Recognition – A force towards excelling

As a manager or a leader, our performance largely depends on our team players’ performance. With the increasing demand to excel in the tasks at work, and increasing dependency on the team members’ performance, it becomes extremely essential to take care of the team members, keep them motivated and analyzing the ways & means to help them maintain & enhance their performances. The tool of recognition, thus, becomes quite important & vital.
To ensure that the team members deliver best performance, recognition needs to be given due weightage. It is a mandate that the other hygiene factors need to be in place.
What is recognition? It’s humbly accepting and commending the contribution made by the team member, whether in person or in a forum, in an informal or a formal manner. If we ask ourselves when was the last time we recognized our employee? The answer might be inconsistent. Recognition is not just saying good job done. It is much more than that. It reinforces that good job done by the member matters a lot to the leader. It is found to be more effective when done in a forum in a formal manner.
Generally managers who build a bond with employees (9 on the ‘employee orientation’ on the managerial grid developed by Blake and Mountain) can find it easy to demand performance from employees. They build a give & take relationship and can count on employees as the level of trust is higher.
In all human beings there is an internal desire to be appreciated. When this latent need is met & the desire satisfied, people feel good and are motivated. This leads to higher level of performance and retention also goes high. Practicing recognition is not easy. Unless we genuinely believe in our employees, the recognition would not contain the due weight. If we are not genuine, the false recognition would reflect in one or the other action of ours, no matter how hard we try, all our efforts will be wasted if we are imitating it and we might invite unpleasant events.
Recognition is generally associated with rewards, but it is not compulsory to club more than one form of reward together. A genuine “thank you” might as well do the job. However in the long run, consistent recognition in various forms would leave an impact. There are different ways of doing it. “Priceless recognition” is the most difficult one to practice and the most impactful. It depends on the leader or the manager how innovatively he can think of ways and means to make the impact. An innovative way of such recognition that a manager has tried in the past is calling the employee’s parents in a forum and extending gratitude towards them. This has a very long term impact on the employees.
Most of the global firms are adopting this culture silently and exploring the power of RECOGNITION!!