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Podcast Summary
In episode 20 of the 52 Life Lessons series on the Working Well Podcast, host Tim Borys opens with a question most leaders would rather not answer honestly: when was the last time you caught someone doing something exceptionally well, and did you say anything about it? Leaders are highly trained problem detectors, Tim argues, and decades of research on negativity bias explains why. That instinct is valuable, but when it becomes the only lens a leader uses, it quietly erodes the people and performance it was meant to protect.
Drawing on his own journey as an athlete, strength coach, personal trainer, parent, and business owner, Tim shows how the coaches who helped him see both sides of his performance made him better, while the ones who only corrected mistakes made him cautious, less creative, and less engaged. He then turns the lens on himself with a candid admission: in the early years of his company, he noticed every gap and rarely named the hundreds of things his team did well, and it cost him excellent people.
The episode builds the research case for specific, in-the-moment recognition, citing a meta-analysis linking structured reinforcement to a 17 percent improvement in task performance, Adam Grant and Francesco Gino’s work on gratitude, and Kluger and DeNisi’s landmark finding that feedback backfires in more than a third of cases when it targets identity instead of behavior. Tim anchors the idea in the Sternins’ positive deviance work in rural Vietnam, where studying the healthy children in impoverished villages, rather than the failing ones, reduced malnutrition dramatically. He closes with a practical three-step framework, See it, Say it, Scale it, and a 24-hour challenge for every leader listening.
For executives, managers, and human resources leaders, this is a research-grounded reminder that recognition isn’t a soft perk. It’s a performance system. As Tim puts it: when we celebrate the bright spots, we don’t lower the standard, we show people how to reach it.
✅ Key Takeaways
- Leaders are wired to see problems, and that has a cost. Negativity bias makes it easy to spot every missed deadline and typo, while the hundreds of things people do well each day go unnamed. Silence reads as “nothing I do is good enough.”
- Accurate feedback isn’t the same as useful feedback. When people only hear what they’re doing wrong, they stop hearing instruction and start hearing a verdict, and they stop experimenting because mistakes feel dangerous.
- Adults still need recognition. “It’s just their job” ignores a basic human need for competence, connection, meaning, and progress. Recognition doesn’t require parades or confetti cannons, just noticing the behaviors, judgment, and effort that help the team succeed.
- Specific beats generic every time. Research found feedback reduced performance in more than a third of cases when it focused on the person’s identity. “You’re a superstar” tells someone almost nothing; naming the behavior and its impact tells them exactly what to repeat.
- Your best examples are already inside your organization. The positive deviance approach shows that people succeeding despite the same constraints hold the uncommon behaviors others can learn. Bright spots aren’t happy stories, they’re data.
- See it, Say it, Scale it. Look for what’s working, name it within seconds with timeliness, specificity, and sincerity, then get curious about why it worked so the behavior can spread.
Episode Links & Resources
Connect with Tim: https://timborys.com/book-tim/
Buy Tim’s Book: The Fitness Curveball (Amazon Link)
Podcast Highlights
Please note: This highlight is generated by a computer and may contain errors.
When Did You Last Catch Someone Doing Something Right?
Tim opens with a question aimed squarely at leaders: not during an annual review or a quarterly recognition day, but in the normal flow of a workday, when was the last time you noticed someone doing something exceptionally well, and said something?
“Most leaders are highly trained problem detectors… Our brains are excellent at finding what is wrong.”
He points to decades of research on negativity bias, the human tendency to give greater weight to threats and negative information. That ability matters, he stresses, because businesses can’t improve if leaders ignore hard facts or uncomfortable truths. But there’s another side of leadership that gets far less attention: becoming skilled at identifying what’s working, understanding why, and helping people repeat it.
Two Kinds of Coaches
Tim first learned this lesson as an athlete. Some of his coaches helped him see both sides of his performance: what he was doing well, why it mattered, and where he could improve. He left those conversations challenged but capable.
Others focused almost exclusively on mistakes. Much of their feedback was technically accurate, but accuracy alone doesn’t make feedback useful.
“When all you hear is what you’re doing wrong, eventually you stop hearing instruction and just start hearing a verdict.”
Under those coaches, he became more cautious, less creative, and less engaged. He also improved more slowly and enjoyed the experience far less.
What Changed When He Started Noticing the Good
When Tim became a coach and personal trainer, he remembered that feeling and began deliberately looking for what his athletes and clients were doing well: a technique that improved on one rep, showing up on a difficult day, handling a setback without abandoning the plan.
“Those moments happened every day, and they often looked small from the outside, but once they were recognized, they started to become evidence.”
Evidence of change, of agency, of what the person was capable of. His clients became more engaged, worked harder, stayed longer, and got better results. People tend to repeat actions that are noticed, reinforced, and connected to meaningful progress.
He saw the same pattern as a parent: children’s confidence shifts in real time depending on the feedback they receive. Speaking to their effort, curiosity, kindness, and persistence shows them which behaviors matter, while only appearing with a red pen after something goes wrong teaches them that your role is to evaluate their failures.
The Mistake Tim Made as a Business Owner
Despite understanding all of this as an athlete, trainer, coach, and parent, Tim didn’t always apply it as a leader. In the early years of building his company, there were clients to serve, bills to pay, and “400 small fires” every day. He became very good at noticing gaps.
“What I often failed to see, or at least I failed to communicate to my team, were the hundreds of things that people were doing every day that were awesome.”
In his head he was maintaining high standards. From their perspective, it likely felt like nothing they did was quite good enough, and he lost some excellent people because of it.
“Good intentions don’t cancel out poor leadership habits. I had created an environment where criticism was immediate, but appreciation was just assumed.”
“But That’s Just Their Job”
Tim still hears versions of the same mindset from leaders every day: they’re getting paid, so why congratulate them? They’re adults, they shouldn’t need positive reinforcement.
“Adults still wanna know whether their work matters. They still want useful feedback.”
Being employed and getting a paycheck doesn’t remove someone’s basic human need for competence, connection, meaning, and progress. He’s equally clear about what this does not mean: no parade for Steve in accounting submitting his expense report correctly, no participation trophies, no forced compliments or confetti cannons. It simply means noticing the behaviors, judgment, effort, and values that help the team succeed.
The Research Case for Recognition
A major meta-analysis of organizational behavior change found that structured reinforcement approaches were associated with an average 17 percent improvement in task performance, varying across settings. In a series of experiments, Adam Grant and Francesco Gino found that expressions of gratitude increased people’s willingness to help again, largely because being thanked made them feel socially valued.
“People and profitability are not competing priorities. When done properly, recognition strengthens both.”
The Positive Deviance Story From Rural Vietnam
Tim shares one of his favorite examples: the work led by Jerry and Monique Sternin in rural Vietnam, where childhood malnutrition was widespread. The conventional approach would have been to study everything going wrong, bring in outside experts, build a large program, and tell families what to change.
Instead, the team asked a different question: were there children in the same impoverished communities who were healthy despite the same limited resources? There were. The team found that some caregivers were adding tiny shrimp, crabs, and sweet potato greens from the rice fields to meals, feeding smaller amounts more frequently, and actively helping children eat.
“The resources were already present. The knowledge was already present. The solution was already happening. It was simply hidden inside the success of a few families.”
Rather than lecturing the community, families practiced these behaviors together, and the village program produced a dramatic reduction in malnutrition, becoming an influential example of what’s now called the positive deviance approach.
“Bright spots… they’re not merely happy stories, they’re data.”
Tim asks leaders to consider the parallel in their own organizations: somewhere, a manager is already running amazing meetings, a team has figured out how to reduce customer complaints, or one location is retaining people while comparable locations lose them. Before launching another expensive transformation, ask who’s already succeeding, what they’re doing differently, and how to make it easier for others to practice.
A Warning: More Feedback Isn’t Automatically Better
Tim cites the landmark meta-analysis by Abraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi, which examined more than six hundred feedback effects. Feedback improved performance on average, but in more than a third of cases it actually reduced it, particularly when it pulled attention away from the task and toward the person’s identity or sense of self.
Saying “You’re a superstar” feels nice but provides little useful information. Compare it to specific feedback: “Nancy, I love how you handled that meeting. You noticed their frustration, you slowed the conversation down, and you asked questions before trying to defend our position. I could see their posture change.”
“That feedback identifies the behavior. It explains the impact. It helps Nancy understand what to repeat, and it also signals to everyone else what good leadership and customer service look like in practice.”
A sincere “great job” is still considerably better than complete silence.
Culture Is Built in the Ten Seconds After
Annual reviews, rewards programs, and recognition platforms are useful, Tim says, but culture isn’t built during formal events.
“It’s built in the 10 seconds after the difficult client call, the little brief interaction in the hallway.”
Most leaders use that window to talk about what didn’t go well, even when someone has just knocked it out of the park. And when the company’s big town hall message doesn’t match the day-to-day experience, formal recognition can create more cynicism, not less.
“You can’t ignore people for six months and then expect to repair the relationship with a certificate and a branded coffee mug.”
See It, Say It, Scale It
Tim closes with a simple three-step process leaders can start using today:
- See it. Train yourself to look for what’s working. At the end of a meeting, ask what someone did that improved the outcome. At the end of the day, reflect on where you saw effort, judgment, progress, courage, or care. This applies to your own behavior too, since high performers are often excellent at identifying deficiencies and terrible at recognizing progress. “That’s not arrogance. It’s accurate self-assessment.”
- Say it. Don’t assume people know. Make recognition timely, specific, and sincere: name what the person did, why it matters, and the impact it created.
- Scale it. Get curious about what allowed the success. Can it be repeated? Can the person teach it? Is there a system, habit, or environmental factor behind it? “Celebration isn’t the end of the process, it’s the starting point for learning.”
Choosing to celebrate bright spots doesn’t mean ignoring reality. Acknowledge the mistake, address the missed standard, have the difficult conversation, then look for what remains strong and what positive action comes next. He ties it back to the three gifts practice from an earlier episode: we can’t always control what happens, but we can choose where to direct our attention and what behavior we reinforce.
The 24-Hour Challenge
“In the next twenty-four hours, catch one person doing excellent work… Be specific, be genuine. Take ten seconds to make that invisible visible.”
What leaders consistently notice, name, and reinforce eventually becomes the culture of the team and the organization.
“When we choose to celebrate the bright spots, we don’t lower our standard, we show people how to reach it.”