedback, that your best directs and more. But usually your best ones first will come to you asking for negative feedback because you've proven to them that you see the 80%. Okay, exactly, you've proven it. You've actually built trust by giving that positive feedback. What better way is there to have your negative feedback accepted than to hear from your directs that they want it in advance of you giving it. And imagine that they start hearing negative feedback with the same tone that you use with positive feedback. So you're not becoming a grinch, okay? And using basically the same words and showing them that in both cases, positive and negative, the purpose is to encourage effective future behavior. Negative feedback, you ask for a change. Positive feedback, you ask for more of the same. That's the only difference in the model at all.

[Sarah]

And folks, one more thing to think about. What would your life be like if everyone on your team just did their job exactly as expected. Not anymore, but not any less. All the time. They met all their deadlines, they did quality work, they worked well with others, they communicated frequently and positively. I mean, I gotta tell you, if the folks on my team just do exactly what I asked them to do, the way I asked them to do it, my world cracks open. I mean, see, honestly, like, like all of the clouds go away, it's sunny. A bluebird lands on my shoulder. I'm like, what on earth is happening right now? Why then knowing that are we not giving more positive feedback for all of the things our team members do? Well, not even well, just do to a standard expectation because everything so much easier. People just do exactly what they were expected to do. Thank you so much for joining us folks. We hope you join us again next week as we continue this topic. Now, help us help others and tell your friends. And of course, follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only.

[Mark]

Five stars only. Please.