The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  2: Deepen ties. What if Panda Garden House rebranded “fortune cookies” as “friendship cookies” and included provocative questions inside, intended to spark conversation at the table? You might break open your cookie to find: “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”

  Final reflections: Just a few of these moments could substantially improve the customer experience. Many of these ideas were suggested by a class of business students; no doubt real restaurateurs would have much better ideas. What we wanted you to see in this Clinic is that it’s easy to generate ideas for memorable experiences simply by paying attention to the principles you’ve encountered in this book.

  Moments of ELEVATION

  Moments of INSIGHT

  Moments of PRIDE

  Moments of CONNECTION

  Introduction to Moments of Pride

  * * *

  Moments of elevation lift us above the everyday. Moments of insight spark discoveries about our world and ourselves. And moments of pride capture us at our best—showing courage, earning recognition, conquering challenges.

  How do you make moments of pride? The recipe seems clear: You work hard, you put in the time, and as a result, you get more talented and accomplish more, and those achievements spark pride. Simple as that.

  There’s a lot of truth to that “roll up your sleeves” advice. But when you start thinking in moments, you notice that the advice misses several important points. First, regardless of how skilled we are, it’s usually having our skill noticed by others that sparks the moment of pride. If you think about your own moments of pride in your career, our bet is that many of them were examples of recognition: You were promoted. You won an award. You were praised. In Chapter 7, we’ll see how simple and powerful it can be to create defining moments for others through recognition. We’ll also encounter an experience that lasts an hour and elevates your happiness for a month afterward. (And, no, it’s not Krispy Kreme.)

  What’s also true is that two people chasing the same goal—and putting in the same amount of hard work—can experience different amounts of pride, depending on how they choose to structure their work. You’ll learn how to “design for pride,” using the principles of gaming to multiply the number of defining moments you experience en route to your destination (Chapter 8: “Multiply Milestones”). You’ll come to understand, for instance, why so many Americans never hit their goal to “learn Spanish.”

  Finally, we’ll investigate some of people’s proudest experiences: moments of courage, moments when they stood up for what they believed in. These moments are not a by-product of hard work; the opportunities to be courageous can arise unexpectedly, and sometimes we kick ourselves later that we didn’t act. But we’ll see that, just as we can practice physical and intellectual skills, we can practice the moral skill of courage (Chapter 9: “Practice Courage”). We’ll study how soldiers get comfortable with defusing bombs and how arachnophobes can make peace with spiders.

  In short, hard work is essential, but it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll experience defining moments. In this section, you’ll learn three strategies for living a life rich with pride. So turn the page and transport yourself back to a time that spawns many (negative) defining moments: middle school.

  7

  Recognize Others

  1.

  Kira Sloop remembers it as the worst year of her life. It was 1983 and she was entering the sixth grade. “Imagine, if you will, an awkward 11-year-old with a terrible set of teeth, out-of-control curls, and very low self-esteem,” she said. Her parents had divorced during the summer prior to the start of school.

  The one class she looked forward to was chorus. Sloop had a powerful voice and a “flair for the dramatic,” she said. Relatives told her she should be a country singer.

  Something happened early in the semester that is still seared into her memory. The students were arranged into groups on the risers: altos, sopranos, tenors, and baritones. The music teacher—“a woman with a beehive-ish hairdo and a seemingly permanent frown on her face”—led the choir in a familiar song, using a pointer to click the rhythm of the song on a music stand.

  Then, Sloop remembered, “She started walking over toward me. Listening, leaning in closer. Suddenly she stopped the song and addressed me directly: ‘You there. Your voice sounds . . . different . . . and it’s not blending in with the other girls at all. Just pretend to sing.’ ”

  The comment crushed her: “The rest of the class snickered, and I wished the floor would open and swallow me up.” For the rest of the year, whenever the choir sang, she mouthed the words.

  “Chorus was supposed to be my favorite thing,” she said. “My family said I could sing, but the teacher said I couldn’t. So I started to question everything.” She began to act out, hanging out with the wrong crowd at school. It was a dark time.

  Then, in the summer after her seventh-grade year, she attended a camp for gifted kids in North Carolina called the Cullowhee Experience. She surprised herself by signing up to participate in chorus. During practice, she mouthed the words, but the teacher noticed what she was doing and asked Sloop to stick around after class.

  The teacher was short and thin, with hair down to her waist—a “lovely flower child,” said Sloop. She invited Sloop to sit next to her on the piano bench, and they began to sing together in the empty room.

  Sloop was hesitant at first but eventually lowered her guard. She said, “We sang scale after scale, song after song, harmonizing and improvising, until we were hoarse.”

  Then the teacher took Sloop’s face in her hands and looked her in the eyes and said: “You have a distinctive, expressive, and beautiful voice. You could have been the love child of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.”

  As she left the room that day, she felt as if she’d shed a ton of weight. “I was on top of the world,” she said. Then she went to the library to find out who Joan Baez was.

  “For the rest of that magical summer,” Sloop said, she experienced a metamorphosis, “shedding my cocoon and emerging as a butterfly looking for light.” (And, on the heels of her personal defining moment with the teacher came a romantic defining moment with another campmate—see the footnote.)I She became more and more confident in her singing. In high school, she joined the theater department and played the lead in almost every musical production. She grew comfortable in front of audiences until, in her proudest moment, she sang with her choir at Carnegie Hall.

  Carnegie Hall! This was the same girl who had once been told to “mouth the words.”

  2.

  Sloop’s story is moving and inspiring and—here’s the biggest surprise—commonplace. The sociologist Gad Yair interviewed 1,100 people about their key educational experiences, and he found that many of them had strikingly similar tales to tell.Here’s a story that Yair cites as typical:

  I was 12 years old; I was regarded by all the teachers as a “weak” student; and school seemed cold and alienating. My teacher went on maternity leave, and the new teacher declared that she ignores past achievements and starts from a clean slate. She gave homework and I did my best to succeed.

  A day later I read my homework aloud . . . and the new teacher praised my work in front of everybody. I, the “weak” student, the Ugly Duckling of my class, suddenly turned into a beautiful swan. She gave me confidence and opened a new clean page for me for success without ever looking back at my dark prior achievements.

  The similarities with Sloop’s story are clear. First, there’s a bleak period of alienation and rejection. Then a new teacher appears, offering praise and support. Which leads to a transformation: The Ugly Duckling turns into a beautiful swan.

  Yair heard stories like this again and again. He titled his research paper “Cinderellas and Ugly Ducklings: Positive Turning Points in Students’ Educational Careers.”

  Our intention is not to diminish the power of these stories by pointing out their similarities. On the contrary, it’s precisely the similarities that illustrate the larger
truth: A few minutes can change a life. These moments didn’t just happen; thoughtful teachers made them happen.

  But how many more defining moments didn’t happen because the teachers were tired or distracted or weren’t sure how to translate their concern about a student into a meaningful conversation? What if every teacher received guidance about handling students, like Sloop, who seem hurt and withdrawn? It could be included in new teacher training: Here’s what we know about how to make a lasting impact in a child’s life in a few precious minutes.

  Of all the ways we can create moments of pride for others, the simplest is to offer them recognition. In this chapter, we’ll see why recognizing others is so important, how to handle the moment so that it’s most effective, and why the good feelings enjoyed by the recipient can boomerang back to the giver.

  3.

  Carolyn Wiley of Roosevelt University reviewed four similar studies of employee motivation conducted in 1946, 1980, 1986, and 1992. In each of the studies, employees were asked to rank the factors that motivated them. Popular answers included “interesting work,” “job security,” “good wages,” and “feeling of being in on things.” Across the studies, which spanned 46 years, only one factor was cited every time as among the top two motivators: “full appreciation of work done.”

  The importance of recognition to employees is inarguable. But here’s the problem: While recognition is a universal expectation, it’s not a universal practice.

  Wiley sums up the research: “More than 80 per cent of supervisors claim they frequently express appreciation to their subordinates, while less than 20 per cent of the employees report that their supervisors express appreciation more than occasionally.” Call it the recognition gap.

  This gap has consequences: One survey found that the top reason people leave their jobs is a lack of praise and recognition. Corporate leaders are aware of this inadequacy, and their response has generally been to create recognition programs, like Employee of the Month awards or annual banquets recognizing star performers. But these programs are inadequate for two reasons. First, the scale is all wrong. When we talk about the need to recognize employees, we’re not aiming for one employee per month! The proper pace of recognition is weekly or even daily, not monthly or yearly.

  Second, the mulish formality of the program can breed cynicism. For example, every Employee of the Month program in human history has been plagued by a similar dynamic: If you judged the award fairly, your best employee would win the award every month, but it seems socially awkward to give it to Jenny every time, so you start concocting reasons to spread the award around, and after a year or two of hopscotching among employees, Stuart is the only guy on the team who hasn’t won, and it’s becoming An Issue, so one November you throw him a bone (“He has made real progress on his tardiness!”), and from that moment on, anytime you say the phrase “Employee of the Month,” your employees will roll their eyes. And pray it’s not them.II

  Recognition experts have advice on how to escape this trap. For formal recognition programs, they recommend using objective measurements, such as sales volume, to protect against cynicism. If Stuart doesn’t hit the sales target, he won’t win the award, period.

  The larger point is that most recognition should be personal, not programmatic. In our own research, when we asked people about the defining moments in their careers, we were struck by how often they cited simple, personal events. Here’s one example:

  I was greatly commended by my manager for prepping the backroom by cleaning and reorganizing all the bikes for easy scanning for inventory. I felt proud that someone actually took the time to acknowledge my effort. . . .

  And here’s another:

  A few years ago, I was working in the office when a new client to work with came in. He seemed to be in a bad mood when talking to my coworker. . . . I came out of the back room to see if there was anything I could do. I noticed an error that my coworker and the client didn’t notice and fixed the issue for them. The client was so impressed that he demanded to speak to my boss, and he told him how great I was. It was a very empowering feeling, and even though it was a small moment, I do believe that moment is when my boss really started noticing my hard work.

  Notice the similarities here: The recognition is spontaneous—not part of a scheduled feedback session—and it is targeted at particular behaviors. A classic paper on recognition by Fred Luthans and Alexander D. Stajkovic emphasizes that effective recognition makes the employee feel noticed for what they’ve done. Managers are saying, “I saw what you did and I appreciate it.”

  Keith Risinger, who works in leadership development at Eli Lilly, has made recognition a hallmark of his management style. Earlier in his career, he managed a team of sales representatives who called on psychiatrists, hoping to convince them to adopt Lilly’s drugs for use with their patients.

  When Risinger visited his sales reps in the field, many of them would bring him to meet their best clients so they (the reps) would look like stars in front of the boss. But Bob Hughes was different. He asked for Risinger’s help in handling one of his hardest customers, whom we’ll call Dr. Singh. Hughes was frustrated by his lack of progress with Dr. Singh, who always seemed very interested in Lilly’s drugs when Hughes was in the office, yet never prescribed the drugs they had discussed.

  When Risinger shadowed Hughes on a visit to Dr. Singh’s office, he noticed a big problem. Hughes was doing a great job pitching but he wasn’t doing much listening. After the visit, Risinger asked Hughes some basic questions about the doctor: How does he choose medications? How often does he see the patient he’s treating? What measures for improvement does he trust?

  Hughes didn’t have the answers. So Risinger challenged him to get more curious about his client—to stop giving a sales pitch and start learning what Dr. Singh thought. Over the next few visits, Hughes began to understand why Dr. Singh had been reluctant to change medications.

  For example, one of Lilly’s drugs, Zojenz (disguised name), was designed for patients with ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder). Dr. Singh saw a lot of ADHD patients, but he consistently prescribed other drugs over Zojenz. That puzzled Hughes, who thought Zojenz should be perfect for the doctor’s patients: It was effective in treating ADHD, but unlike other medications, it wasn’t a stimulant. Dr. Singh himself had praised the drug’s profile. So why wasn’t he providing it to his patients?

  When Hughes started listening, he learned that many of Dr. Singh’s ADHD patients were teenagers who came to him during a crisis—perhaps a student whose behavior problems had led him to the brink of a suspension or a failing grade. Patients in crisis needed help quickly. But Zojenz had a slow onset—unlike the stimulant drugs, it often required a month or more for its positive effects to kick in.

  So Hughes suggested an option to Dr. Singh: Why not offer Zojenz to your patients during the summer, when instant results wouldn’t be necessary? Hughes also suggested Zojenz for adult ADHD patients who might not be comfortable taking a stimulant.

  Impressed, Dr. Singh began to try Zojenz with his patients and, liking the results he saw, he eventually became an advocate for it.

  Risinger was thrilled by Hughes’s work. This was exactly the kind of curiosity he wanted to instill in his reps.

  About a month later, Risinger kicked off a sales meeting with the story of Hughes’s progress with Dr. Singh, highlighting the value of asking more questions and listening to the answers. To commemorate the occasion he awarded Hughes a symbol of his quality listening: a pair of Bose headphones.

  “That was a very proud moment for me,” Hughes said. “People in the pharma industry are very intelligent and very competitive—to win that kind of award among your peers means more than being recognized with a bonus,” he said.

  Risinger began to use tailored rewards more often. To a rep who came up with a customized solution for an individual client, he gave a Keurig single-serve coffee machine (which lets you tailor each cup of coffee to the specific indivi
dual drinking it). To those who showed admirable curiosity about their clients, he gave North Face gear that sported the tagline “Never stop exploring.”

  Pharmaceutical sales reps are well paid, and they can afford their own headphones and coffee machines. The prizes were symbols. With his half-silly gifts, Risinger created moments of pride for his team members.

  Maybe your managerial style is different; maybe thematic gifts wouldn’t work for you. There are many approaches to recognition. Some are spontaneous and no-nonsense: the manager above who complimented his employee for “cleaning and reorganizing all the bikes.” Some are warm and caring: the teacher who took Kira Sloop’s face in her hands and said, “You have a beautiful voice.”

  The style is not important. What’s important is authenticity: being personal not programmatic. And frequency: closer to weekly than yearly. And of course what’s most important is the message: “I saw what you did and I appreciate it.”

  4.

  How do you deliver personal recognition when your scale forces it to be programmatic? Imagine a charity with thousands of donors. All of them deserve a thoughtful, personal reply—which is a logistical impossibility. But one charitable organization, DonorsChoose, has found a way to scale up thoughtfulness. Its leaders have methodically built a system to deliver recognition.

  DonorsChoose’s website allows teachers to seek crowdsourced funding for school projects. An elementary school teacher might try to raise $250 to buy new books, or a high school science teacher might seek $600 to order new lab equipment. In an era of school budget cuts, this money from outside donors is precious.

  For donors, the big moment comes a month or two later, when most of them have forgotten their contributions. They receive a package in the mail full of individually written thank-you letters, addressed to them by name, from the students they supported.