Leadership Strategies for Recognizing Accomplishments

Leaders should have expectations for their own performance and for their followers. I am reminded of the true story of the Soviet submarine K-19 that was recently made into a movie. One of the problems faced by the crew was that they were not completely trained and the officers were not doing much about the issue, presumably due to the lack of proper equipment. The Captain of the submarine called all the officers together and told them that they (i.e., the officers) had failed the crew for not setting high standards. They could have built a stronger crew by recognizing accomplishments that met the requirements communicated by their expectations. According,to Kouzes and Posner (2002), here are some of the ways that leaders can recognize accomplishments:

• Be creative about rewards and give them to team members personally – constituents respond to many different intrinsic rewards and do not necessarily need or always want extrinsic rewards.
• Make recognition of employees public – the conventional wisdom has been that building up people in public may cause jealousy but a more common reaction is that others wish to emulate those who receive the rewards and increase their performance accordingly.
• Design the reward and recognition system in a participatory fashion – let people have a say in how they want to be recognized and rewarded, within reason, of course.
• Provide feedback en route – the author believes this is one of the most powerful principles discussed by Kouzes and Posner (2002): give people timely, nurturing feedback and you can turbocharge the performance of your team. Yearly performance reviews are not timed close enough with good or bad behavior to be anything but perfunctory paper pushing.
• Create Pygmalions – feedback can be observation alone but feedback can also be treatment, meaning that if we honestly treat people like winners; there is a high probability that they will attempt to live up to that image.
• Find people who are doing things right – leaders actually should be looking for people to reward for exhibiting behaviors consistent with the vision of the organization. In effect, they are looking for “poster children” to build up and promote as positive examples for the organization.
• Coach – coaching expands upon the notion of providing feedback en route and in real time. Leaders need to provide feedback in a way that incorporates input from those being coached, which includes talking and strategizing about how to move forward toward the goal day by day.
  

Reference

Kouzes, J.M., & Posner, B.Z. (2002). The leadership challenge (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.