THE LEAFLET
April 24 2025
accessible status symbols, reveal and remark, changing the terms
MAKING STATUS (SYMBOLS) ACCESSIBLE
There is much sorting by status out in the world. It’s naive to assume this sorting won’t happen on your team, too. As a leader, and especially as a founder, you influence the creation and allocation of status. This is a cool power to wield, share, and refine. It’s often cheap to do so, too.
As we often say around here, public praise from you, the leader, costs zero dollars yet carries great value for the recipient of that praise and everyone else who hears it. You raise the recipient’s status, right there and then.
There are many other ways to allocate status. Awards, specialized swag (yes even a T shirt or a lapel pin), ceding/sharing a stage normally reserved for you or other leaders, specialized cohorts with custom names — these are just a few.
This is one of several areas where your deliberate action probably behooves you and the team. Ideally, the way one gets status on your team is through values-driven action. Doing the stuff that contributes to your shared mission, no matter what status that stuff might confer outside of this contrived little world of your team. Ideally, you make this clear. Unlike the world beyond, status around here isn’t inherited or randomly assigned or driven by looks, wealth, zip code. Status and its symbols are accessible. Around here, status is a good and it is abundant.
-eric
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REVEAL AND REMARK, AGAIN AND AGAIN
One of the most powerful things you can do is praise your team members in detailed and genuine ways. This is a formula I call “Reveal and Remark,” and all it takes is pointing out the connection between someone’s positive choices and better outcomes for all. The core criteria for effective “reveal and remark” are:
Praise behaviors, not people.
Recognize tiny choices.
Be specific — not “be more like Natalie.”
Remark publicly when possible.
Do it often. (This is the most important part.)
The next time you think about your ‘favorite’ employees, consciously work to identify the basic, replicable behaviors that make you think so fondly of those individuals. Then tell them about those behaviors you’re seeing and the positive impact they’re making.
Talking about these specific qualities with the other employees on your team promotes pointed growth in a direction that they can easily understand. For instance, encouraging employees to “follow up with sales leads at the end of each week, like Natalie does,” makes Natalie’s good habits much easier to emulate than when someone is simply told to “be more like Natalie.” This praise elevates Natalie to a new status that she will be driven to maintain and surpass.
Attention to the smallest details is incredibly helpful for stimulating growth. It can mean something as simple as, “John, it’s awesome that you always take the time to respond to all of your internal emails before you sign off for the day – that’s a huge help for our team.”
Anyone can “Reveal and Remark,” but managers should do it as a matter of routine. It demonstrably improves performance, and shouldn’t take longer than thirty minutes per week, even for those who are hesitant or uncomfortable giving praise. To establish a consistent practice and make the process feel less vulnerable, I encourage managers to put this task on their calendar each week and really visualize the outcomes of their compliments beforehand. Once you establish a regular process of praising your employees, reinforcing incremental growth becomes a fun and inspiring, instead of bogged down in the procedural mire of annual reviews or caught up in (mostly irrelevant) questions about authenticity and a leader’s personal preferences.
-ben
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CHANGING THE TERMS AS VERY USEFUL FEEDBACK
A generous critic will do some intuitive work - theyll look at what you’ve made and infer what you were going for. They’ll see the kind of thing you wanted this draft to be and give you feedback about fulfilling the criteria of that kind of thing. They meet your work on its own terms.
Sometimes the most useful feedback to get, even if it’s some of the hardest to hear, is the suggestion of new terms. This memoir you think you’re writing really wants to be an essay. The company you’re trying to fundraise for is better as a non profit. The young program manager that you’re training should actually run her own shop.
To get this kind of feedback, you can ask for it directly. “Right now, I’m trying to make this a really high quality x. I’d love your take on what it needs to become that. I’d also love to hear if you think there’s a different thing it could or should be altogether.”
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Poet Maya Angelou on history and opportunity, on an inauguration day 32 years ago:
History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, but if faced With courage, need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon The day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream
Aviator Amelia Earhart on tenacity and rewards:
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life;
and the procedure, the process is its own reward.
Poet Ben Lerner on cliche:
Nothing is a cliche when you’re living it.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric