The more frequently and predictably you check in with your people or meet with your team—the more you offer your real-time attention to the reality of their work—the more performance and engagement you will get.

The trick to doing this is not just to tell the person how well she’s performed, or how good she is. While simple praise is by no means a bad thing, it captures a moment in the past rather than creating the possibility of more such moments in the future. Instead, what you’ll want to do is tell the person what you experienced when that moment of excellence caught your attention—your instantaneous reaction to what worked. For a team member, nothing is more believable, and thus more powerful, than your sharing what you saw from her and how it made you feel. Or what it made you think. Or what it caused you to realize. Or how and where you will now rely on her. These are your reactions, and when you share them with specificity and with detail, you aren’t judging her or rating her or fixing her. You are simply reflecting to her the unique “dent” she just made in the world, as seen through one person’s eyes—yours. And precisely because it isn’t a judgment or a rating, but is instead a simple reaction, it is authoritative and beyond question.

And, as we’ve seen in this chapter, the problem with almost all data relating to people—including you—is that it isn’t reliable. Goals data that reports your “percent complete”; competency data comparing you to abstractions; ratings data measuring your performance and your potential through the eyes of unreliable witnesses: it wobbles by itself, and fails to measure what it says it’s measuring.

One way to think of these results is to imagine a team leader having three distinct jobs. Her first is to ensure her team members feel connected to the purpose and future of the company, even though she may not directly define those. Her second is to ensure that her team members, as a group, understand and support one another. And her third is to ensure that her team members, individually, understand what’s expected of them and how they can do their best work now and in the future, all while feeling recognized for who they are.

The subtlety here is that, as we saw above, the feeling of enthusiasm about a company’s mission, and confidence in its future, still vary team to team. In other words, our experience of our company is significantly mediated by our experience of our team.