How much Appreciation is right?

This is a short write-up on another vast subject. A lot of you would be thinking this write up is about monetary appreciation and possibly involves stock market tips. However, the appreciation that I am talking about is something else. In the online dictionary, it means Recognition of the quality, value, significance, or magnitude of people and also, An Expression of Gratitude.

In every organization, Appreciation has a large role to play. It is one tool, which when used appropriately, can do wonders to the overall atmosphere and productivity of the workplace. Let’s take a look at this story:

Madhavan was blessed with two sons – Veer and Karan. It was Madhavan’s dream to become an army officer, a dream which he had to give up due to untimely death of his father, where he had to take over his Father’s business to make ends meet. It was therefore natural for Madhavan to pass on the same dream to his sons. Veer, the elder son, was into physically activities and was involved in lot of sports in his school. Karan, the younger lad, was more into academics and was specially good at painting. Given his dream, Madhavan kept on getting inclined towards Veer, thereby ignoring what Karan did. Any win in sports race, even if it was class level, would call for a party at the rich businessman’s place, and a state level win in painting competition by Karan would go unnoticed. Time passed on and Veer kept on getting more and more over confident. He believed he was the fittest and toughest guy around, and his father did confirm that to him time and again. Veer, finally cleared the entrance got through NDA. However, he was not prepared for the tough situations and rude behavior inside the campus. It was a shock of his life to see that he was one of the slow performers in the entire batch. Three months down the line, he gave up and quit. Madhavan, shocked that he was, decided to turn to Karan and appreciate what he was good at, only to discover that Karan had given up painting long back.

Appreciation works two ways – both absence of it and excessive presence of it, makes you give up. While the absence makes you doubt whether you are going in the right direction, excessive presence makes you over confident of yourself and therefore, makes you complacent. What we need in life, is clearly the right balance between the two.

Imagine what happens when you keep appreciating your team members for everything they have done. Well, they feel good for some time, but slowly it starts becoming regular. One, they lose the importance of what is being appreciated, and also it is natural for them to get overconfident in their work area. Slowly, they notice that there is no challenge in their life and start cribbing about the mundane situation that they have landed into. There is nothing to fight for, nothing to grow for. Everything is perfect, but boring. Also imagine a situation, where no matter what your team members do, you never appreciate. The first thing it does is that it confuses them and does not give them a clear picture as to if they are going in the right direction at all. This results in them getting de-motivated and therefore prevents them from taking any extra efforts. They slowly adapt a quitter attitude and give up what they thought they were doing well.

Who’s loss do you think happens in both the situations? Primarily – your team members, no doubt on that. But in the long run, it's your loss , it's the loss for people around your team for spreading negativity (either complacency or quitter attitude) and therefore, the entire organization.

A lot of times, appreciation is also related to your expectations. If you set your expectations too low, you will be abundant in appreciation and vice versa. Therefore, setting the right expectations is also equally important. Therefore, next time somebody comes to you expecting a feedback, think twice. A wrong balance, may just spoil it all.

This is a vast area of discussion and the thoughts over here are only some starters. As always, I would like to hear your take on this one.



PS: You can also reach me out at @agrawalsanjeev on twitter