🔟 Ten Wise Ways: Generosity, Recognition, and Celebration
How to motivate, recognize, and reward your co-workers in ways that show they really matter
In an earlier article I shared two stories about my bosses and their acts of generosity. Each of their gifts of compassion fit into tiny moments, but each made lasting impressions that stayed with me years later.
Here’s what I learned: Intention is what matters. They invested time in their relationships with people because they cared deeply about those relationships.
Today I’ll share some simple steps you can take to show that people really matter to you.
New Safe @ Work Feature: Ten Wise Ways
Starting today, Ten Wise Ways will provide collections of simple, actionable ideas that you can deploy at work.
These are more than tips. They’re complete recipes for directly impacting your environment with emotionally intelligent behavior.
Each list starts with an anecdote from my personal history. I’ll challenge myself to build from there to at least “Ten Wise Ways.”
Each list will be packed with emotional intelligence for readers, colleagues, co-workers, managers, peers, vendors, partners… everyone you encounter in your career.
Here are some of the lists I’m planning for Ten Wise Ways:
How to treat interview candidates respectfully throughout the recruiting process
How to work with someone starting, during, or ending family leave
Improving productivity during the feckless but apparently inevitable “Return to Office”
Thoughtful ways of working with globally distributed teams
Writing Concisely1
The bar for Ten Wise Ways will be high: no ideas from ChatGPT or Google. Ugh!
I promise thoughtful, interesting ideas that you’d find practiced by innovative, experienced people you’d be inspired by.
The first several ideas in each edition will be free. The rest will be exclusive to subscribers.
Generosity, Recognition, and Celebration
The beneficiaries of recognition are our team members and colleagues who deserve our praise and acknowledgement at work.
With the high bar I described earlier, I won’t propose the selection of gift cards or logo-bearing merchandise.
Leaders often botch recognition and celebration in the workplace with cringey and insincere displays. These can do more harm than good.
It’s easy for a well-meaning manager to center the ceremony of “saying something” about a project launch instead of delivering an earnest and sincere gesture of recognition, which should center the person being recognized.
Authentic Recognition
To me, an authentic and sincere act of recognition requires three ingredients:
Key facts about the celebrated individual or team
The celebrated accomplishment or event and why it is important
Understanding of the contribution, efforts, or sacrifices of the individual team members
These must be married together to be authentic and effective.
For example, if a leader says “Congratulations, Matthew, welcome to the company!” … that’s nice.
A more inspiring example would be “Matthew, welcome to Lumon. I heard it’s your second week. We’re excited you’ll be replacing Petey, with your skills in Macrodata Refinement I’m sure you’re going to have a big impact.”
Here are my ten examples of ways that managers and co-workers can celebrate and recognize contributions.
Acts of Generosity, Recognition, Celebration
Take a stroll around the office with a bottle of window cleaner and a microfiber towel. Offer to wipe down the monitors, keyboards, and mice of your colleagues as you encounter people who do not seem immediately engaged in renaming layers or deep in flow state. While you’re cleaning, talk to your colleagues. Ask them about their projects, or their work/life balance, or about their families, or about the weather. Thank them for their efforts. Congratulate them on their work. If you do this for about one hour a quarter, you’ll learn something fascinating, I promise.
When a promotion or accomplishment is achieved by someone on your team, arrange for a gift of recognition to be delivered by mail to their home address. Fewer and fewer gifts are sent by mail, and it’s sure to get a little attention from their family members. This gives the family an opportunity to participate in the recognition and the celebration, which they probably richly deserve.
We know you would never let this happen, but tedious and repetitive busy work sometimes threatens to get in the way of creative and productive endeavors that innovative teams are paid to do. When deadlines for these mendacious tasks start to pile up, inspiring leaders like you schedule a time for everybody to complete it synchronously — together like buddies! Example: Nobody likes expense reports, but everybody’s quarter ends on the same day. Schedule 30 minutes with the entire team during the last week of the quarter. There is no reason to do expense reports together, but there’s no reason to do them separately, either! This is a great way to get time tracking done, too,
Many experienced managers share the strong belief that in a rapidly growing company, a manager should almost never be hired. Rather, they should almost always be promoted from within. This creates the rewarding and delightful bit of recursive celebration that occurs when a promotion occurs, and someone from their team moves up behind them to take their place. This causes a tiny cascade of promotions and celebrations. This is a terrific victory of organizational development and career mobility when it happens. You have three people celebrating and enjoying the realization of their potential. I once moved three people up a vertical organizational column all at once this way. About fifteen people all got new bosses on the same day. That was one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my career.
When a member of your team achieves something that matters to you, write an email to your boss, their boss, and a few of their peers describing the
accomplishment. Say what they did matters to you. Copy your teammate on the email. This is a five minute project that will make an impact on that person that they will never forget.
The greatest reward that you can offer someone is to become their mentor. Reward the people you value the most by investing in them. Share your knowledge, skills, relationships, and opportunities. When I was a young software developer, I had a manager who found ways to let me know that they appreciated my skills and my intellect. They took time out of their day to teach me all kinds of skills that I probably should have had in order to get the job they gave me. They encouraged me to pursue training that was way outside the scope of my job. They taught me things about being a manager, about working in finance, and about working in a professional environment that would make a huge difference for me later in my career. If you don’t feel like you can personally mentor somebody, maybe you can share relationships from your network by making some introductions or calling on a favor for a cup of coffee.
I worked for a few years at a bank. The bankers had beautiful lucite awards on their desks. Later I worked at a tiny software company. I wanted to get those same awards for the developers. I found out the lucite slabs cost hundreds of dollars — way out of our budget. I kept investigating. I discovered the trophies they used for kids’ soccer and baseball leagues cost about $18, plus 20 cents a letter for engraving. My bosses thought they were too cheesy. I thought they’d have a sentimental value if the sincerity was there. I was right. Management started handing them out at the completion of each project. The first project got soccer trophies, then bowling, and so on. After a year or two, some people had a half-dozen or more of these things. They weren’t fancy, but they carried symbolic meaning. A desk with a row of them was a sign of someone who’d seen some shit. I later worked at a big tech company, and they would sent me an expensive lucite award every few years. I don’t have those lucite awards anymore. But I still have those engraved sports trophies. I’ll bet a lot of the people who worked there do, too.
Teams can arrange for recognition of achievement or celebration of milestones to be recognized through the affixing of emoji or other flair to the profile or screen name of Slack screen name or profiles. This tiny public display of recognition adds a social element that ensures the circulation of an interesting fact or accomplishment quietly but quickly throughout the team. Profile flair are one way of accumulating “sports team” trophies virtually without lots of dusty desk clutter.
Say thank you, obviously! But how? Gratitude expressed privately, verbally or in writing, matters when it is sincere. When that message matters, the same message will matter more when amplified to a table full of colleagues at lunch or to a room full of colleagues in a conference room. Conversely, an email from a manager saying “Thanks to everybody who made this project a success” means nothing to a team that didn’t feel respected throughout a project. If the VP congratulates the team in the all-hands, that might be nice. If the VP says the team members names, and something about each of their individual contributions, that will go much farther. They shouldn’t worry about reading them from a card — nobody expects them to have memorized it. It’s the fact that they’ve made an effort that matters.
The most obvious way to say thank you must not be obvious at all. I discovered this by accident recently. I realized Schedule a 15-minute 1:1 with somebody and say these words:
I scheduled 15 minutes with you but I’m only going to need about two. I just wanted to look you in the eye and say how much I appreciate you and your work. You have really made a difference to me, and I couldn’t think of any better way to show it to you than to say it to you.
It’s just like the words from the VP in #9 — it doesn’t matter what they say. What matters is their intention when they say it. This works well for apologies, too.
I hope you find these ideas helpful in organizing your approach to recognizing and celebrating your colleagues. I have no doubt that they deserve it, and so do you. If you’d like to share your ideas, I’m eager to hear them. Please post your comments or drop me a line at mjr@bizlet.org.
See what I did, there?