“You can do it!” - why encouragements can fail

Managers have more than other people the power and tools to influence people’s lives. Employees look up to their managers for examples and for feedback. They try to learn and find those qualities who could also make them successful.

Self confidence is a quality that can be trained and that needs to be feed with constant reassurement so that it will stay at a high level. Even the people who have generally a high level of self confidence go through moments of uncertainty when they need someone to tell them “You can do it!”

It happens quite a lot to hear encouragements from our managers but somehow only a few of these incentives have an impact on us. Why? Maybe because we don’t appreciate those persons, because we think they are just saying it to make us feel good or because they don’t know us good enough to be able to estimate if we can do what we want or not.

I was asked many times who is the person who influenced my professional life and whom I appreciate as a professional. My thoughts go always to one of my first managers because he encouraged me to pursue my dream. He said I have all it takes to achieve what I want and he is convinced I can do it. For me it meant so much, specially because I was at the beginning of my career and I was not sure if I had chosen the right area to work in. His words had such an impact on me and motivated me to work very hard for what I wanted professionally.

Thinking back, I realize that this specific encouragement had such a positive impact on me because I had a great respect for that person, I was impressed by his career and we worked together for enough time so that he could see my performance and potential. And there was something else. There was something in the way he talk to me. I had the feeling he is honest.

The risk of encouraging someone is to be perceived as fake and therefore cause more damage than good.

We shouldn't say “You can do it!” to someone if:

• we don’t know the other person good enough to tell what are his\her skills and abilities
• we think the person can’t do what she\he wants but we say it anyway because we find nothing better to say and we think it can’t hurt
• we don’t have enough information about what the other person wants to do
• we don’t have any examples and arguments to support our encouragement.

For some people it is natural to make positive and effective encouragements, however most of us need to learn this ability and to refine it in time. I find this to be an essential ability for every manager because this will help to build up and maintain an increased employee motivation. Employee who have a high level of self confidence can also have a great performance and do whatever it takes to reach the goals of the company.  

Looking forward to your feedback!

Giving and receiving feedback is a powerful tool at the workplace. It informs employees about their performance and behavior within the team. Without feedback, employees will get in a frustrating uncertainty that can become very demotivating. Feedback should be given and received in all directions in a hierarchy: from peers to peers, from employees to managers, from managers to employees. The purpose is to give guidance and to motivate people in reaching their goals. Giving feedback is not as easy as it may seem. If not done properly, the effect can be extremely negative: people will feel unmotivated and might even take the feedback as a personal attack.

It is commonly known that the feedback can be positive or negative. We need both of them to improve our performance even if the negative feedback is sometimes harder to accept. Both forms are ok from my point of view as long as they are constructive. Knowing how to give feedback is especially important for managers because they are the ones who need to guide and motivate the team. If they fail in giving right feedback, the performance of the whole team will suffer. What I discovered to be a very efficient way of giving feedback is the sandwich technique. In this process positive and negative feedback are offered alternatively. This way the employee will accept easier the negative comments as he will see that despite the things he needs to improve there are also things for which he is appreciated. Let’s take for example a meeting between a manager and one of his employees where the manager wants to give feedback to the employee about a specific situation.

This is the way I would see things going:

• The manager asks the employee his opinion about the situation he wants to address: “How do you think it went?”, “What did you think went well?”, “What do you wish you had done differently?”,
• The manager gives positive feedback: compliments the employee on the behavior or performance he wants to encourage and states the specific current behavior or performance that is complimented
• The manager gives negative feedback: focuses on the actions of the employee, not on the person, mentions the actions the person took or specific things said and defines positive future steps
• The manager gives positive feedback again and develops goals that the employee can work toward and explains how he will provide guidance.

Most of us are afraid of negative feedback because it is unpleasant and hard to accept. However both positive and negative feedback should be seen as sources of learning and improvement.

If we don’t receive feedback at work, we should go and ask for it. Otherwise we will lose a great chance to grow personally and professionally. 

RE: Your application 32456

“Dear Ms Melita, 

Thank you very much for the interest you show for an employment in our company. 

Unfortunately, we cannot offer you an employment in our company at this time. But we are confident that your qualification and knowledge will allow you to develop yourself with regard to your profession and according to your wishes. 

We wish you good luck for your future in your private and professional life. “

It’s not easy or pleasant to receive such emails. However it’s quite inevitable when looking for a job. Like with any other rejection we need to be able to handle them properly and make the best out of the situation. Otherwise our chances to find our best potential job might drop considerably.

First of all, before starting the search it’s important to set our expectations right. That means we should expect the following:    

• We might be looking for several months before finding the job we want
• Inevitably we will receive messages like the one from above
• It could happen that we go to two or three interviews with the same company and still receive at the end a message telling us that someone else was chosen for the job
• For certain applications we will have no feedback at all
• We need to put considerable effort and to invest time and energy in order to prepare our applications, search for jobs, send them and constantly try to improve our CVs and letters of intent

Realizing all this from the beginning will not make the search process easier but will help us keep up our level of energy and confidence. One of the common mistakes people do when looking for a job is creating a CV and letter of intent and use them as they are during the whole process.

Doing the same thing and expecting different results doesn't make too much sense. Therefore applying with the same CV after receiving negative feedback it might not be the best idea.

We will never know exactly why we were rejected no matter how much we think and speculate about it. Instead of spending time thinking at the reasons the employer had, it would be more efficient to try and review our CV and letter of intent and improve it constantly.

The online environment is full with information on how to create CVs and letters of intent. All we need to do is to adapt the information to our situation and try different styles until we find the one that works for us. What we should not forget is that our CV is the first thing the employer will know about us. Even if it might sound obvious, the photo we choose to put in this document needs to be a professional one adequate for a business relation.

Having someone else checking our CV might also be very useful. If we don’t have any friends who work in HR we can look for someone who has recent experience with job applications or contact HR professionals who would be willing to evaluate our CV. We should never be happy with just one opinion. People have different experiences and points of view regarding this aspect even if they work in HR.

The quality of our application is the only thing we can really influence. All other things are speculations and suppositions.

When we understand that negative answers as well as positive ones are part of the recruitment process, our chances to go smoothly through it and to find the job that we really want will be definitely higher.