Over the course of my career, I have learned a lot about how to motivate people – something I was rather poor at when I first took on leadership roles. Sometimes I have summarized one element of my current approach as “never stop affirming.” In my book When in Doubt, Ask for More: And 213 Other Life and Career Lessons for the Mission-Driven Leader I titled one of the lessons “Affirmation: The 5x Rule.” It reads, “When considering whether or not to affirm a friend, colleague, family member, or stranger—for example, by offering a compliment, a thank-you, or a gesture of public appreciation—assume that your affirmation will be five times more meaningful for them than you instinctively believe it will be. My experience suggests that this assumption is likely to be accurate.” (I also made a five-minute instructional video partly on this idea.)
From time to time something happens that beautifully illustrates one of my lessons. This week was one of them.
Last semester I was teaching the course “The Foundations of Nonprofit Leadership and Social Innovation” at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, as I have been doing for the last several years. One of my students – whom I still have never met in person, due to the pandemic – had been struggling with her assignments and in other respects.
Yet in one of the final classes, she spoke up twice and made major contributions to a class discussion on important and difficult topics. I was impressed and mentioned during the class (as best I can recall now) that she was “on fire.” Since many of my students had difficulties focusing, meeting deadlines, and learning during the pandemic, I tried many approaches to making them feel I was on their side and emphasized more what they were doing right than what they were doing wrong.
The day after the class where this student contributed so effectively, I thought it would be important to express in writing that she had done so well, as a way of further encouraging her. I didn’t overthink or overengineer my message, since doing so can be a trap leading to nothing ever being done or sent. I simply wrote, “Great job in class this past week!”
Until a few days ago, I had no idea whether my short message had even been read, much less received as intended as an affirmation. Then, out of the blue, she wrote these words to me a few days ago: “I remember the class before you sent this email you were telling a story [where] the moral of the story was that some types of support are not immediately measurable. The reason that I bring this up is that this email acknowledged that even though I was not performing in the way I would have liked I still managed to contribute something meaningful to the class. And that meant a lot to me and the hope it gave me will stay with me forever. So, the effects of some emails are also not immediately measurable.”
The importance of measurement of nonprofit effectiveness in solving societal problems is a recurring theme in my class. She was channeling that insight to underscore how my seven word email was much more effective at encouraging her than I had assumed. How generous of her to let me know that! Indeed, my guess that affirmations are often five times more meaningful than one intends may in fact be an underestimate.