He's Heating Up

A few years ago I started playing basketball at Never Too Late in Brooklyn (if you’re in the city looking for run, it’s great).

Class was about 2 hours. First hour was being coached on techniques and played. Second hour was scrimmage. What you learned in the first hour, you’d apply in the second.

And the coach was great. His stuff worked. Worked so much that I found myself open for a shot. Swish. Next play down, wide open again. Swish. I didn’t think much of it - we were running the plays coach taught us. And it worked.

After my second bucket in a row, I’m jogging back and coach looked at me and said with a smile:

He's heating up!

Immediately I started smiling and thought “well I did hit two in a row ... yeah I am heating, up, I’m hot!”. Injected confidence in my veins. Simple positive public feedback can do wonders.

Public Positive Feedback

It's common to come across designers who struggle with confidence. And often they'll feel like it's all on them. And no doubt there's a certain level of personal responsibility. BUT, some of that needs to be shouldered by their leadership.

And as leaders, giving public positive feedback is one of the easiest ways to boost confidence. If a member of your team does something well, even if it's small, call it out. In fact, often the smaller acts are the best acts to call out.

A couple of ways I did this in the past:

Call it out in Slack (or whatever tool your team uses). It's a public space. You don't need to make a big deal of it. A simple "@name hey great job on the presentation this morning, you rocked it!" will do.

Even better, get specific:

"@name hey great job on the presentation this morning, you rocked it! You nailed the Results slide and the way you handled the questions at the end was great."

It doesn't take much.

Another way is in team meetings. Every Friday I would have a team meeting and at the end I would do shoutouts. I’d run through slides of screenshots of positive things I’ve seen throughout the week.

It could be slack comments from a manager or just good design work. I found the team really appreciated this.

Building Up

Part of giving feedback is to build up your team. You want to identify areas where a team member can grow. A good tip is to identify where a designer did well in an area they are actively working on. So if they’re not as confident with real time questions and they did a great job answering questions, that would be a great call out.