After spending 4 hours driving up the armpit of California that is Highway 99, my Account Manager and I walked into a local diner just outside the town of Merced.

We had our storyboards, we had our presentation, the printed and bound slides, we had prepped responses to expected questions... And we were sharply dressed.

Here, over burnt coffee paired with burnt toast, we had a meeting with our agency's founding partner. Twenty minutes later we'd drive to a pitch interview with a potential client, but here and now, we were listening to our leader lament the current climate of the agency.

Any other day, this attitude... this conversation might have been expected.

But here we were, the presenting team sitting together for a pre-meeting...meeting, about to walk through the prospect's door with a defeated, confusing, depressing, unmotivating conversation fresh in our minds.

You can imagine how hard it was to then praise our agency, our work, our dedication to the client.

Instead of walking in with confidence, with a swagger, we were the quiet account team -- we knew our lines, we had an impressive portfolio, but we weren't visibly proud of ourselves.

Sometimes, despite how crappy business is, or the pattern of bad decisions and bad breaks, your team needs to hear something positive.

There's nothing worse than your team working diligently, working long hours to get a project done. Finally get it done, seeking that sense of accomplishment, and then hear what's wrong with it before any acknowledgment of the good that was done.

I read something last month that resonated, it said, "Being critical doesn't make you a critical thinker."

And that's exactly what the agency's founding partner was -- the poorest example of a critical thinker. He'd look at a project and before trying to find an ounce of success in it, he'd find the smallest bad piece, and tear it apart.

It wasn't good for morale; it wasn't good for progress.

I think of encouragement and recognition like a gas tank. Your team members start their engines each time they arrive for work, using past encouragement to get through their day.

But eventually, after a dry spell of encouraging words, they're going to run on fumes. They've been ignored, insulted, criticized -- and now, they lack the motivation to keep going, to pursue the "always make it better" objective.

Reinforcing positive behavior and good work may help with a gradual transition to a more positive atmosphere; but only identifying new "you're doing this wrong" items will only work to dig an employee deeper into a toxic mentality.

Respect your team, value them, encourage them and you'll avoid an empty gas tank all together.