Lavish praise for a rival's minor achievement, delivered on the record, sets expectations so high that their ordinary later work reads as a decline.
An example
Promotion to manager at an accounting firm came down to two senior associates on the same track. In the partners' weekly review, a senior manager who stood to gain if one of them stalled described her memo on a client's revenue-recognition question as "the best technical work I've seen from anyone at her level in a decade" and suggested she lead the firm's two hardest audit clients the next season. The minutes recorded the praise. The memo had been solid and routine. Over the next two quarters her work was as good as before, and partners began remarking that she had "leveled off." At the promotion meeting one partner said she had not lived up to her early promise. The other associate was promoted, and nobody in the room connected the verdict to the praise from the spring.
Why it works
Praise is the safest cover an attack can have, so the move costs the speaker almost nothing. Setting the audience's expectations too high makes every later normal result register as a fall-off, and the rival's real achievements lose their upside because a higher trajectory was already priced in. The rival then works under an inflated bar, where staying at their usual level reads as failing to live up. Audiences that project trajectories from recent results are most exposed. The rival's real ceiling has to sit below the praised level, the praise has to be public and minuted so the anchor cannot be rewound, and nothing about the speaker's relationship with the rival can signal hostility.
The thinking behind it
Amos Tversky In Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974), Tversky and Kahneman describe anchoring: estimates start from an initial value and adjust from it, usually too little. Lavish praise on the record sets a high starting value for a person's trajectory, and later ordinary work is judged against it as a decline, with little adjustment for how small the original achievement was. Lowering the bar at once, in plain words, replaces that starting value before it settles.
Warning signs
Praise out of proportion to the achievement arrives in a setting where it will be recorded, such as a partners' review, a board update, or leadership minutes. It often comes with a suggestion of bigger assignments. The speaker stands to gain if the person praised plateaus. Months later, the same person's normal work starts being described as a decline, and nobody remembers where the high bar came from.
How to defend yourself
Disclaiming praise in public can look ungracious, but lowering the bar at once and plainly is the counter that lasts.
- Thank the speaker and state what the achievement was and was not: "Thank you. It was a good memo on a standard question, and the client's harder issues are still ahead."
- Put your own expectations for the next period in writing to your evaluators, with the measures you expect to be judged by.
- If you are offered bigger assignments on the strength of the praise, take them on terms you set, with clear scope and support.
- Keep a record of the praise and when it came, so that if your work is later called a decline, you can show where the bar was set and by whom.
How a leader shuts it down
Set expectations for people from their own record and the role's defined criteria. When you hear praise far out of proportion to the work, ask what specifically it was for. In promotion discussions, check whether an apparent decline is measured against the person's actual record or against a bar someone else set for them.