05 Oct Why Praise Has Outlived Its Usefulness as a Leadership Tool, and What Actually Drives Performance
In my consulting and coaching practice, I’ve spent many years guiding leadership teams and organizations through change and transformation. Along the way, I keep running into one pattern that’s deeply embedded in our work culture and, at the same time, one of the biggest obstacles to real ownership and performance: praise as a leadership tool.
What looks harmless, even positive, on the surface turns out on closer inspection to be a mechanism that erodes autonomy, breeds dependency, and keeps teams from doing their best work. At the same time, rejecting praise outright is its own kind of mistake.
So in this article, I want to bring together two perspectives that, in my work, are inseparable: organizational dynamics (structure) first, then psychodynamics. We need both lenses to understand why praise is so often problematic, and how we can stay human, genuine, and effective anyway.
Contents
Praise as a Power Play Is a Judgment, Not a Compliment
The Dilemma of Praise Dependency
The Alternative: External Referencing Instead of Hierarchical Judgment
Corporate Functions and Asymmetric Handoffs (Interdependencies)
What Structure Alone Doesn’t Explain: The Psychodynamic View
Real Gratitude, Real Responsibility, and Sometimes an Honest “That Was Great”
Rethinking Leadership: Build Conditions, Not Fix People”
How to Put This Into Practice on Your Team”
Conclusion: Praise as a Leadership Tool Needs Structure, Not a Ban
Praise as a Power Play Is a Judgment, Not a Compliment
When we talk about praise, we usually mean statements like:
→ “You did a great job”
→ “Great work”
→ “I’m really impressed by what you did”
These phrases sound positive, friendly, appreciative. But let’s look closer: what’s actually happening in that moment?
One person places themselves above another and passes judgment on their work or behavior. In doing so, the person giving the praise claims the authority to decide what counts as good or bad. This seemingly harmless gesture has far-reaching consequences: praise and reprimand are two sides of the same coin. Anyone who praises could just as easily reprimand, since both rest on the same assumption: that the leader has the standing to judge the quality of someone else’s work.
A quick note on terms, since several related ones come up later: praise and reprimand, sometimes also called criticism, are judgments made from a position of hierarchical superiority. Feedback, by contrast, is the unevaluated response from the people the work was actually done for. Recognition is genuine appreciation of a person as an equal, independent of hierarchy. This article argues against the first two as leadership tools, not against the last two.
Let me be clear about one thing from the start: not all praise is toxic. It turns toxic when it inflates and infantilizes the person receiving it, or when it mainly serves as a display of power, when its real job is to cement a hierarchical dependency rather than express genuine recognition. That distinction is the crux of it, and I’ll come back to it in more detail later.
What Shows Up in Practice
I see how deep this pattern runs again and again in workshops and coaching sessions with leadership teams. Leaders tell me they feel they have to praise people, whether to show appreciation or just to keep morale up. At the same time, many of them sense something inauthentic about it, as though they’re playing a role instead of actually relating to the other person.
It shows up even more clearly on the other side: plenty of employees actively ask for praise. They’re used to having their work evaluated and feel unsettled without that outside validation. That’s no accident, it’s the result of decades of conditioning in organizations built on hierarchy, control, and external motivation. I’ll add this deliberately, though: sometimes it really is just a very human need, and we shouldn’t argue that away.
The Dilemma of Praise Dependency
This is where a fundamental dilemma shows up: people who’ve spent their entire careers in traditional structures have learned to anchor their sense of competence and worth in other people’s judgment. Every day, they hand over a piece of their responsibility and submit to their manager’s verdict.
This dependency isn’t a sign of poor competence or low self-confidence, it’s the logical outcome of a system that strips people of agency by design. When an organization spends years signaling that the manager decides whether the work is good, it’s only natural that employees go looking for that validation.
The Cost to the Organization
The consequences of this dynamic are significant:
➡️ Loss of ownership: people take their cues from what their manager thinks, instead of what the work actually requires or what customers need
➡️ Poor performance gets locked in: catering to the need for praise stops people from developing real capability
➡️ Wasted leadership energy: managers spend their time tending to people’s feelings instead of building the conditions for good work
➡️ Innovation stalls: teams waiting for approval experiment less, take fewer risks, and grow more slowly
I see this over and over in my consulting work: as long as these patterns persist, new processes, agile methods, and modern tools all fall well short of what they could achieve.
The Alternative: External Referencing Instead of Hierarchical Judgment
So the question isn’t whether we should give up praise, it’s what takes its place, and how we structurally make sure recognition doesn’t become a tool of power. That’s where the concept of external referencing comes in, one of the most effective levers I know for building genuine ownership.
The Principle of External Referencing
The core idea is simple: it shouldn’t be the manager who judges the quality of the work, it should be whoever the work is actually for. That can mean:
➡️ Customers who use a product or service
➡️ Colleagues in other departments who depend on the results
➡️ The market itself, signaling through demand, or the lack of it, whether something matters
➡️ Internal recipients who need a team’s output to do their own work
These external reference points give objective, non-hierarchical feedback. They don’t say “that’s good” because they hold a position of power, they show it through their reaction: more demand, repeat business, enthusiasm, or rejection, and that’s what tells you whether a piece of work actually meets the real requirements.
Putting It Into Practice with Teams
In practice, I put external referencing to work on several levels:
1. Build direct contact with customers. Instead of letting managers or account managers act as a filter between the team doing the work and the customer, I set up direct lines of communication. Development teams talk to users regularly, service teams get unfiltered feedback. That doesn’t mean every single person is on customer calls all day, but it does mean teams feel first-hand the difference their work makes.
2. Make internal handoffs more transparent. Many teams work for other teams inside the company, an interdependency that often goes unmanaged. Here I recommend feedback loops that don’t run through management at all. One example from a project of mine: a research team was producing market analyses that the sales team barely used. We redesigned the handoff so sales had to actively request an analysis before the research team would build it. The result: the research team only produced what was genuinely needed, and the requests themselves became direct proof that the work still mattered.
3. Agree on measurable indicators together. Where external reference points aren’t directly experienced, I have teams develop clear, measurable indicators everyone can use to see whether the work is succeeding. These indicators aren’t handed down from above, they’re negotiated between the team, its leadership, and whoever receives its output. They’re not always objective in a strict scientific sense, but they’re understandable and accepted by everyone involved.
Corporate Functions and Asymmetric Handoffs (Interdependencies)
One area where the praise problem shows up especially clearly is in corporate functions, areas like HR, internal communications, finance, or IT, that have no direct contact with the market or customers and instead serve the rest of the organization. Their counterpart is line departments like sales, product development, or customer service, which deal directly with the market. Corporate functions mostly create value indirectly, which means they aren’t exposed to the same market discipline as line departments.
As a result, they tend to produce work nobody actually asked for: HR rolls out training programs nobody needed, IT builds internal tools hardly anyone uses, finance invents new metrics systems just to prove its own relevance.
The fix is to symmetrize these handoffs, the interdependencies between corporate functions and line departments, as the example above already showed: sales had to actively request and specify the analysis before the research team would build it. The same principle applies to any corporate function. The moment a department only delivers on active request, instead of producing ahead of demand, it finds out very quickly whether it’s genuinely needed, with no one having to say “great job.”
The beauty of symmetrized handoffs is that they don’t require discipline or good intentions. The structure itself makes sure the work gets done and its relevance becomes visible.
What Structure Alone Doesn’t Explain: The Psychodynamic View
In my coaching and consulting work, this is where I deliberately take a step that many purely structure-focused approaches skip. Structural change, external referencing, symmetrized handoffs, clear indicators, all of that lays the groundwork. But it doesn’t explain why some people keep hungering for praise no matter how good the conditions are, while others barely need it at all. That question is psychodynamic in nature, and this is exactly where the work of Klaus Eidenschink, an organizational consultant, psychotherapist, executive coach, and author of several books on the subject, comes in. I consider his perspective essential.
The Parent-Child Dynamic
Eidenschink describes with real precision what’s happening psychologically when an employee demands praise from their manager: the demand for appreciation sets up a parent-child dynamic between the person and the organization. A child draws a picture and needs praise for it from a parent: “Well done!” Psychology calls this validation. That description gets at exactly what happens in countless organizations every day, without anyone noticing: adult employees and their managers are unconsciously re-enacting a family dynamic that has nothing to do with the actual, adult working relationship they’re supposed to have.
When Internalization Succeeds, and When It Doesn’t
What matters here is how someone’s psychological development unfolded. When early development goes well, external validation gradually turns into self-recognition, and the dependency on praise and the need to demand appreciation from others become unnecessary. When employees, despite fair pay and an adult working relationship, still consistently demand extra validation, that’s a sign this internalization never fully happened.
This matters a great deal in practice: if a structural change, say, introducing external referencing, doesn’t immediately make someone more relaxed about praise, that’s not proof the structure is wrong. It can simply mean this person isn’t psychologically at the point yet where they can replace external validation with self-recognition. It helps, as a leader or a consultant, to know that, rather than blaming yourself or the system for it.
Socialization and What Happens Outside Work
Why does this internalization work better for some people than others? A large part of the answer lies outside the organization: our conditioning around praise doesn’t start with our careers, it starts in childhood. Many of us were raised on praise and learned that outside validation is what success feels like.
The Danish family therapist Jesper Juul coined the concept of equal dignity for exactly this. He argues that every judgment, including praise, elevates one person over another and, in doing so, subordinates the other. His recommendation: instead of passing judgment, share in the excitement. Take a child coming home proud of something they did. Instead of saying “you did a great job,” we can reflect that joy right back: mirror their excitement, share it with them, without evaluating it.
What gets laid down in childhood carries straight through into working life, with real consequences for the organization.
The Warning Against a “Right to Validation”
Eidenschink takes a position I find genuinely clarifying in my own consulting work: it’s a problem when people in an organization believe they have a right to validation. From a purely organizational standpoint, the appreciation for someone’s work is already built into their paycheck. Anyone who wants to reliably feel valued has to be able to give that to themselves first.
That said, this isn’t something you can just decide to do overnight, it’s a process that takes time, as described above in the section on internalization. Organizations can actively support that process: through real responsibility, through direct contact with the people the work is for, and, where the old patterns run especially deep, by encouraging people to seek targeted support, such as coaching. Creating the conditions for that stays the organization’s job, but walking the path itself is something every person has to do on their own.
That sounds harsh at first, but it’s actually a liberating message, both for leaders, who no longer have to carry the pressure of constantly tending to people’s feelings, and for employees, who are invited to take a firmer hold on their own sense of competence.
Appreciation Is Not the Same as Praise
A distinction I’ve used consistently in my training sessions ever since also comes from Eidenschink’s work: appreciation means communicating well with each other, feeling seen, heard, and understood. That’s what happens between adults. Appreciation doesn’t mean getting patted on the head for every little task, it means the value of your work gets acknowledged, along with the plain fact that everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
To me, this distinction, between a childlike, dependent way of receiving praise and adult, equal-footing appreciation, is the real core of this whole debate. It matters far more than whether we’re still allowed to use the word “praise” at all.
Reflection Questions for Leaders
In coaching sessions, I work through these questions with leaders:
→ When I feel the urge to praise someone, what feeling is actually driving it?
→ Am I genuinely grateful? Proud? Happy for them?
→ Or do I feel obligated to say something because “that’s just what you do”?
→ Am I unconsciously expecting something back, loyalty, gratitude, attachment?
Often there’s a genuine feeling underneath the praise, gratitude, pride, happiness. Those feelings can and should be shared, as long as they don’t get wrapped up in a power dynamic.
Real Gratitude, Real Responsibility, and Sometimes an Honest “That Was Great”
External referencing covers the structural layer, Eidenschink’s perspective covers the psychodynamic one. But what about the plain, everyday, human moment? What happens when a leader is genuinely excited about something a team member did?
It’s worth drawing a clear line here: gratitude and recognition are not the same as the evaluative praise this article is warning against. It’s perfectly fine, now and then, to say spontaneously and honestly: “I think what you did there is really cool,” or “That’s just great work.” What matters isn’t whether a sentence sounds like praise, it’s whether it’s genuine and whether it comes from a place of equal footing, not from a position of superiority or an unspoken expectation of something in return.
An Old Classic That Already Knew This
Interestingly, this core idea, that sincerity is what matters, already shows up almost ninety years ago in one of the most influential books ever written on human communication: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). One of Carnegie’s basic rules is to lead with honest appreciation instead of criticism. He also warns forcefully against undercutting praise with a follow-up “but.” Praise someone, then qualify it in the next breath, and you cancel out the recognition entirely and come across as insincere.
What Matters Is the Attitude, Not the Wording
A mistake I see often in training sessions: people learn to say “thank you” instead of “great job” and mistake that for the actual shift. They keep the same inner stance, that of a judge evaluating someone else’s work, just dressed up more nicely. People are perceptive, they can tell right away whether a phrase carries real appreciation or is just a judgment with a fresh coat of paint. That’s why, in my coaching sessions, I spend less time on wording and more on a leader’s underlying stance: does this come from genuine joy or gratitude? Or is it there to reinforce a position of power and create dependency?
More Responsibility Is the Strongest Form of Appreciation
When a leader notices that someone is doing outstanding work that genuinely benefits the company or the team, that person should get more responsibility. More responsibility is the strongest form of appreciation an organization can give. It carries more weight than any pat on the back. It says: “I trust you enough to give you more room to decide, more room to shape things, more influence.”
I see how powerful this lever is again and again in my project work. Teams that get handed real responsibility, not as lip service but with actual decision-making authority, develop a completely different dynamic. They take ownership, think like entrepreneurs, and solve problems on their own.
Rethinking Leadership: Build Conditions, Not Fix People
One of the central misunderstandings of modern leadership is the assumption that it’s a leader’s job to motivate people or fix them emotionally. The real responsibility lies elsewhere: in building the conditions under which ownership and performance can emerge.
A provocative but important claim from my consulting work: keep letting demands for praise steer your decisions, and you just reinforce the exact problem described at the start. A leader who pours time and energy into keeping people emotionally satisfied isn’t addressing the structural roots of poor performance. At the same time, leaders have their own autonomy too. Building direct customer contact, setting up stable processes, and agreeing on indicators together, as described in the section on external referencing, is absolutely a way of caring for your people, just structurally rather than emotionally. It’s not a leader’s job to make sure employees feel good in the sense of getting outside validation. Their job is to make the business successful. Employees’ independence and sense of competence grow out of that as a welcome side effect.
How to Put This Into Practice on Your Team
Step 1: Change the Conditions First, Don’t Just Explain
The most common mistake I see in organizations: people start explaining before they’ve actually changed the structures. As long as employees still get no direct feedback from customers and decisions keep getting made over their heads, any explanation just evaporates.
Concrete steps:
→ Extend direct customer contact and shared indicators: build on what’s described in the section on external referencing and roll it out across the board first
→ Set up stable processes: transparent dashboards, iterative ways of working, regular review sessions with the actual users of the work
Step 2: Account for Psychodynamics, Don’t Structure Them Away
Before you talk to a team about the new conditions, it’s worth doing a quick internal check: who on the team seems especially dependent on praise? Where might a parent-child dynamic have taken hold between a manager and an employee? This isn’t about judging individuals, it helps you gauge realistically where resistance to structural change might come from, and support people through it with more patience.
Step 3: Explain Only When Needed
Only once a gap opens up, when someone explicitly asks for praise or feels unsettled because the usual validation isn’t coming, is it time for a clarifying conversation. That’s when you explain why you’re doing things differently, what you’re putting in its place, and that this isn’t about withholding appreciation, it’s about real, adult ownership.
Step 4: Extend the Thinking to Practices, Rituals, and Systems
The need for praise doesn’t just show up in direct interactions, it’s baked into organizational systems too:
→ Bonus schemes built on a manager’s subjective judgment
→ Performance reviews where managers sit in judgment of employees
→ 360-degree feedback that turns into a popularity contest
→ Employee-of-the-month programs that reward extrinsic motivation
To stay consistent, these systems need to be questioned too, and redesigned where necessary.
It’s also worth periodically checking back in: is external referencing actually working, or is praise sneaking back in through the side door, excessive celebration in meetings, constant praise in team chat channels? This kind of check belongs inside your existing retro or review routines, not as a one-off effort but as a permanent fixture.
Conclusion: Praise as a Leadership Tool Needs Structure, Not a Ban
How thoughtfully an organization handles praise isn’t a niche question, it’s a litmus test for how seriously it takes ownership, autonomy, and working together as adults.
On the organizational-dynamics side (structure): praise itself isn’t toxic, its inflating, infantilizing, power-hungry form is. External referencing, symmetrized handoffs, and genuinely delegating responsibility are the most effective levers for breaking dependency on hierarchical validation and making people’s own competence tangible.
On the psychodynamic side: structural change alone isn’t enough, because people are at very different points in internalizing self-recognition. The parent-child dynamic that can quietly take hold between employees and managers can’t be organized away, it has to be understood, named, and patiently worked through. Someone who believes they have a right to validation needs support finding their way to a different perspective far more than they need a new set of processes to fix it for them.
And on the human side, what was already true almost ninety years ago still holds: an honest, spontaneous “that was really good work” isn’t a relapse into old power dynamics, as long as it comes from genuine enthusiasm and not from a need to keep someone dependent. Sincerity was the decisive ingredient for Carnegie, and it still is today.
My appeal to leaders, HR professionals, and transformation leads: question how automatic praise has become, but don’t swap it for a new dogma.
→ First, build the structures that make genuine competence possible
→ Second, take the psychodynamic patterns seriously, they show up differently on every team
→ Third, allow yourself to stay human and honest, even if that means occasionally just saying: that was really good work
Leadership isn’t a privilege, it’s a service to other people’s growth. And that service isn’t about judging people, it’s about creating the conditions in which they can grow, structurally and psychologically both.
Get in Touch
If you notice your team getting restless without constant validation, or find yourself unable to stop praising people, that’s rarely a personality trait, it’s usually a sign that structure is missing.
In an initial conversation, I look together with you at where the real leverage points are in your organization. No charge, no pitch, no obligation.