I recently asked my team to begin sending a group message every day pointing out at least one good thing that happened at work. I had been noticing that it had become a habit for us to discuss things that came up during the workday and focus primarily on the negative impact of those things. Most of the issues being discussed were legitimate concerns and certainly needed attention, but I began to wonder whether we were becoming so accustomed to identifying problems that we were overlooking things that were going well.
My intent was to try to shift the focus to see something good each day. If you spend most of your time looking for problems or things that didn’t go according to plan, it becomes easy to reach the end of the day feeling as though very little went right. The problems are real, but they aren’t the whole picture.
I have to admit that the exercise did not work exactly as I had planned, although the results were still worth the effort. The only parameters I gave the group were that their positive thing had to be work related and couldn’t simply be the absence of something negative. I wanted them to identify something that had actually happened that was good, whether it was significant or very small.
Some members of the team began sending their “one good thing” and also included motivational quotes about positivity. Others identified successful customer interactions, projects they had completed, assistance they received from coworkers, or something they had learned during the day. After a while, however, some members of the group got into the habit of simply sending a message that said, “It was a good day.”
While I was certainly glad they thought it was a good day, that wasn’t really the point.
Looking for Something Good Is Not the Same as Calling Everything Good
The purpose was never to convince anyone that every day was a good day. Some days are difficult. Sometimes customers have problems, systems fail, deadlines change, people make mistakes, or unexpected situations take up time that was intended for something else. Those things are part of working in any organization, and pretending they don’t happen is not particularly useful.
What I wanted the team to practice was intentionally identifying something that had gone well, including on the days when several other things had not. There is a difference between deciding that you had a good day and being able to identify something good that happened during the day. A difficult customer situation may have been handled particularly well. Someone may have stepped in to help a coworker without being asked. A problem that had been lingering for several days may finally have been resolved, or a process that normally creates difficulty may have worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
It doesn’t have to be significant because much of what goes well during a normal workday is fairly ordinary, which is probably one of the reasons we don’t pay much attention to it. The things that work are easy to overlook because they generally do not require anything from us.
Problems Get Our Attention
Most organizations are naturally structured to identify and respond to problems. Customers usually contact us when they need something or when something is not working correctly. Employees ask for assistance when they encounter an issue they cannot resolve, and managers become involved when something needs additional attention or has escalated beyond the normal process. Reports frequently highlight missed targets, complaints, outages, errors, or other situations that require someone to take action.
When everything works correctly, there is often very little reason to discuss it. A customer whose issue was handled correctly the first time may never contact the company again about it and an employee may prevent a problem before anyone else even realizes there was the potential for one. A process can work exactly as designed hundreds of times without generating a single conversation, but the one time it fails, it may involve several people and become the subject of discussion for the rest of the day.
Problems are louder and they demand attention because something needs to be fixed. Over time that can also affect the way we view our work. If most of what we discuss involves something that went wrong, it is easy to begin feeling as though most things are going wrong. That may not actually be true. We may simply be paying more attention to them.
We Reinforce What We Are Already Looking For
Once a group develops the habit of focusing on what is wrong, individual events can easily begin reinforcing that outlook. A difficult customer becomes another example of how difficult customers can be. A system issue confirms the belief that a particular system never works properly. A coworker makes a mistake and it becomes evidence that people are not paying attention, while a particularly busy day reinforces the feeling that there is never enough time to accomplish everything that needs to be done.
Those conclusions rarely come from a single event. They build gradually as we collect examples that support what we have already begun to believe, often without realizing that we are doing it.
That was the habit I was trying to interrupt with the daily exercise. If you know that at some point during the day you are going to have to identify one good thing that happened, you have a reason to pay attention to things that you might otherwise overlook. You may notice how well someone handled a customer, recognize that a teammate went out of their way to help someone, appreciate that a difficult project moved forward, or simply realize that something worked better today than it did yesterday.
The exercise did not create those things. They were happening all along and it simply gave us a reason to notice them.
There is an additional lesson in this for leaders because the things we repeatedly focus on help determine what our teams focus on as well. Leaders have a responsibility to address problems and identify areas where the organization needs to improve. Avoiding difficult subjects in the interest of being positive would not be good leadership.
At the same time, if nearly every conversation with a team is about what went wrong, what needs to be corrected, we shouldn’t be surprised when the team begins viewing the organization primarily through its problems. People learn quickly what receives attention.
There is value in discussing what worked as well. Asking why a customer interaction went particularly well, recognizing when someone found a better way to complete a task, or talking about why a process succeeded gives the organization useful information. We spend considerable time trying to understand the causes of failure so that we can prevent it from happening again. There is just as much reason to understand the causes of success so that we can repeat them.
This doesn’t require constant praise or an effort to put a positive spin on everything that happens. Sometimes it simply requires noticing that something worked and taking a moment to understand why.
Resetting the Way We Look at the Day
My experiment did not dramatically change everyone’s outlook, and I didn’t really expect it to. Some people embraced the idea, some participated because I asked them to, and some eventually reduced the exercise to saying that it had been a good day. That response probably demonstrated something else as well: almost any exercise can become routine once we stop thinking about why we are doing it.
Even so, I believe the exercise was worthwhile because it interrupted an existing habit. For at least a few moments each day, everyone had to consider what had happened that was worth recognizing instead of thinking only about what had been frustrating, difficult, or inconvenient. That was the goal.
The objective was never to replace negative thoughts with positive ones or to suggest that people should ignore the things that go wrong. Problems deserve attention because they need to be addressed. The purpose was to make sure they didn’t receive all of our attention.
There will always be something at work that could have gone better, and if that is what we are looking for, we will have little difficulty finding it. There are also people solving problems and quietly doing their jobs well every day. Those things may not be as loud or demand our attention in quite the same way, but they are there.
Resetting the way we think does not require convincing ourselves that everything is good. Sometimes it simply means becoming more intentional about what we choose to notice.
At the end of the day, perhaps the better question is not whether you had a good day or a bad day, but what were you looking for?