The Most Underused Leadership Intervention in Healthcare: Catch People Doing Something Right

In healthcare, recognition is not a courtesy. It is a clinical, operational, and cultural intervention.

Healthcare leaders are trained to notice what is wrong.

We look for the missed handoff, the delayed discharge, the incomplete documentation, the staffing gap, the medication variance, the patient complaint, and the metric that moved in the wrong direction. This vigilance is necessary. Safety depends on our ability to identify risk early and respond to it honestly.

But there is a leadership failure hiding inside that strength: we can become far better at catching people doing things wrong than at catching them doing things right.

That imbalance has consequences.

When the only moments that reliably attract a leader’s attention are moments of failure, people learn an important lesson about the organization: excellence is invisible, while mistakes are highly visible. Over time, that lesson erodes initiative. It makes people cautious rather than creative, quiet rather than candid, and focused on avoiding blame rather than improving care.

The most underused intervention in healthcare leadership is remarkably simple:

Catch people doing something right.

Recognition is not the same as praise

Generic praise is easy to dismiss because it is easy to give.

“Great job.”

“Thanks for everything.”

“Keep it up.”

These phrases may be well-intentioned, but they often lack the specificity required to shape behavior. A person cannot reliably repeat a behavior that has not been clearly identified. A team cannot build a culture around an expression of approval that could apply to anything.

Effective recognition is different. It names the behavior, explains why it mattered, and connects it to the mission of care.

Consider the difference:

Specific recognition tells people exactly what excellence looks like in practice.

Why this matters more in healthcare

Healthcare is not delivered by isolated individuals performing standardized tasks in a predictable environment. It is delivered through thousands of small judgments, adaptations, acts of vigilance, and moments of human connection.

A respiratory therapist notices a subtle change before the monitor signals an emergency. A medical assistant catches a discrepancy in a medication list. A nurse makes a second call to a family member because the first explanation did not land. A scheduler finds a way to close a gap in follow-up care. A physician invites a quieter colleague into a complex discussion. An environmental services professional notices that a frightened patient needs reassurance, not only a clean room.

Much of the work that protects patients never appears as a dramatic event. It is preventive. It is relational. It is distributed across roles and shifts.

If leaders only recognize visible outcomes, they will miss the behaviors that produce them.

That is why recognition should be treated as part of the operating system of a healthcare organization. It reinforces situational awareness, teamwork, reliability, and respect. It helps translate abstract values into observable actions. It shows people that leaders are paying attention not only when something goes wrong, but also when someone quietly makes care better.

The leadership discipline: go looking for what is working

Recognition is most powerful when it is deliberate rather than accidental.

A practical discipline is to spend a small, protected amount of time each week moving through the operation with one question in mind:

What is someone doing right that I would want repeated, taught, or built into our standard of care?

This is not a ceremonial rounding exercise. It is not a search for compliments. It is an effort to observe the real work as it happens.

Look for the person who closes a communication loop. Look for the team that anticipates a bottleneck. Look for a new employee who asks an important question. Look for a colleague who protects a patient’s dignity under pressure. Look for a process that works because someone took ownership of it.

Then respond while the moment is still fresh.

A useful recognition statement has three parts:

• Name the action. State what the person actually did.
• Explain the impact. Connect the action to safety, experience, quality, access, teamwork, or stewardship.
• Affirm the standard. Make clear that this is the kind of behavior the organization wants to see more often.

For example:

“I saw you stop before the transfer and confirm the oxygen requirement with the receiving team. That prevented an assumption from becoming a risk. This is exactly what reliable handoff practice looks like.”

That conversation takes less than a minute. Its effect can last much longer.

Recognition must be credible

People know when praise is performative.

Recognition loses power when it is indiscriminate, delayed, exaggerated, or disconnected from reality. Telling a struggling employee that everything is excellent is not kindness; it is confusion. It can undermine trust and make meaningful feedback harder to hear.

Credible recognition does not replace accountability. It strengthens it.

A leader can say, “The documentation still needs improvement, and I also want to recognize the way you escalated the patient’s change in condition quickly and clearly.” Both statements can be true. In fact, holding both truths is one of the defining responsibilities of leadership.

The goal is not to create a culture in which everyone is told they are doing a great job. The goal is to create a culture in which people receive accurate feedback, understand what good work looks like, and believe that their good work will be noticed.

Recognition should travel across the hierarchy

Healthcare organizations often concentrate recognition at the top. Senior leaders receive awards, executives receive applause, and high-profile accomplishments receive broad visibility. Meanwhile, the daily acts that make care safe and humane remain largely unacknowledged.

A healthier model distributes recognition across roles, departments, and levels of authority.

Leaders should recognize frontline staff. Frontline staff should be encouraged to recognize one another. Physicians, nurses, technicians, administrators, and support teams should be able to name one another’s contributions without waiting for an annual ceremony.

The question is not, “Who had the biggest win?”

It is, “Who made the right thing more likely to happen today?”

That question honors the reality of healthcare: outcomes are collective, and reliability is built in small increments.

A simple practice for the next seven days

For the next week, try this:

• Spend 15 minutes observing work outside your usual office or meeting schedule.
• Identify one specific behavior that improved care, teamwork, safety, access, or trust.
• Recognize the person as soon as possible.
• Use the person’s name and describe the behavior without exaggeration.
• Tell them why the behavior mattered.
• Write down what you learned about the conditions that made the behavior possible.

That last step matters. Recognition should not only celebrate individual effort. It should help leaders understand the systems that enable excellent performance. If a team consistently closes communication gaps, what tools or norms support that? If a staff member repeatedly prevents avoidable confusion, what can the organization redesign so that fewer patients depend on extraordinary individual effort?

The best leaders do both: they appreciate the person and improve the system.

The cultural shift we need

Healthcare does not need less accountability. It needs a more complete form of accountability—one that asks us to account for failure, but also to account for success.

When we catch people doing something right, we make invisible excellence visible. We give teams a language for high-quality work. We reinforce the behaviors that patients depend on but may never see. We remind people that their judgment, care, and attention matter.

A culture of recognition is not soft leadership. It is disciplined leadership.

It is how values become behaviors.

It is how behaviors become norms.

And it is how norms become better care.

The next time you walk through your organization, resist the instinct to look first for what is broken. Look for what is working—and make sure the person responsible knows that you saw it.

This essay was inspired by the leadership principle “The key to developing people is to catch them doing something right,” attributed in the photographed text to Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson’s The One Minute Manager. The healthcare applications and examples above are an original adaptation.