Stop saying ‘you are doing a good job’ to your reports

Acknowledging good work is important to motivate engineers, but just saying ‘you are doing a good job’ is absolutely the worst way of doing that.

People accomplish tasks by exercising many skills. When a successful outcome is achieved, it is rewarded with words of encouragement. This generic statement of a ‘good job’ does not provide any details on the skills that someone was good at to accomplish the outcome.

Using such generic statements will close the doors for further critical feedback.

Repeating this often makes an engineer get the false impression that you are absolutely happy with all the skills they have got to offer, which may not be the case.

Here is how to provide feedback

Appreciate with specificity

“You did a good job of communicating the progress to everyone and help us stay within timeline”

Here you clearly demonstrate that you know what you are talking about. You should have paid enough attention to the work of the engineer to be able to make this comment. It also leaves the door open to other areas with critical feedback.

Expose them to the next level of good

“If you want to further enhance this skillset of communication, try adding a milestone image in a future project”

For every good job done, there is always a better way to do things. Providing that guidance allows continuous improvement. It also helps them build on the confidence in a skill that they are already good at.

Your relationship with your reports will drastically improve by following these simple techniques as an added advantage.