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# Attawhat?

**James Walls** · September 2, 2026 · 10 min read

An underrated anti-hero movie of relatively recent times – and it is somehow eighteen years old now – is Hancock. One of the things I remember fondly is Jason Bateman’s character, Ray, instructing Will Smith’s titular character that one of the ways to redeem himself is to flatter other people with acknowledgement. So Hancock goes about saying “good job” in an uncomfortable, stilted way, to people who never asked him for his opinion.

I know how that feels from the receiving end. Every time an employee told me I was doing a good job, it landed as weird. Slightly suck-uppy, if I’m honest about my first reaction – which is a rotten thing to think about somebody who has just said something kind to you, and it bothered me for years that I thought it.

I’m not American, so it took me longer than it should have to learn the word for this type of praise. I knew ’attaboy’ as football-field language – a slap on the backside and off you go. It was a surprise to find it used at work, in earnest, as truncated praise. And it turned out I’d been collecting them my entire working life.

During the years where I held senior roles I was given plenty of attaboys, and not one of them ever did anything for me either. They just didn’t matter. My success was measured on agreed metrics and KPIs – written down, signed up to – so whatever anybody said to me in a corridor, the question of whether I was doing a good job was going to be answered somewhere else. My boss gave me encouragement, and neither of us ever confused the encouragement with achievement.

Then I owned my own company, and the measures stayed behind with the old job. Nobody sets an owner’s KPIs. Nobody sits you down in March to agree what the year is supposed to produce, and nobody tells you in December whether you did it. All that’s left is what people say to you.

## Everybody is reading something real

For a while I interpreted any received praise as politics, and beyond politics, as the way recognition in general has gone. We live in a society where recognition is increasingly bought rather than earned – I watch the fervent campaigning that accompanies the local Best of SRQ awards here in Sarasota every year, and the winners are the ones who asked hardest. It was a tidy theory, and I liked it, because it let me put every attaboy I’d ever been handed in the same bin as the awards and stop thinking about it.

It wasn’t the answer, though, and the reason it wasn’t is that the people praising me actually, as far as I could ever tell, meant every word. Hancock at least had the excuse of being told to say it. The people who said it to me had no such excuse, and it still did nothing for me.

The problem is position. The employee who told me I was doing a good job could see some of what I did and none of what it produced. A supplier who tells you that you’re running a good operation may believe every word of it, and he has still never seen what your gross margin did last quarter. Your operations manager watches the work every day and has never seen the stress and planning and corrections you made at midnight. The accountant sees your profit number, but not your sacrifice. All of them are reading something real. None of them is reading whether the business is achieving your aims better now than it was a year ago.

**Accountant.** A professional who prepares, reviews and interprets a business's financial records – producing the statements, handling tax filings, and advising on how the numbers should be treated. [Full entry →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/glossary/#accountant)
**Gross Margin.** The percentage of revenue a company keeps after covering the direct costs of producing the goods or services it sold (COGS). [Full entry →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/glossary/#gross-margin)

The people who could get closest to that – a co-owner, a trusted advisor who has watched three years of it – aren’t the ones catching you by the coffee machine, and most owners haven’t got them anyway.

None of which stops praise feeling good to many people. It does, and that’s not a failing; the pleasure is real. It’s just that the pleasure and actual achievement are two different things. Which, I eventually realized, is all the weird feeling ever was – some part of me knew the real achievement and satisfaction weren’t there, long before I could say why.

## The attaboys I hand out

I could have left it there, as one of the stranger perks of the job, except that I hand them out too, and I’ve done damage with them.

There’s a version of this most of us have run. You hire someone and it’s just not working out as you needed. They’re trying hard – and every so often they do something tactically right: a part of job delivered well, a customer handled properly, a week where the numbers behave. So you hunt out the goodness and express that. You say it partly because it’s true and partly because you’re hoping the encouragement will carry them toward the big problem they’re not solving.

It never does. The attaboy is accurate – about the job, the customer, the week – and that’s exactly what makes it dangerous, because what they hear is that they’re doing a good job. The problem gets to stay where it is, with your endorsement now sitting on top of it. Then comes the inevitable day when it can’t go on, and it lands as a shock and an unwelcome surprise, because everything they’d ever been told was that they were doing fine. I’ve done this, and I’ve watched it done, always to good people who deserved better.

The tyranny of attaboys is that they can assemble into a run of true statements that add up to a false one.

None of this means real genuine praise shouldn’t be given, or effort go unrecognized. It should be. The fault is praise alone – handing somebody an attaboy as the entire means of moving them toward the problem they’re not solving.

## What praise alone trains

I’m working at the moment with an owner who is handing his business to his son, and the son takes his whole reading of how he’s doing from what his father tells him. The attaboys given are meant every time – and every one of them tells the son how his father feels, much more than the real strategic progress that’s being made towards a succession outcome.

Praise alone – heartfelt or not – trains tactical thinking at best, and at worst something closer to Pavlov’s dogs, where the work stops being the point and the response becomes the point.

And it’s gradual, insidious even. What a person learns is where the praise lives, rather than whether the work is any good. The strategic work is usually the unpopular work, and nobody applauds in the middle of it. So the popular task gets done, the difficult work gets put back another week, and there’s never a day you could point at afterwards and say that was where it went wrong.

The strange part is that the same owner doesn’t run himself on praise at all. He measures himself on the number of people the business can support – properly support, meaning good wages, work worth doing, and enough left over for their families. Nobody has ever given him an attaboy for that, and an attaboy couldn’t touch it. It doesn’t move because he had a good meeting. It moves when the business is carrying more people than it did last year, on wages that hold when a slow quarter arrives.

It has never occurred to him to give his son a measure like it.

## What has to be said out loud

What’s missing – for the son, for the employee I kept encouraging, for the owner most of all – is what my old employer used to give me, and it doesn’t take a corporate apparatus: an aim (or series of aims) written down, shared with somebody appropriate, and committed to, plain enough that in a year both of you would know whether it was reached.

A real aim doesn’t need a judge. It sits in the business rather than in anybody’s opinion of you – it moved or it didn’t. Nobody can talk that up, and no attaboy can move it. By all means find the co-owner, the accountant, and the honest room as well; but they’ll be reading the same instrument you are, and somebody has to have built it first.

You do this work twice over. Once for yourself, because nobody else is going to. And once for everybody who depends on you, because until they have an aim of their own, the only instrument you’ve handed them is your own face.

I did what I suspect most owners do. With nobody to set an aim for me, I set myself a number and went after it. What I had, it turns out, was half an aim – and I know that because I reached the half I had.

The number of times I’ve sacrificed one part of my life for another is not something I’m proud of. The evenings at my computer building something, when I should have been taking care of the parts of my life that were every bit as meaningful as the work, and most likely more so – those being, after all, what the work was supposed to be for. I got where I was going, and the benefit to me and to my family was real. But the arguments and the tension along the way, all of it coming out of my own ignorance about what balance was actually for, made the result hollow by the time it arrived. Distasteful, even. The number was met. I’ve never once enjoyed looking at it.

Praise is always temporary. Doing something that satisfies is enduring – and what satisfies is not only what you reached, but what you were and were not prepared to do to reach it.

The right aim, executed the wrong way, comes out hollow. If you ignore your family to build a better future for them, the victory is undermined.

So an aim has two halves and it’s a sentence, not a document: here is what we’re going for this year – and here is what we’re going to and not going to do to get there. And the ’not’ is the important guide-rail, as opposed to all-encompassing: We’re not buying it by dropping price, we’re not buying it by burning out the two people who’d have to deliver it, and we’re not ignoring our families to get there.

No one ever communicates what you’re not going to do to reach your aim – and it’s very much needed in this day and age.

And then the aim needs driving, because getting the initial conversation is only the start. An aim agreed in January and then left alone until December tells you nothing about the work while the work is happening – no more than the attaboys ever did. The aim needs regular monitoring, both halves of it: is it moving, and are we still getting there the way we said we would? Mine had only the first half, and the first half drove itself. The second was never said, so nothing was watching what the getting there was costing – until the result came in and told me.

And the satisfaction isn’t only for the person doing the work. Whoever is handing out the attaboys gets very little from them either – what the giver actually gets, when it works, is the satisfaction of watching somebody take on the difficult, unpopular work and deliver the outcome. Neither side has that available until both halves of an aim have been said out loud, and driven.

Do that, and the attaboy can go back to being what it always should have been: a good thing somebody says on the way past, like on the football field, rather than the only tool anybody is using.

## Aiming True

So, what are your real aims? Are they well explored and actionable through your efforts and others? Doing this right strategically and tactically starts with understanding your real aim. Most owners have the number in their head; what they don’t have is the rest of the aim.

Getting underneath that is a conversation I have with owners most weeks, and at Stoneforge we’ve put a short version of it online as the Real-Aim Test: what the number is standing in for, and what you would and wouldn’t do to reach it. There’s no email address to hand over and nothing is stored anywhere, because it’s meant to be useful to you whether we ever speak or not.

## Two questions to sit with

- Think of the last time somebody told you that you’d done a good job – what did they actually know about the work?

- What is the last thing you did that satisfied you – both in what you reached and in how you went about reaching it – whether or not anybody noticed?

### Find the aim under your own number

The free real-aim test runs four quick checks on the number you're chasing – what a target like it usually stands in for, where yours actually came from, what changed the last time you hit one, and what you wouldn't give up to get it. Where they agree is the real aim. No email, no sign-up.

[Test Your Number →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/tools/real-aim/)

The same question, written out: [Am I chasing the right aim – or just a number? →](https://stoneforgegroup.com/questions/am-i-chasing-the-right-goal/)

First published in The Stoneforge Newsletter on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/attawhat-james-walls-bnlhe), September 2, 2026. Revised for this edition.

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