A reflection on value, belonging, and why recognition should not depend on who your manager happens to be.
For much of my career, I thought recognition was primarily about appreciation. Someone did something exceptional, you thanked them, and perhaps you celebrated the outcome with the broader team. That still matters, but a conversation with a former employee taught me that recognition serves a much deeper purpose.
Several years ago, an employee who had previously reported to me stopped by my office and asked if I had a few minutes. She had moved into a role on another team, and I assumed she wanted advice about a project, a customer situation, or a career decision. Instead, she told me she was frustrated. The work itself was not the problem. She believed she was doing good work, but she no longer felt that her effort and contributions were being recognized.
As we talked, she contrasted her current experience with the culture she had experienced on my team. Recognition had been part of how we worked together. Successes were acknowledged, people noticed one another’s effort, and teammates were encouraged to celebrate contributions that might otherwise go unseen. She was not asking for an award. She was describing what it felt like to work in an environment where people knew their contributions mattered, and what it felt like when that reinforcement disappeared.
That conversation stayed with me because it forced me to confront an uncomfortable question:
Why should feeling valued depend on who your manager happens to be?
If an employee could move within the same organization and have a completely different experience of whether her work mattered, recognition was not simply a matter of leadership style. It was a matter of culture.
Recognition Communicates What Matters
When people hear the word recognition, they often think first about awards, annual celebrations, incentives, or public praise. Those programs can be meaningful, but they are only the visible part of recognition. The deeper purpose is to communicate what the organization values.
Every time a leader or teammate recognizes a contribution, a message is being sent. This behavior matters. This effort mattered. This outcome mattered. Most importantly, this person mattered. Recognition helps people understand which behaviors should be repeated and which contributions the organization does not want to take for granted.
That is why I no longer think of recognition as a reward that happens after the work. At its best, recognition is one of the ways culture is explained, reinforced, and sustained.
Making Feeling Valued More Consistent
After that conversation, I began wondering how many other employees were having a similar experience. Some worked for leaders who naturally made recognition part of their routine. Others may have been doing equally valuable work in environments where appreciation was less visible or less consistent. Feeling valued had become dependent on organizational luck.
That did not sit well with me. I began asking how we could make recognition more intentional and scalable, not to replace the responsibility of individual leaders, but to create mechanisms that encouraged recognition across teams and functions. That question eventually led me to help build and chair a formal recognition council, develop recognition practices, and advocate for broader participation across the organization.
The goal was never to create more awards for the sake of creating awards. The goal was to make it easier for people to notice good work, acknowledge contributions, and reinforce the behaviors we wanted the culture to represent.
The Result That Changed My Perspective
As the recognition program grew, managers began adopting new behaviors and participation expanded across functions. Those were encouraging signs, but one outcome told me more about the program than any formal award ever could: approximately 80% of the recognition activity was peer-to-peer.
That result surprised me because it challenged another assumption I had carried into the work. I had viewed recognition primarily as something leaders gave to employees. The data showed that employees wanted to recognize one another. They noticed who helped, who stepped in, who shared knowledge, who solved a difficult problem, and who made the team better. What they needed was a mechanism that made expressing that appreciation easy and visible.
The formal program provided structure, but employees created the momentum. Recognition was no longer flowing only from the top down. It had become something people practiced with one another, which was a much stronger signal that the culture was taking ownership of itself.
Recognition Creates Clarity Too
The common theme across this article series is that people perform at their best when they have clarity. Recognition contributes to that clarity in a particularly human way. It helps employees understand what the organization values, what good work looks like, which behaviors deserve repetition, and whether their individual effort is making a difference.
Without that reinforcement, people are left to interpret silence. They may continue performing well, but they may also wonder whether anyone notices, whether the work matters, or whether the extra effort is worth sustaining. Recognition cannot solve every engagement or retention challenge, but its absence can create uncertainty that leaders should not ignore.
This is also why recognition needs to be specific. A generic “great job” may feel positive in the moment, but it does not explain what was valuable. Telling someone what they did, why it mattered, and who benefited reinforces both the individual and the culture.
Final Thought
The most important lesson I have learned about recognition is that it is not primarily about making people feel good. Feeling good may be a welcome result, but the deeper purpose is helping people feel valued.
Awards are temporary. Feeling valued has a much longer reach. People may forget a trophy, a point total, or a formal announcement, but they often remember the moment when a leader or teammate demonstrated that their contribution mattered.
That is why I believe recognition should not depend on who your manager happens to be. Leaders still carry responsibility for creating that experience, but the strongest cultures do not leave it to managers alone. They give people throughout the organization permission and practical ways to recognize one another.
When that happens, recognition stops being a program people participate in and becomes part of how the organization operates. It reinforces what matters, helps people feel seen, and makes culture something employees help create rather than something leadership simply describes.
In my experience, the moments people remember most are rarely the largest rewards. They are the moments when someone took the time to explain, with sincerity and specificity: What you did mattered.
Photo courtesy of Kelly Sikkema