By james art 
Whether you work from a C-suite office or a cubicle, genuine encouragement from leaders and colleagues can significantly boost your mood and productivity. Jordan Montgomery – bestselling author, performance coach and speaker – will discuss the art of promotion at the upcoming Elevate Your Leadership and Your Team 2025 event hosted by Baton Rouge Business Report on Feb. 19 at the Healing Place Arena.
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Jordan Montgomery will join Charlotte Gamble at Elevate Your Leadership and Your Team hosted by Business Report on February 19 at the Healing Place Arena. Get details and tickets.
Inspired by his bestseller, The Art of Encouragement: How to Lead Teams, Spread Love, and Serve from the HeartMontgomery will explain why encouragement is vital to building strong teams and how to implement authentic encouragement practices in your business. Business report sat down with Montgomery ahead of the event to get an early peek at some of his insights.
We are all equipped to provide encouragement.
Encouragement is not style. It’s a choice. Some people think, “Well, I’m not a super encouraging person, or it’s not my style to share warm, fuzzy words.” I see this with a lot of men in particular. I want to challenge this. We all understand the language of encouragement and anyone can speak it. We just have to be intentional.
Promotion attracts and retains talent.
The art of promotion is really important if you want to keep great people in your culture. If you want to build a great culture, stand out, and hire the best talent, you need to have a really thoughtful strategy for how you make people feel known, seen, valued, and understood. If you encourage people, you help them feel valued and they are much more likely to stay with a company.
You can overcome barriers.
Part of that is not pausing to consider the impact of encouragement or assuming that people already know how we feel. The cost of under-communicating is more significant than the cost of over-communicating. I’d rather people get annoyed at how many times I rate them than wonder if I care. People sometimes worry that it might be awkward because they do their best to share what’s on their heart. I don’t think most companies and people share enough appreciation and encouragement, which means that when you do, you’ll probably feel unusual and a bit unique and different.
Two easy ways to make your team feel appreciated and encouraged in the workplace.
Encourage those who do. We live in a culture that makes a really big deal of what people do and not enough of who people are. Not that results aren’t important. Results are very important. As leaders, we need to get really good at promoting not just results, but also the choices, decisions, character, and values of the people responsible for leading and impacting.
Be specific in how you encourage.
So many of us are quick to say, “Good job.” Instead, I can say, “I appreciate you because X, Y, and Z.” When you’re specific, you’re much more believable and it comes across as much more authentic. If you are sincere, genuine and authentic, the specifics should come out.