TL;DR
Quick praise like “outstanding work!” feels good in the moment but doesn’t tell your team what to repeat. This post breaks down a real moment where I caught myself doing exactly that — and the five specific things that actually made the work outstanding, so my team knew what to do more of.
I talk about feedback all the time. It’s one of my favorite topics. And I still got it wrong the other day — flatfooted, in real time, in front of a whole client team.
Here’s what happened: one of my client teams at the agency sent work to a client in a presentation and copied me on it. I read it, and it was fantastic. The work was outstanding. I was so proud of the team. So I hit reply, dropped all the client emails off the thread, and wrote: “Outstanding work! Lee.”
Felt great. Sent it fast. Case closed — or so I thought.
Timely Isn’t Enough — Feedback Has to Be Specific
Then I started thinking about it. And the next day, I woke up and thought, “Well, that was dumb.”
Not dumb that I replied in the moment — that part was good. Feedback has to be timely to matter, and I gave it right after they presented the work. But “outstanding work” is a moment in time. It’s a clap on the back. Awesome, awesome, great work. We didn’t even have a result yet. We didn’t know if the client would take the advice. We just knew the client had fantastic work in front of them to consider a big strategic move.
So what actually made it outstanding? I hadn’t told anybody anything they could share, reuse, or train someone else on. If someone on that team was onboarding a new hire, they couldn’t point to my email and say, “and here’s what we did here, and here’s what we did there.” There was nothing to reinforce.
Timely gets attention. Specific gets repeated.
So I face-palmed myself and went back. I started to type “to clarify…” and stopped — what I actually meant was, “To expand on my thoughts on outstanding work, let me explain why I think this is outstanding.”
What Actually Made the Work Outstanding
Once I slowed down, the specifics were easy to name. Here’s what I told the team — and what I want them to keep doing.
1. Deep, Contextual Research
They went back in time on the client — competitive research, client research, what had worked before, what hadn’t. That put everything in a place where we could see the client wasn’t operating in a bubble. They exist in an ecosystem, and the work reflected that.
2. Two Fully Built Options, Not Just a Tagline
The whole point of the presentation was to explore two options. They articulated the two themes, backed them up with research, and layered the messaging underneath each one — how the campaign would go, how different audiences would hear it, how it would come to life. Then they juxtaposed the two side by side so a reader could compare them on one page, even without the live presentation.
3. Strong Headlines and Visual Cues
If you were just flipping through, you’d know what was in the presentation without doubting what you were about to look at later. That’s how most of us actually read things — skim now, come back later. Good headlines give you the visual cue to find your way back.
4. A Working Appendix
The appendix was longer than the recommendation itself — and that’s a good thing. It showed all the thinking that went into the first ten pages: the decision-making process, the reasoning behind the recommendation. Why does that matter? Because very seldom does anyone make a decision alone. Our client was going to take this to someone else. My team set it up so that person didn’t need us in the room — they could pull from the appendix and stay fully informed on their own.
Our job isn’t to be needed for everything. Some agencies make that mistake — building work that only makes sense with them in the room. Our job is to make the work shareable and actionable, with or without us.
5. Clean Design and Ruthless Editing
Great use of color, great use of white space — which gave natural pause points for anyone reading it solo. It wasn’t jumbled. And that kind of clarity doesn’t happen by accident. You have to edit and edit and edit to get from 25 words down to three. It’s much harder to make something short than to make it long.
That’s what made the work outstanding — not the package as a whole, but every individual piece inside it. And if you’re ever giving feedback on something where that person might train the next person on it, that’s the question to ask yourself: what do I want them to focus on?
Make Your Feedback Specific and Amplifiable
Positive feedback works when it’s two things: specific, and amplifiable. People need to know exactly what they did well so they can do more of it — especially midstream in a project, before you even know the final result.
This tracks with what Harvard Business Review has found: traditional feedback, on its own, often doesn’t help people improve the way managers assume it does. Part of the issue is that vague, evaluative comments — the “great job” or “you need to work on this” variety — don’t give someone anything concrete to act on. The lesson isn’t to stop giving feedback. It’s to make sure the feedback you give actually contains something usable.
In this case, I knew the client liked the work. I knew they were appreciative and complimentary. But they were complimentary because we gave them something they could act on. And the reason they had something to act on was everything the team had just done: the thinking, the presentation, the word choice, building it out so the client could see it come to life instead of going back and forth, back and forth.
Giving someone something they can act on — that’s what makes work outstanding.
I talk about this all the time, and I still corrected myself midstream. I’m sharing it because we all need the reminder — be timely and specific in your positive feedback, so people know exactly what to amplify, what to train on, and what to keep doing. It makes their life easier, makes the work better, and makes everything downstream easier too.
So next time you want to fire off “great job” or “outstanding work,” take the extra thirty seconds. Say what made it great. Your team will actually be able to use it.
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