Give Kudos Quotes

Yesterday I was clever, so I took the glory for me. Today He makes me wise, so I give the glory to Thee

Grandma, please. It’s okay. Dad’s doing a great job. I give him kudos for at least being calm and rational, and not losing his temper with everyone around him who isn’t in childbirth. And he has yet to start shooting lighting bolts at people. Poor Damien still has a burn scar.” – Kat

Let go of a need for personal recognition. Heap kudos on others and they’ll perform even better next time. Leaders are only as good as those who follow them and followers are at their best when leaders are quick to give credit for successes.

Dixie Flynn may be the most kick-ass heroine ever created. Kudos to M.C. Grant for giving us the ultimate 'girl power' thriller." —TESS GERRITSEN, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE SILENT GIRL

Someone I know writes fanfic, and he— they want me to help proofread and give feedback on their stories. But I can’t give useful feedback unless I know what a good story looks like, so I’ve been reading fics about Cupid. The ones with the most kudos.

Given that we all agree, in principle, that postmortems are good for us, I’m always struck by how much people dread them. Most feel that they’ve learned what they could during the execution of the project, so they’d just as soon move on. Problems that arose are frequently personal, so most are eager to avoid revisiting them. Who looks forward to a forum for being second-guessed? People, in general, would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong, using the occasion to give additional kudos to their most deserving team members. Left to our own devices, we avoid unpleasantness. It isn’t just postmortems, though: In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. Looking inward, to them, often boils down to this: “We are successful, so what we are doing must be correct.” Or the converse: “We failed, so what we did was wrong.” This is shallow. Do not be cowed into missing this opportunity.

We are only righteous in Christ and in him alone. But that’s a hard pill to swallow, especially if you give yourself kudos for good choices.

In short, if you want innovation in your company, you need to reward people for taking intelligent action, not just for talking about the virtues of failure, experimentation, or risk taking. It might not even be enough to give equal rewards for success and intelligent failures. The excessive value that our culture places on success means that people who succeed may still get more kudos than they deserve from peers and outsiders, and those who fail may get more blame than they deserve. To offset this bias, perhaps this weird idea should be “Reward failure even more than success, and punish inaction.

Axios In-House Newsletters Lights On from our revenue team . . . Cranes from Axios Local . . . Click Clack from our web-traffic guru . . . The Funnel from our head of growth . . . The TopLine from our sales warriors. • Those are just a few of the newsletters regularly published by Axios execs using Axios HQ—for their bosses, their teams and their colleagues across the company. Why it matters: This gives winners a forum for sharing best practices, encourages healthy competition among business units and gets rid of silos—everyone has visibility on what everyone’s up to. Between the lines: For the cofounders, these updates are an early-warning system for anyone’s activities that might be veering away from company goals. In one Sunday evening, we can be sure everyone’s on track and spot pockets that need our attention, encouragement or kudos. • And here’s our favorite part: When we have one-on-one meetings with our leaders, we’re already caught up. So we can use that time to talk through innovations, insights, bottlenecks, disruptions.

Who Are Your Stars? That is the first question I ask when a boss has performance problems, is plagued by caustic conflict, or is losing good people at an alarming rate. I want to know if the anointed stars enhance or undermine others’ performance and humanity. Unfortunately, too many bosses have such blind faith in solo superstars and unbridled competition that they hire egomaniacs and install pay and promotion systems that reward selfish creeps who don’t give a damn about their colleagues. Or, even worse, they shower kudos and cash on credit hogs and backstabbers who get ahead by knocking others down. As