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Giving recognition

“I think just the idea of recognizing people, letting people know that you’re paying attention, making heroes. A lot of people do a lot of heroic things in the life of an enterprise or a company, a family, whatever, and recognizing them matters to them. And so, it’s not that hard to do either, just to say, wow, you really did a great job on that. Or you did a great job on that, why don’t you think about this, so you can combine it with feedback, too. But it’s a great way to teach. Great leaders are great teachers.”

Joel Peterson said the above on Episode 198 last week and the act of recognizing your team has stuck with me since. One way we recognize performance is through cash bonuses which, while they certainly have a place in company incentives, aren’t always the most effective at highlighting great behaviors and actions to the rest of your team.

Bonuses also aren’t public. Generally speaking, nobody else in the company knows what everyone else’s bonuses are. Gains in status amongst peers for hitting a bonus are limited.

But public praise and recognition from the CEO in front of one’s peers has immense status, makes a team member feel seen and their hard work appreciated, paints them as a great team member to the rest of the organization, and sets a standard for behavior to be recognized in the future.

There are countless ways to recognize employees. One way is as simple as a #Kudos Slack channel the whole company is on where anyone can recognize the effort of another team member. This method has the added benefit of allowing peers to recognize peers.

In bigger companies, Ann Rhoades talked about JetBlue CEO David Neeleman writing a weekly email to the whole company (almost 10,000 employees in 2007) and making sure to always include at least one story of an employee who went above and beyond for a customer.

Other large companies have internal awards programs (FreightWaves example), which has the added physical benefits of bringing the company together in-person and providing plaques and trophies to winning employees.

“Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy. Start with employees and the rest follows from that.”

Herb Kelleher, Founder of Southwest Airlines

But recognition doesn’t need to be so formal to start. Even simple praise or recognition in passing conversations can be an effective early step for CEOs. It must however be genuine and authentic, no praise for praise’s sake. Employees know when they are being lied to, especially by leadership.

Seeing these opportunities for recognition in a small company is fairly straightforward since the CEO will likely have daily interactions with the majority of the team. But what about as the company grows? Are there any systems to gather recognition and great stories from employees going above and beyond? I asked Joel Peterson this question as well and he responded:

“You do it yourself…if the leader collects stories and tells stories and opens meetings with a story, recognizes people, celebrates others, reflects credit, absorbs blame, everybody will start to do that, and you start to get a healthier and healthier culture.”

The CEO must make collecting and telling stories a personal priority to be great at it. Ask for great stories in meetings, 1:1s, and lunch breaks. Get your team used to sharing these stories with you and over time they will flow more naturally upward. Another idea here might be creating an recognition@ email address, but I’d be concerned with loss authenticity vs direct one to one conversations to share stories.

How do you recognize employees? What methods and systems have you found effective for story collecting?

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