Espresso: Will Guidara - Praise Is Affirmation. Criticism Is Investmen

0:00I talk often about how the best organizations are those that develop a culture of feedback, of consistent feedback. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by that, I mean not just one where it is well-received, but one where it is genuinely sought out. And when I'm talking about feedback, obviously I'm talking about praise. If you're leading a team and you set high expectations and people meet or exceed those expectations, you better celebrate them. Yes. A, because it's the right thing to do, but B, because the more praise you receive, the more you want to receive. It's a great way to affirm the right behavior.

0:36And yet at the same time, so many people are so focused on praise that they forget about the fueling power of criticism. Because of praise is affirmation, criticism is investment. Your thing about consistent criticism, which I've listened to, that's really interesting because it's not criticizing when it's too late. It's the idea of criticizing often and regularly, but kind of taking the emotion out of it. Being unemotional. How do you, I mean, that's, again, I think that's one of those things that's easy in theory, hard in practice. Well, it's like anything. It's hard in practice until you build muscles around it.

1:15Sure, okay. And by building muscles around it, I'm not only talking about the person delivering the criticism, but also those receiving it. any specific examples of that that you could jump into? I mean, I had a meeting. I'll give you an example of just the other day. Sure, sure. And by the way, this is where you do need to develop some level of familiarity with the people that you lead. My approach to criticism is we're going to have a conversation. I'm not going to be emotional about it. I'm going to tell you where you went wrong. And the moment that conversation is over, it's behind us. Now let's get right back to it.

1:52but my role is to communicate to you what right looks like so that we can thrive together yes we're working with this this group and they sent out a deck to a client which had my name and face all over it and they sent it to the client without ever showing it to me right and so we're getting on this zoom it's like 10 of us for this brainstorm and at the very beginning i said hey real quick before we start don't ever send a deck out with my name and likeness on it again without me seeing at first. And I said it like that, which perhaps for them, they weren't expecting the call to start out with a, with a dose of criticism.

2:28Was this with everyone on the call? Yeah. I think the point is, is what I'm finding, cause I'm, I'm highly emotional and chaotic. So with my team on the, with the podcast is, and I'm again, I need to do, do some serious gym training on this, but, um, cause I'm also flying at like a hundred miles an hour with just my brain of like ideas and stuff is I need to get almost more like um kind of systems in place to to be like this is when we're now trying to do like a production call but before I'd be like why the fuck have you done that and it then and I got the feedback being like mate you need to just chill yeah yeah but I think it's yeah it's it's an interesting one of just so you're almost saying like you just take the emotion out of it from the jump and you do it and it's getting into the habit of doing it often because I feel like I know if something builds up builds up and I think it's a Tim Ferriss thing, you're the sum of the most, you're the sum of uncomfortable conversations you have.

3:23And I think so many as humans, where people pleases, you want to push it back. And that's when it goes into a volcano of emotion. And a lot of people, by the way, this is human nature, you want your team to like you. Yes. You don't want to be like the naggy person that's saying, hey, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. But the reality is they're going to like you a whole lot less if you're the person that when you finally do address something, you do it like a dick. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so if you do it earlier, you are more emotionally set up for success to actually communicate like an adult.

3:55Yes, yes. Now, to be clear, you better also be praising them. This is what I think a lot of driven people struggle with. And I'm the same way. Back in the day when I would walk into the dining room of one of my restaurants, my eye goes first to the things that are wrong. and if you only pause to focus on those things you're not actually showing up for your team in the way they need you to which is to say hey this thing awesome this thing awesome this thing awesome because when we name the things that are going well we also ensure that they're more likely to consistently go well do you can you give praise to yourself how do you do you have that muscle yeah I think you need to interesting I think you need to because the further up in the hierarchy you find yourself there's fewer and fewer people above you whose job it is to give you praise and we all need to feel like we've done a good job yeah because I'm hopeless at that and so like and it's interesting do you know Tom Kerridge the British chef he owns he does the Corinthia he's a big chef I know the name yeah big chef in the UK and we were talking about this because we were recording.

5:08It was pretty jokes, actually. It was during, so I walked up to the pod and I was like, I was like, where are you calling, bro? And it was like the middle, it was the middle of breakfast service in the Corinthia, five star hotel. That's cool. I was like, okay, this is kind of, I'm kind of a bit off piste here, but we'll figure it out. Yeah. But actually it was a really nice way. He just kind of had the hum of the dining room and just the chink and the conversation kind of erupting. It was beautiful. But he was like, I walk in here and I'm the only one who walks in. I noticed, he goes, this is right now so we're sat in the gorgeous dining room in central london he's like that painting's off that's off that thing's off yeah and we were sort of saying negative internal bias equals positive external results so the more if you're looking at things with a negative mindset it's actually making your business better because you're constantly improving it but i think the nuance is like if you're just constantly negative looking at the negative and it might be getting things better but it becomes you're kind of operating from not the the happiest of places.

6:04It's that thing of like excellence versus excellence leads to kind of... I'm bringing this up because I think there's a tie to excellence versus hospitality. Here's the thing. Yes, it makes your business better. Yep. But not as good as it could be if you do that and season all the things that are going well. Wow. Forget about me as a boss or a leader. I'm now going to look at the world through the lens of me 15, 20 years ago. I wanted to be great. I wanted to work for someone who would call me to a level of greatness I did not myself believe I was capable of. So I needed for the person I worked for to say, hey, you can be better here.

6:46You can be better. And yet I was working my ass off. I needed to be told when I was doing well. I needed to be celebrated for all the things that I was doing right. and those that can only focus on the things that are wrong, yeah, they're going to fix a lot of stuff. But if they're not also celebrating the things that are going right, A, it's not going to be a fun place to work and we deserve to have fun at work no matter what level we're playing. And B, this I see happen more often than it should. There's organizations where they're doing a lot of stuff really well. but because no one ever celebrates the things they are doing well they inadvertently stop doing them well