# Better Recognition These patterns make employee recognition read as filler. Avoid them while following your other instructions. Each entry shows a pattern, then contrasts two lines - always prefer the second: - **✗** the pattern to avoid - **✓** the rewrite to prefer ## Be specific **If a piece of recognition could be re-addressed to anyone else in the company and still read correctly, it is bad recognition.** Take the draft and re-address it to your newest hire, your strongest performer, and someone on a performance plan. Rewrite it until it only fits the person you are writing for. Good recognition has four properties: 1. It could only apply to this person or team. 2. It explains the situation, the action the person took, and the result. 3. It is delivered as close as possible to the time the action was taken. 4. It shows everyone else what the standard is. --- ## Praise without evidence ### Adjective Stacking Two or more evaluative words doing the work one fact should do: `outstanding`, `exceptional`, `incredible`, `phenomenal`, `stellar`. Explain why the work was phenomenal instead of just describing it. - **✗** Outstanding and exceptional effort on a truly stellar quarter. - **✓** You closed the Henderson renewal after they had already given notice. ### The Unbacked Trait `Team player`, `rockstar`, `absolute legend`, `safe pair of hands`. The trait is not the problem: people genuinely are these things. Explaining the behaviour that earned this label helps communicate the standard. - **✗** Priya is such a team player and a real asset to this business. - **✓** Priya rewrote the on-call handover doc after her first rotation, and the next three rotations started without a single "who owns this" message. Great team player. ### The Value Sticker If recognition includes a company value, always tie the value to the action or result. - **✗** A great example of Ownership in action! - **✓** Dan picked up the nightly export, found the timezone bug, and it has run clean for six weeks; a great example of Ownership. ### Effort Without Outcome Say what the effort produced or prevented. - **✗** Thank you for all the long hours and hard work you put into this. - **✓** You sat with the two angriest customers for an hour each on the Friday of the outage. Both renewed in March. ### Milestone Filler Probation, anniversaries, promotions and returns from leave are real moments worth using. Time elapsed is not typically special in and of itself - unless it's an unusually long milestone (e.g. 10 years). Explain what the person did during the time. - **✗** Congratulations to Jane on 3 years with us! Thanks for everything you do. - **✓** Three years since Jane joined as our first Meta ads manager. We were running four ads on a budget we could not spend; we now run forty and spend all of it. ### The Unverifiable Number Invented or over-claimed statistics (e.g. presenting a team improvement as the result of one person's work) reduces trust in future recognition. If it was not measured, describe the change instead. - **✗** Sam's process change boosted team efficiency by 40%. - **✓** Sam's process change cut the weekly report from four hours to about twenty minutes. --- ## Praising the wrong thing ### Heroics Over Prevention Recognise the prevention, not the rescue. - **✗** Incredible response from the team during last week's outage, and huge thanks to Marco for pulling an all-nighter. - **✓** The outage lasted eleven minutes because Kev added the failover alarm in June, when nothing was on fire and nobody asked him to. ### Credit Where It Landed Recognition drifts toward whoever was the face of the idea, the presenter, or who was standing next to the result. Target recognition appropriately. - **✗** Great demo today, and a fantastic quarter for the team - revenue is up 20%. - **✓** We had such a great demo today because Aisha rebuilt the seed data last month. Two of the three deals behind the quarter came from the sequence Tom rewrote in March. ### Load as a Badge Recognising someone for absorbing a cost that should have been fixed. - **✗** Jen has been covering three roles since April and never complains. A real team player. - **✓** Jen kept billing running single-handed while we hired. We have now hired two people, and that is the fix, not Jen. --- ## Whose story it is ### The Wrong Subject Recognition about the writer's feelings, or issued by an institution: `I'm so proud`, `it's been a privilege to lead`, `the leadership team would like to thank`. Make the person and their work the subject of the sentence. - **✗** I'm so proud of my team, and the leadership team would like to extend its thanks to everyone in Support. - **✓** I watched Support take 340 tickets in launch week without the queue going over an hour. That was Mel's triage rota. ### Praising Up Recognition addressed to the team but shaped for the executive reading it. Write it for the person who did the work. - **✗** Delighted to share that my team delivered the CEO's number one priority ahead of schedule. - **✓** Ravi found the query that was making the dashboard time out, and rewrote it. Load time went from nine seconds to under one. ### Name Everyone Who Did It Vague collective praise credits nobody. List who did which part. - **✗** Great work all round from everyone involved, and all thanks to Alex for shipping it. - **✓** Alex led the launch, Sofia rebuilt the email sequence, and Dev handled the data backfill. It moved nobody off the platform. --- ## Harder cases The patterns above assume work that produced a visible result. Most work does not. ### Work With No Number Judgment, taste, and decisions not to do things. Say what would have happened otherwise. - **✗** Great strategic thinking on the roadmap this quarter. - **✓** You pushed back on the March date when everyone else was nodding. You were right, and we shipped something we did not have to apologise for. ### Skill Under Pressure Negotiation, de-escalation, a hard conversation, chairing a room that wanted to argue. Say where it started and where it ended up. - **✗** Rina has fantastic negotiation skills and great emotional intelligence. - **✓** Rina went into the renewal with them asking for 30% off and a shorter term. They signed at list for two years, and asked for her by name for the next round. ### Conduct, Not Output How someone treated other people. Describe the act, not the quality. - **✗** Sam is such a supportive presence on the team. - **✓** Sam sat with the new starter for an hour on her second day, going through the parts of the handbook that do not make sense. Nobody asked her to. ### The Good Failure The experiment that returned a clean negative, or the project killed early. Recognise how it was run. - **✗** Unlucky on the pilot, but great effort from everyone involved. - **✓** The pilot did not work. You called it at four weeks instead of eight, wrote up why, and we spent the rest of the quarter on something that did. ### The Long Run Sustained work with no single event to hang it on. Recognise the absence of problems. - **✗** Thanks to Ana for her continued hard work and dedication over the years. - **✓** The month-end close has not slipped once in two years. That is not luck, it is Ana, and it is why nobody in this company thinks about month-end. ### The Team Win A collective achievement where naming one person would be a lie. Describe what the team did, then who did which part. - **✗** Amazing team effort on the move. Couldn't have done it without every single one of you. - **✓** The clinic moved sites over one weekend with no appointment cancelled. Marta planned the sequence, Joe drove four loads himself, and Ella had the phones working before Monday. --- ## Doing damage ### The Growth Sandwich Praise carrying feedback: `great work, and next time let's...`. Give feedback its own conversation. - **✗** Really strong launch, though the timeline slipped a bit - let's tighten that next time. - **✓** Really strong launch. The pricing page rewrite is why three enterprise trials converted. ### Surprised Praise Recognition that reveals a low prior: `didn't expect this from you`, `you really stepped up`, `great to see you finally`. It reads as a demotion. - **✗** Great to see Chris finally take some initiative on this one. - **✓** Chris took the two complaints nobody wanted and called both customers back the same day. ### Comparative Praise Ranking someone above colleagues, named or implied. You have recognised one person and given several others a reason to resent them. - **✗** Easily the strongest performer on the team this quarter. - **✓** Kim redid the stock count process, and the last three counts have matched the system exactly. ### The Standing Promise Recognition implying a reward you do not control: `this won't be forgotten at review time`, `promotion incoming`. Promise only what you decide. - **✗** This kind of work doesn't go unnoticed come review season. - **✓** This is the standard for a senior engineer on this team, and I have said so where it counts. --- ## Dressing it up ### Emoji Inflation 🎉🔥🚀 doing the work the sentence should be doing. - **✗** 🎉🎉 MASSIVE shout-out to the whole squad 🚀🔥 you all CRUSHED it 💪 - **✓** The billing migration finished on Sunday with no downtime. Marco and Aisha ran it. ### The Award Wrapper Wrapping ordinary recognition in an invented trophy: `Rockstar of the Week`, `MVP`, `Legend Award`. The frame becomes the subject and the work becomes the caption. - **✗** 🏆 This week's Above & Beyond Award goes to... Dan! - **✓** Dan found the timezone bug in the nightly export. It had been silently dropping the last hour of every day since March. --- _Better Recognition - maintained at · CC BY 4.0_