While the other teams were reviewing missed tackles and dropped balls, Landry instead focused his players’ attention on their wins, however minor. He combed through footage of previous games and created, for each player, a highlight reel of where that player had done something easily, naturally, and effectively. He reasoned that while the number of wrong ways to do something was infinite, the number of right ways, for any particular player, was not. It was finite, and knowable, and the best way to define and know the right way was to look at those plays where the player had done it right.

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 a Google internal study in 2008 (one that Bill loved) proved that teams with managers who regularly practiced a set of eight behaviors had lower turnover and higher satisfaction and performance. Topping the list of behaviors: “is a good coach.

Not surprisingly, when Google conducted a study to determine the factors behind high-performing teams, psychological safety came out at the top of the list. (More details about the study can be found in James Graham, “What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team,” New York Times, February 25, 2016.)

This touchy-feely stuff isn’t in the manual,” Bradley says. “It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the work of what we’re producing, and not how we’re doing it. But leading teams becomes a lot more joyful when you know and care about people. It’s freeing.