The professional compliment is different, it is tool of change, something we use to develop individuals, teams, and organisations. It is also a way to give appreciative feedback, which is a resource that is lacking in most organisation. Therefore, the professional compliment has to meet higher standards of credibility, relevance and content than everyday compliments.

I see four conditions that need to be fullfilled for a compliments to be professional: meaningful, real, sincere and tailormade:

1. Compliments need to be meaningful and purposeful. The have to fit in the context. If you are working on a project, a compliment a collegue about their great recipie for apple-pie is out of context. Unless your are starting a café.

2. Compliments need to be real. They should be facts, that is, based on things we know by having seen and heard them. If you want to give someone a compliment for being a caring person, it is because you have seen or heard some caring behavior or words. It comes down to this: If someone replies to a compliment with Why do you say that? you must be able to answer it is because you said or did this or that. We need to back professional compliments with facts.

3. Compliments have to be sincere. You must say what you mean and mean what you say. If we are not seen as credible and sincere, our compliments might be experienced as flattery. It doesn’t really work to say to someone who obviously is overworked and haven’t slept well, that they look fresh today. It might work to say we are impressed that the took the time to come, given that they have so much to do.

4. Compliments have to be tailormade The must sound right in the ears of the reciever. The simplest way to do this is to use the words and language the other person. It must also reflect the kind of relationsship we have. I can’t use the same langauge talking to a kid or to a adult employee. When my son learned to ride a bike, I did’t tell him that I was truly impressed by his recent progress in developing coordination skills. And when a collegue writes a great report, I will not tell here she is a good girl.

To sum up. Everyday compliments is an important part of communication and social life since it a social lubricant and builds relationsship. An organisation is, of course, also a form of social life, and needs to be lubricated. But is a special kind of social life, though, where we create things together; we have projects, products, customers, budgets, and so on. Things need to get done. Here, compliments play an important part too: as a change tool, as a way of coaching and motivating, and as a way to create positive, constructive feedback. The professional compliment must therefore, if we want it to work, be meaningful, real, sincere, and tailormade

I will, in a series of four blogs, discuss how Wisemans findings fit with a solutions focused approach, and how the approach actually is something of a luck school in it self.

(BTW, the first thing to notice is that Wiseman’s luck school idea in itself is an example of the solutions focused approach. One of the central ideas of SF is: find out what works, and do more of it. Wiseman extracts what seems to make people lucky, and then teaches other people to do more of that. This is similar to the Positive Deviance approach to foreign aid.)

Wiseman described the four factors of an article in Sceptical Inquirer (May/June, 2003)

Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition,create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

In this blog, we’ll look at the first principle: Create and notice chance opportunities

Wiseman conducted an interesting experiment. He gave lucky and un-lucky people a newspaper and asked them to count the number of pictures in it. What he didn’t tell them that there was a message on page two of the magazine saying “Stop counting - There are 43 picture in this newspaper”. The lucky people tended to see this message and was done in a few seconds. The unlucky people spent several minutes working to count the numbers. The luck here was not a matter of chance. It was a matter of awareness. The lucky people, without realising it, used a technique we can learn and develop: our ability to notice the unexpected and pattern-breaking, and not to get locked down in tunnel-vision.

In solutions focused work we often use techniques to help us notice change and possibilities. A classical technique often used in solutions focused therapy is easily adaptable to a small everyday experiment:

For the next few days, notice what you do, and what happens, that is good for you, and that you want to see happen more. Make a note of it in the back of your head or an paper

The idea of exceptions or, as I prefer to call it hidden success is another tool that works with this principle. If a solutions focused coach is asked to help a team with co-operation problems he or she might use a question like when was the last time you co-operated well or better After an initial suprise people often recollects moments of success hidden among the problems, like Wisemans message among the pictures. Often, we are too busy with problem (or counting) to the the fragments of success that give us clues to solutions. When we have identified such hidden success, we often follow up with affirming questions like How did you manage to do that? Which helps us to build on what works.

An experiment you might like to try is:

Think back on the week until you find something that you did, or that happened, that was useful for you. Then ask yourself how you made that happen. How did you do to take the opportunity? What did you learn from it?

With the solutions focused approach we can increase our possibilities in the moment and in the future by noticing the chance opportunities that always happen. We can also use the past by using our lucky eyes to pick up the possibilities that was lying in front of us, but we were to busy to notice or that discounted by view them as exceptions. This increases our possibility-field to include the unpredictable changes that always happen.

In the next blog in this series we will look at the third principle: create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations. There are also some ideas on luck and chance in a previous blog

Rayya Ghoul once shoved me a training exercise called nag-nag-nag which I’ve found immensly useful. Perhaps you would like to try a little experiment based on this exercise. The next time you encounter someone who nags and complains about something. (and preferably when they are not nagging about you, that makes the experiment too difficult) As they are complaining, keep quiet for a few minutes and just listen, don’t comment either positively or negatively. After a few minutes, when there is a gap in the nagging, do some magic. The magic is to give the person sincere compliments about things you heard in the nagging. That’s right: sincere well-grounded compliments. And real ones too, they should be derived from someting in what the person is saying.

…could you do it? Amazingly this is quite possible to do. If you did the experiment, how did you find compliments to give? You probably did so by listening differently. You hear resources: commitment, observational skills, sense of what’s right, willingness to do the right thing, coping skills, ambitions, aspirations, honesty etc. Would it be as easy to hear these things if you had not decided to give sincere compliments after a while? Probably not. Your ears would be hurting from all the negativity, itching to either encourage or discourage. So, the commitment to give sincere, real, compliments, tunes you in to seeing and hearing resources, the positive in the negative. In this sense the solution focused practise to end a conversation with acknowledgement, validation, and compliments works both ways. For the giver, it trains you to listen differently be receptive to resourses, skills and positive intentions. For the reciever, if it is well done, it acknowledges and validates.

So, the next time you meet someone who nags and complains. Be thankful for that they give you the opportunity to train yourself in constructive receptivity. And this is something completely different than new-agy positity. Remember, it is the positive that is included in the negative. The negative is still there. But it is this positivity that we need to cope with the negative.