Confession time.
I didn’t get participation awards at school. Not because I was too cool for them — they just weren’t really a thing. You either won, or got great marks, or you didn’t. That was it.
Somewhere in there I picked up a fairly healthy dose of wanting to do great work without needing a trophy for it. But over the years I’ve realised not everyone is wired that way. And here’s the twist: even the most internally motivated people (as it turns out — myself included) respond very well to positive reinforcement.
Second confession: I used to get mildly irritated watching other people seemingly need a round of applause for turning up and doing the basics of their job.
Luckily, we now have a lot more to go on when it comes to reward and recognition at work, and where the line actually sits between “well done for existing” and genuine, performance-driving recognition.
Why this keeps tripping leaders up
Research on high performers in high performing teams — not the average performer in an average team — supports that high performers want to be recognised for excellent work. Not for showing up. For excellent work.
So the leadership takeaway is fairly simple on paper: help your people feel they’re doing excellent work, and make sure they know you’ve noticed. Simple to say. Considerably harder to execute well, because it forces leaders to get precise about two things they may have never actually defined — what recognition looks like, and what is “excellent” work.
And the data on how badly most organisations are doing this is sobering. Gallup research supports that only around one in three US employees strongly agree they’ve received recognition for good work in the last seven days. Other Gallup-backed research supports that employees who receive high-quality recognition are 45% less likely to have left their job two years later.
Recognition isn’t a soft nice-to-have sitting next to the real KPIs — it’s a retention and performance tool sitting right in front of them. And that’s pretty cool.
Get crystal clear about what is “excellent” work
Most KPIs I see barely articulate the baseline job requirements in any specific way, let alone draw a clear line between “doing the job” and “doing the job exceptionally well.” Which means most leaders could do with turning a bit more energy toward clearly defining that gap.
Defining the difference between good and great is something high performing organisations generally do pretty well — and it’s one of the more underrated levers available to a leader. You’d be surprised how many people lift themselves to meet an excellence bar the moment they can actually see where it is.
Ambiguity doesn’t inspire people to reach higher. Clarity does.
Get clear on what recognition actually means
There’s no single currency for recognition — different people bank it differently. As a leader, it’s your job to work out which currency your people are actually spending time on. Some options include:
- Money
- Time with a mentor, or a stretch project
- Training and development
- Public accolades
- Extra leave
If you can identify the top one or two forms of recognition that land for each person, you don’t just make them feel good — you make them more engaged. And higher engagement is good for the person, and very good for the business.
While I’m on a confession roll: Turns out I did like recognition. The recognition I liked most was bonuses. I didn’t need a song and dance in front of the team — just make sure my bank account reflected my performance at bonus time, and I was a genuinely happy corporate camper.
Which means you could stand up in front of the whole company and heap praise on me, but if my bonus wasn’t commensurate with my performance, I wasn’t hearing the recognition you thought you were giving me. The form has to match the person, or it doesn’t land as recognition at all — it just lands as noise.
The compound interest of recognition
For anyone who loves them some compound interest, have I got a treat for you!
Recognition helps build what positive psychology researchers call psychological capital. This is fancy umbrella term which includes hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism your people are carrying into their work each day.
And the research is consistent here: higher psychological capital, higher performance. A meta-analysis spanning more than 12,500 employees across 51 independent samples supports that psychological capital is positively linked to job performance across self-ratings, supervisor ratings and objective performance measures. It’s not a soft metric dressed up as a hard one — it holds up under scrutiny.
So how does being recognised for excellent work actually lift psychological capital? Positive psychology research supports that psychological capital rises when people experience positive emotion, engagement, positive relationships, and a genuine sense of accomplishment.
Being recognised for excellent work checks every one of those boxes almost by design. Recognise the work well, and you’re not just making someone’s day better — you’re literally topping up the very resource that predicts their future performance.
That’s a genuinely delicious upward spiral.
Recognition lifts psychological capital…
Psychological capital lifts performance.
Performance creates more to recognise.
Once that flywheel starts turning, it’s one of the lowest-cost, highest-leverage moves available to a leadership team. Good times all round!
What This Looks Like in Practice
For the leadership teams we work with, this usually plays out in two deliberate moves, not one blanket policy:
Move one — map recognition to the individual, not the org chart. Rather than assuming everyone wants the same all-team shout-out or the same bonus structure, leaders take the time to actually ask, or observe, what currency each of their direct reports responds to. It’s a short conversation with a long payoff.
Move two — write down what “great” looks like, separate from what “good” looks like. Not as a vague value statement, but as specific, observable behaviour and outcomes tied to the role. When people can see the excellence bar clearly, they stop guessing, and leaders stop having to manufacture recognition moments out of thin air — because the genuinely excellent work becomes obvious to spot and easy to call out.
Neither move requires a bigger budget. Both require a leader willing to get specific instead of generic.
Why Solve This Now
Engagement and retention pressure isn’t easing off, and recognition sits right at the centre of both. Every leadership team we speak to is trying to do more with the same headcount, hold onto their best people, and keep energy and profitability moving in the right direction without burning their best performers out in the process.
Recognition — done with precision rather than performatively — is one of the few levers that moves all three at once, and it doesn’t require a bigger budget to pull. We love that!
What This Isn’t
Just to be crystal clear: none of this is an argument for a trophy for simply doing the job. That’s called a salary — the medium of exchange for solid, expected work.
Save the celebration for where it belongs, or it stops meaning anything to the people actually doing excellent work.
Go forth and get that upward spiral spiralling
Recognition isn’t complicated in theory. Define what good looks like. Define what great looks like. Notice the difference. Recognise it in the way that actually lands for that person. What’s complicated is that most leaders have never sat down and done the first two steps properly — so the recognition, however well-intentioned, ends up missing the mark.
Get the definitions right, and recognition stops being a vague, once-a-year gesture and starts being one of the most reliable performance levers a leadership team has. It’s a win for your people, and a win for the business.
If you’d like help working out where the gaps are in how your leaders currently recognise excellence — and what it’s costing you in engagement and retention — book a Performance Call or join us at our next 20/20 session or open workshop.
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Source
Avey, J. B., Reichard, R. J., Luthans, F., & Mhatre, K. H. (2011). Meta-analysis of the impact of positive psychological capital on employee attitudes, behaviors, and performance. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 22(2), 127–152. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.20070