Are You Fostering a Culture of Appreciation or Competition

As I said in my last post, courageous and thoughtful leadership is critical during this time of fear among the workforce. I’m encouraged that so many company leaders I speak with regularly are continuing and even increasing their investment in employee recognition programs as a way to replace fear with appreciation, focus and determination (results born out in our recent market research study).

However, you must be cautious in how you manage a recognition program. Yes, you want to broadly acknowledge those people deserving of recognition, but you cannot do so in a way that allows any one employee to brag about their “recognition achievements” or in any other way turn recognition into some kind of competition. As I’ve said before, recognition is about driving behavior change at the individual level to achieve corporate success. It’s not at all about pitting one employee against another to see who can get more recognition.

Competition has its place, such as in a sales incentives initiative or similar. Otherwise, you should be using recognition to encourage and motivate every employee to his or her top level of performance, regardless of the achievements of their colleagues.

What’s your company culture? Appreciation or competition? Which kind of environment inspires you to better performance? Be sure to take our weekly poll (upper left corner of the blog).