Grades Roll Downhill

“You’re so smart.”

That’s what came out when my daughter grabbed the oven mitts to get something hot out of the microwave. I heard it leave my mouth, caught it, and changed lanes as casually as a man can in his own kitchen. “Oh, looks like you grabbed oven mitts so you wouldn’t burn yourself!”

Smart is a trophy. It goes on a shelf and does nothing. The oven mitt sentence is a recipe, and the next time the microwave beeps she already knows what to reach for. (For the record, I still said smart first. Old habits get to the microwave before you do…)

A label is a grade, and a grade needs a judge. Every “great job” quietly climbs onto the bench and bangs the gavel. “I knew you could do it” is worse, because now the judge is also collecting credit for calling it.

Going downhill, that mostly works. Parents grade kids. Managers grade reports. Grades roll downhill like everything else does.

Try sending one uphill…

Tell a boss “great presentation” and you’ve appointed yourself her grader. That’s presumptuous, so you add a little sugar to cover the presumption, and the sugar is what the whole room can smell. Brown-nosing is a grade from below, frosted.

A description doesn’t need a bench. Anyone can be a witness.

I tried it once. A boss had said something vulnerable in a meeting, the kind of thing leaders usually leave in the car, and later I told her I’d noticed she was willing to say it out loud in that room. No adjective. You could still watch it land on her face as praise. Then she told me what saying it had actually done, which meant she was praising herself, with better evidence than I had.

I’ve been on the receiving end, too. At a sales kickoff at one company, an account manager took the mic in front of everybody. She said I was responsive, which was nice. Then she got specific. I’d built the enablement materials her team had been desperately asking for, tracked whether they actually used them, and kept refining them off my own research instead of waiting around for feedback. I can still tell you what she said. That’s the tell. (She could have easily said, Garth is awesome!)

You can’t describe what you didn’t watch. A description is a receipt for attention, and attention is the one thing flattery can’t counterfeit for very long.

Sucking up is praise that skipped the watching.

For what it’s worth… I’m not shitting on labels. Labels still have a job. They’re the bow. Once the box has something in it, “I’m so proud of you, I’m so happy you made that kind of impact on people” ties it off beautifully. That isn’t a grade anyway. It’s a report on your own feelings, and you’re the only one qualified to give it.

Product pages could stand to learn this. A page that calls itself powerful is grading its own homework, and buyers can smell the sugar from the search results. Describe what changed at one customer’s desk on one ordinary Tuesday… and leave the adjective blank. People defend the adjectives they write themselves.

My daughter will reach for the oven mitts again. The word smart won’t be what sends her there. What she did will, because a thing you did is a thing you can do twice. And ain’t that the whole game of growth?

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