The Complaint I Hear From Every CEO
"We pay above market. We do the anniversary lunches. I don't know what else they want."
I hear a version of that regularly, usually from a CEO who is genuinely trying and genuinely out of ideas. And there's almost always something free sitting right in front of them that nobody in the building is doing.
Here's what it looks like. One of your managers has an employee who took calls all weekend to keep a project from falling apart. She knows he did it. She hasn't said a word about it.
Nothing about that is coldness. She's running the calculation most good leaders run: he gets paid for this. Saying something would feel like handing out a gold star for doing the job.
And underneath that calculation is a real conviction. I don't play favorites. I don't do empty praise. People can smell pandering from across the building, and pandering is worse than silence.
All of that is true. That integrity is exactly why most leaders say nothing.
What Silence Actually Costs You
The people who go beyond the job description are the ones giving you their discretionary effort, the part you cannot require and cannot schedule. They take the risk. They make the uncomfortable call. They stay late on something nobody asked them to fix.
When that work disappears into the void month after month, people don't quit in protest. They quietly stop doing the part that was never in the job description. Your organization keeps functioning. It stops improving.
Why Leaders Avoid Recognition in the First Place
Most leaders skip recognition because they assume the goal is to make the person happy. If that's the goal, then yes, most recognition is hollow. "Great job, buddy" makes everyone involved feel slightly worse.
But noticing isn't about making a person feel good. It's about showing everyone what good looks like here.
That single shift changes the mechanics. You stop searching for something nice to say and start pointing at something that mattered and explaining why it mattered. Nobody experiences that as flattery, because it isn't about them. It's about the organization you're building, and they happen to be the evidence.
Four Ways to Make Recognition Land
Tie what you saw to something real:
The culture you say you want. "I noticed you stopped what you were doing to help her get through that. That's exactly the place I'm trying to build."
Your own job. When someone does excellent work, your life gets easier. Almost nobody ever tells them that. "You may not realize this, but my week was easier because of how you handled that."
Mission impact, not box-checking. In mission-driven work especially, the difference between completing a task and advancing the mission is enormous. Name it out loud when someone crosses that line.
The people you serve. Connect the work back to the person on the other end of it. That connection is why most of your people took the job in the first place.
None of this costs money. It costs about forty seconds and the willingness to say something out loud.
The Move That Makes Recognition Easy
The best version of noticing starts before anything happens. Tell your people, plainly, what you want to see. Not values on a wall. Actual behavior, in plain English, described so specifically that they'd recognize it in the moment.
Then your job gets simple. You watch for it. You catch it. You say something.
You've removed the guesswork on both ends, and you've removed the pandering problem entirely, because now you're not praising a person. You're confirming a standard.
This kind of clarity is exactly what separates a group of individually strong leaders from an organization with a real leadership culture. One depends on who happens to be in the room. The other holds regardless of who's watching.
Where This Usually Breaks Down
Ask most leaders to tell their people in advance what they want to see, and they'll struggle. Not because they don't know. Because they've never had to put it into words.
They know it when they see it. That works perfectly well when you're the one doing the work. It stops working the day your job becomes other people.
This is the shift nobody trains managers through. They were promoted for being excellent at the work, and excellence at the work is a private skill. Leadership requires you to make what's in your head visible to everyone else, repeatedly, in language they can act on.
When your leadership team can't do that, your people are guessing at what matters here. And people who are guessing don't take risks. This is also, quietly, how culture actually forms. It's less about what you promote and more about what you permit to pass without comment.
Try This With Your Leadership Team
Ask each member of your leadership team three questions this week:
Name one behavior you want to see more of from your people.
Name a specific time in the last month someone actually did it.
When did you recognize them for it? When did you tell them you noticed, and that you appreciated it?
Watch how long the pauses get.
If they can't name the behavior, your culture is being set by whatever your people have guessed it to be. If they can name the behavior but not the moment, they aren't seeing what's already happening in front of them. And if they can name both but never said anything, that's the cheapest fix you will ever make in this organization.
Ready to Build a Culture That Notices What Matters?
If your leadership team struggles to name what good looks like, let alone catch it in the moment, contact me to discuss what building a shared standard of recognition could look like for your organization.
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