Currency

2024-12-04

Here’s some advice I wish I could give to my past self about how to give impactful compliments.

Two experiences led me to this realisation.

The first was when I noticed nobody had clicked the “start sprint” button in JIRA. I sent a brief message in Slack saying that if nobody had any objections, I’d start the sprint. No one objected, the sprint was started, and life went on. The next day, my manager told me I took great initiative in doing this. While I, like most people, enjoy receiving compliments, this one didn’t resonate much with me.

The second experience was when I volunteered to be part of the skeleton crew between Christmas and New Year’s. There was a particular project I was eager to complete during that time. I had taken photos of the dashboards of trucks while on a client’s mine site and wanted to use them as a truth set for automated tests for our signal decoding. I saw our decoding protocol as a significant risk to the company. It was something we tweaked occasionally but had no automated tests to detect breaking changes. In the new year, I presented the completed project. The only comment from my manager was, did you get permission to work on this as part of the skeleton crew?, to which I replied, yes, I got permission from you. It felt disheartening that this was his only comment.

The key difference between these examples is what I cared about. The start-sprint example didn’t matter to me; it wouldn’t even make my list of achievements at this company. But I took immense pride in the second example. I identified a risk, took practical steps to address it, and completed it efficiently and on time.

Years later, I learned during a leadership course that this concept has a name: currency, what someone values. Actions and behaviour have a more significant impact if they align with someone’s currency.

Consciously try to learn what someone values, and focus your positivity towards it.