Chapter 23 – Make others look good

“We rise by lifting others”
~ Robert Ingersoll

“If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else”
~ Booker T. Washington

It’s counter intuitive, but when you make others look good you can further your own career. Spreading around praise, whenever you can, has an outsized effect on everyone involved.

The recipients of the shared praise will appreciate the care you’ve shown and remember how you put the team first. Those present of the outward praise will appreciate your humility and their thinking of you may grow all the larger.

Sharing your praise doesn’t divide it up, it multiplies it. You don’t look less great for deflecting some of your praise onto others, rather you look humble and appreciative as you pass it around. You're like a disco ball, receiving the light and being the brightest in the room while casting it around to all.

For these benefits to be received, it must come from a place of honesty and earnestness. People are attuned to fake modesty and will recognize it immediately. Through practice and gratitude you need to really embody the feelings if they are going to help you. It may help to think of those involved and pinpoint portions of their contributions that made it possible. Even for those who were adversarial to you, often they contributed something that helped. So learning how to focus on that to be grateful for, rather than your personal disagreements, can be your path to the earnest feelings of gratitude you need.

As great as this sharing can be, it cannot be false. We can go a long way to find ways to praise others for the smallest of contributions, but a contribution still needs to be there. Even an opposition is a contribution in some ways. If your idea worked and was chosen over a different submitted idea, then employing some humility and thanking the other idea that “which certainly also could have worked” helps in healing rough relationships and fostering trust for future contentions. But should nothing be there from someone, trying to heap praise on them will seem callous and do harm instead.

Consider here focusing more on graciousness, saying you’re “grateful for the opportunity”, “glad you had the chance”, “excited to have been able to produce for the team” etc.

You may worry that passing along praise will hinder your ambitions with clients or within the company. If you’re not receiving your “due”, how can you rise to the rank you aspire to? To circle back around to the earlier point, passing the praise does not mean you don’t get any, it’s just multiplying it. Further, who is better suited for a promotion, the self serving self focused individual that laps up all the thanks for work done? Or the high producing team player who wants to ensure the team is recognized along with themselves.

Think further down the road, too. Who will a team more happily serve if there is a promotion or leadership grant of some kind? Will they be rooting for the individual that put themselves in the spotlight at the cost of the rest of the team? Or will a team rally behind the individual who was quick to share praise to everyone and bring honor to them all?

If a former teammate needed to help hire someone for a new opportunity down the road, who would they want to consider? The self interested light stealer, or the kind sharing team player?

There are outsized benefits to genuine humility and the spreading of praise to all those around you. Perhaps there are some short term costs to not absorbing every ounce of acclaim available, but the longer term benefits can’t be ignored.

Make others look good.

What I’m not saying:

Don’t accept commendations
Always deflect credit to others
It’s not important to be acknowledged for your work
Give others your praise even if it’s undeserved

What I am saying:

Be humble and grateful
Appreciate everyone’s contribution and call it out
Be generous when sharing praise and lift up your team
Do not be afraid of your career trajectory when you share praise
Your long term career will benefit from this generosity and kindness