Which would you rather be praised and recognized for == your effort or your talent? (And if you are a coach, teacher, parent or manager, which will you choose to reward?) Shows like "Britain's Got Talent and the American knockoff, American Idol spend most of their time and gush on talent.
Bad choice.
When you praise or otherwise reward achievement, when you praise effort, you empower the recipient. They are in charge of effort. If you praise talent, you praise them for what they had nothing to do with.
A lovely research experiment praised one group of students for effort and the other group for talent. Then they gave them choices around some other tests. The students who praised for talent chose the easier tests (to prove they were smart). Those praised for effort chose harder tests, probably because they felt more powerful and in control of the outcome.
If this topic interests you, may I recommend to my fellow coaches and teachers the book, Talent is Over-rated. Unless of course, this seems like too much work.
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Interesting. I can see the argument that rewarding achievement puts the reward system in the arena of "stuff you can affect." But I have to admit that my first thought was of my own experiences.
ReplyDeleteMy parents shared the "praise effort, not talent" mindset. I was naturally talented at schoolwork, so I was rarely praised, because they assumed academic success didn't require any effort from me.
That wasn't true--I have attention-deficit issues, and my efforts were applied to maintaining focus in the classroom. And sometimes I failed! But because I rarely brought work home, my parents assumed I didn't have to work as hard to succeed. This was exacerbated when teachers would interpret my lack of focus as lack of effort, and write helpful comments like "Should try harder" on my report cards... Oh, well.
Hard work and effort looks different in different people, and people who lack talent in a certain area sometimes have a hard time seeing genuine level of effort from people who have that talent.
Just my $.02.