Highlights
When I read books, I use different color highlighters and sticky tabs to mark excerpts that stand out or inspire me. I believe we use internal highlighters and tabs to mark things people do and say that stand out to us. Unfortunately, most tend to highlight the less than favorable things. Have you ever noticed how quick we are to highlight the faults and mistakes rather than highlight the good and positive attributes of someone?
There is in an old, in my opinion a useless one, management technique used in employee reviews called the Praise Sandwich. You initiate dialog with praise and positive feedback, throw in the infamous BUT, slam the person with what they do wrong in the middle, and then heap praise on them again. What does the employee remember? They remember the slamming they received in the middle. We all have improvement areas as no one is perfect, but why do most put more emphasis on the less than favorable areas than the positive and good things? When we highlight and emphasize the less than favorable areas, we assign more importance to them than the positive areas.
Personally, I strive to highlight the positive in someone and where there areas of improvement needing discussion, I replace BUT with AND. I believe using “AND” instead of “BUT” acknowledges a person’s strengths along with giving them a path to grow and improve even more. Let’s change the recipe for the Praise Sandwich to highlight the positive, highlight the positive, AND layer on a path forward to increase the positive.
Rodney - Freshly Highlighed & I Don't Mean My Hair!
My usual way is to give someone the benefit of the doubt, to put the but right there when they do wrong, and sometimes I shouldn't. There are people who no matter how you try to tell them the right things they do, will do the wrong in the next instant. I'm not sure if it's an effort on their part to control the room or what, but I'll still do the positive thing until they force themselve to completely fail.
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