A leader who says good work about everything has not created a positive environment. They have removed their own ability to tell anybody that something was actually good.
The mechanism is the same one that governs any currency. Issue more of it against the same underlying value and each unit buys less, until eventually nobody prices it at all.
People read the distribution, not the words
Nobody evaluates praise in isolation. They evaluate it against everything else the same person has said recently, and the comparison is automatic.
If the response to a routine report and the response to six months of difficult work are indistinguishable, the second one has been diminished rather than the first elevated. The person who did the difficult work notices immediately, and what they learn is not that their leader is generous. It is that their leader does not distinguish, which means the leader either did not understand what was involved or was not paying attention.
This is why inflated praise frequently lands as an insult to precisely the people it was meant to encourage.
Specific praise cannot inflate
Here is the resolution, and it means the answer is not simply to praise less.
Generic praise inflates because it is interchangeable. Good work, nice job, thanks for everything. These are identical whatever produced them, which is what allows the currency to expand without limit.
Specific praise cannot inflate, because it is not fungible. You caught the discrepancy in the second schedule that three of us had read past. That statement can only be made about one act, it cannot be issued casually, and it carries evidence that you understood what happened. A leader can give this kind of recognition constantly without any loss of value.
It also does something the generic version cannot. It tells everybody within earshot what is actually valued here, in operational terms, which is a more effective instrument for shaping behaviour than any statement of values.
Effort and outcome are different objects
Both deserve recognition and the two should not be merged, for the same reason a decision and its result should not be.
An organization that praises only outcomes is rewarding luck alongside judgment and will teach people to avoid anything uncertain. One that praises only effort will eventually be understood to be consoling people rather than recognising them, and effort praise attached to a failed outcome reads as a kindness rather than an assessment.
The workable form names which one is being recognised. That did not land and the approach was right; I would want it run the same way again. That sentence is honest about both halves, and it is considerably more useful than either praising a failure or ignoring good work because the result went the wrong way.
Public and private do different work
Public praise is not simply private praise with an audience. It performs a second function and carries a second cost.
Its function is to tell the room what is valued, which makes it the right instrument when the behaviour should be general. Its cost is that it is comparative: praising one person in front of others is also a statement about the others, and in a small team the statement is heard clearly.
Private praise carries no comparative weight and is therefore the better instrument for recognising a person rather than an act. It is also the only kind that some people can receive at all. A leader who only praises publicly is doing half the job and will systematically under-recognise anyone who finds the public version uncomfortable.
Two failures worth naming
Praise as preamble. If recognition regularly appears immediately before a request or a correction, people learn to hear it as a warning. The praise stops registering as praise and starts registering as the sound of something coming, which costs you both instruments at once.
Praise the leader collects. The team did excellent work, said by the person who ran the team, is a statement about the person who ran the team. Naming individuals costs the leader a small amount of reflected credit and is the entire difference between recognition and its appearance.
The opposite failure is more common
Everything above concerns a leader who praises too freely. In practice the more frequent problem runs the other way, and it is usually not deliberate.
Work that goes well produces no event. Nothing arrives in your inbox, no meeting is scheduled, nothing interrupts you. Work that goes badly produces all of those. A leader responding to what reaches them will therefore comment almost exclusively on problems, and will do so while sincerely believing they recognise good work, because the recognition happened in their head where nobody could observe it.
The correction is mechanical rather than attitudinal. Once a week, identify something that went well and find out who specifically caused it, which frequently requires asking. Then say so, to them, with the detail included. This will feel artificial for about a month and then stop feeling like anything, which is the point at which it has become part of how you work.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD