How to celebrate successes and give recognition to development teams?

StepStone´s dev team “Caramba” celebrate their Team Recognition Award

Have you ever noticed how small the number of managers/leaders who can say thank you really is? Good work is taken for granted while not so good results are criticised immensely…. I think everyone has already seen such a situation. But although there are certainly just bad managers who find it difficult to say “thank you” just because of their mindset, it is mainly the companies that do not properly enable their leaders to play the full keyboard of “saying thank you” and recognition.

Young professionals who climb the career ladder suddenly find themselves in the position as a team lead and are directly responsible for appreciating their team members and recognising their work. Although these young leaders can say “thank you” in their own right, there are many other ways to express recognition and appreciation. Some of these ways generate costs for the company through the use of time and/or money. Especially the inexperienced managers are then rather reluctant or ignorant about which possibilities are allowed, tolerated or perhaps even forbidden in the company. The conclusion is that the behaviour of the experienced managers is taken as a guide. As we say in Germany: “The fish always stinks from the head”. So if the experienced leaders are rather incapable of saying “thank you”, this behaviour is automatically passed on to the lower management levels.

To break this spiral of lack of recognition of team members, the right training approach is needed. However, even though some companies offer training for young managers, they focus more on topics such as performance management, dealing with critical conversations (Radical Candor) or even evaluating employees. Even when the rules of feedback are considered, the training tends to focus on critical/constructive feedback.

Most young leaders are left completely alone with the so important point: How do I say “thank you” and how can I show appreciation? What opportunities does my company offer me as a leader to show appreciation to my team members?

To counteract this phenomenon at StepStone, our Leadership Chapter (which includes all leaders from all hierarchical levels in Tech) also includes a training around the topic “Celebrate Success” where we empower our leaders and orientate them on what opportunities StepStone offers to show appreciation and recognition.

It is all about the mindset

One of the most important issues when it comes to recognition and appreciation is the mindset of the leader. A narcissistic manager will never be able to give honest appreciation and recognition to team members. So if the company does a good job of selecting leaders with the right mindset in the first place, a lot is already gained. But just promoting an employee to a manager position because he or she did a good job in his or her previous position does not automatically make the employee a good manager.

Definition of success

Per definition success is the status of having achieved and accomplished an aim or objective. Being successful means the achievement of desired visions and planned goals.

But results are only one side of the medal and commonly involve exemplary behaviour of individuals or teams. This exemplary behaviour also includes the right approach towards failure. We love to succeed, but true innovation comes with failure along the way and is therefore part of our daily business. If we analyse our failures and struggles to learn from them and get better and better we are able to turn failure into success.

So when we talk about success, we need to consider behaviours to the same extend as deliveries.

Celebrating success and valuing each other starts with recognizing an accomplishment or exemplary behavior. We should value the efforts of others the way we would like to be valued. Support and achievements of others shouldn’t be taken for granted.

There are big initiatives completed but also the daily help and advice of peers that is worth to be valued and celebrated!

Rules of effective recognition communication

In order to ensure that your recognition has an effect, you should respect the following rules:

1. Immediately express your recognition: Outstanding as well as desired behaviours immediately need to be followed by positive feedback. If this is not the case recognition looses it’s potential to amplify positive behaviour.
2. Recognition needs to be plausible and authentic: The reason for recognition needs to be articulated. A general phrase like “well done” won’t do the job.
3. Reasonable recognition: Enthusiastic praise should be reserved for outstanding results and behaviours.
4. Do not praise individual characteristics but concrete behaviour: Reinforcement of specific behaviour only happens in case this behaviour is concretely linked to positive feedback.
5. Be careful when praising in public: Leaders should consider expressing their recognition for a single person in confidence to avoid jealousy and demotivation of other colleagues.
6. Do not praise in advance: Praising in advance can cause pressure to succeed and can have a paralysing effect that can result in fear and stress.

Please keep in mind that below options are meant to celebrate success as something special! Usage should therefore be well balanced. So don’t forget to celebrate, but carefully choose occasions to keep up speciality of celebrations!

Now let´s come to the possibilities given by StepStone to all it´s leaders show recognition to our team members:

Day to day recognition

Sometimes it’s the small things that matter and can change a persons day from bad to good.

Here are some ideas how we can celebrate our colleague(s) and team on an every day basis:

• Tell your colleagues they do/did a great job (see rules above)
• Bring some chocolate, cake, sweets etc.
• Decorate your colleague’s desk (Decorate with balloons, paper streamers etc. for their first day, birthday, wedding or any other special event)

Team celebration

Our teams do a great job every day! That’s why it’s no suprise that we have quite a few option to celebrate team successes in place:

• Office fridge for team drinks: We have fridges most offices and can be used by every team. Our office management takes care that the fridges will never run empty. There is nothing to say against having a drink together in the late afternoon before end of business.
• Team lunch: We can invite the team for lunch to celebrate achievements or special events.
• Team event: Next to the Summer Party and our Christmas Event, the teams can do team events like going out for dinner or for a specific event.

In addition teams can implement celebration of successes into their work routines. It’s as simple as implementing the highlighting of successes in existing formats like your team’s retrospective session.

Public recognition

Celebrate your team’s success by making it transparent to everyone in the organisation or even outside of your company. Here are a few options to use public recognition as a means to celebrate your successes:

• “Ring the bell” emails to stakeholder or internal blog post: Consider if there is a big success that deserves special recognition of individual(s) or team(s). Send an email to desired mailing list, publish a blog post on your internal news platform
• Company Newsletter: Make sure your success is included in your company newsletter.
• Show & Tell Sessions: Share your success in a Show & Tell session to all in your company.
• Chaper Presentation: You have a success story that can help others in your job family? Great! Talk to your chapter lead and align on the details to share your story within a chapter meeting.
• External Blog: Share your success story in the public tech blog.
• Meet-Up: Consider sharing your success story in a local meet-up group.
• Conference: Consider sharing your sucess story in a speach on a conference

Recognition by training

Exceptional behaviours and results can also be valued with individual training offers. Here are two examples:

• Trade-fair/ conference participation: Leaders can reward individual success by sending employee to a special conference. Conference has to have business relevance, but maybe it’s the one over the sea rather the one next door that you can offer.
• Development plan: Every leader is asked to identify successful employees and drive forward their development by a development plan.

StepStone programms for individual recognition

Below points lists company sponsored recognition programmes that you can consider for saying thank you to individual colleagues:

• Small present: Why not a small presents like flowers or vouchers. Members of leadership team can contact local office management to arrange purchase and delivery of present.
• Recognition programme: Leaders and all team members can nominate team members and other colleagues for the Recognition Programme to win big prices. The winners will be selected by a recognition committee.
• Better together incentive: This amazing incentive recognises the outstanding achievements and incredible commitments of our StepStone employees, with great trips, bringing together people from across the business to celebrate.

Company recognition

Last but not least, there are also options to say thank you by using company recognition means:

• Additional time off: Our leadership team has the possibility to reward people who went the extra mile and worked a lot overtime by offering additional time off (e.g. early end of the work day on Fridays).
• Foodtruck, ice cream van, etc.: Our leadership team has the possibility to contact local office management and arrange a suprise lunch, ice cream etc.

If you in your company have different possibilities in place, please reach out to me and tell me about! I am always keen to learn more.

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