...for those employees given mainly positive attention—that is, attention to what they did best, and what was working most powerfully for them—the ratio of engaged to disengaged rose to sixty to one.

Positive attention, in other words, is thirty times more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team. (It’s also, if you’re keeping score, twelve hundred times more powerful than ignoring people, but we haven’t yet come across a management theory that advocates ignoring people.)

People don’t need feedback. They need attention, and moreover, attention to what they do the best. And they become more engaged and therefore more productive when we give it to them.

Paradoxically, then, the more your high-priority interrupts involve catching your people doing things wrong (so you can fix them), the less productive each person will become in the short term, and the less growth you’ll see from your team members in the long run. Finding itself in negative-criticism territory, the human brain stiffens, tenses, and—in meaningful ways—resists improvement. Machines and processes don’t do that. You can fix a machine, you can fix a process, but you can’t fix a person in the same way—people aren’t toasters. So, when it comes to your people, what should be your high-priority interrupt? If what you want is improvement, then it should be whenever someone on your team does something that really works. The goal is to consciously spend your days alert for those times when someone on your team does something so easily and effectively that it rocks you, just a little, and then to find a way of telling that person what you just saw.

A 2018 Gallup study found that barely a third of US employees were fully engaged in their work—where engagement is defined as being “involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to work.” The majority of employees, 53 percent, were “not engaged,” while 13 percent—the maliciously compliant—were “actively disengaged.” Globally, the situation is even worse, with 15 percent engaged, 67 percent disengaged, and 18 percent actively disengaged.

Bumping into each other all day doesn’t substitute for tightly focused team discussions. And a lot of that bumping is causing unnecessary interruptions. Casual encounters fail to take advantage of the three most powerful tools a leader has in getting team performance:

1. Peer pressure

2. Collective intelligence

3. Clear communication