Telling your best people they’re brilliant might be quietly making them more cautious.

It feels like the opposite. A sharp piece of work lands on your desk, you write back “you’re so good at this,” and they glow. But notice what the praise actually attached itself to.

Carol Dweck spent decades on a finding most of us know only in cartoon form. When you praise a trait (“you’re a natural,” “you’re brilliant”), you tie a person’s worth to that trait staying true. So they start guarding it. They lean toward work that will confirm the label and away from work that might expose its limits. Praise the specific move instead, the way they framed the problem or the risk they took that only half-worked, and you point them at something they can actually repeat.

The damage compounds precisely because it feels generous. Your most-praised people carry the most reputation to protect, so they attempt the least, which keeps them looking polished, which earns them more praise for being polished. The caution gets built one compliment at a time.

One pattern that surfaces wherever recognition gets loud: the teams that celebrate talent most enthusiastically often have the least visible failure, and they read that quiet as health. It is usually the opposite. The risk just moved out of sight.

So change one sentence this week. Before you tell someone they’re great, name the specific thing they did that you’d want them to do again, especially if it didn’t fully land. Praise the attempt, not the gift.

What did the last piece of praise you gave teach someone to keep doing?