Early in my academic career, a seasoned manager of a Fortune 500 company told me that his superior had reprimanded him, repeatedly, for only infrequently submitting the names of his people for special corporate recognition programs. His boss felt that this group, or some individuals in it, should be competing for such recognition because they had produced so many extraordinary and excellent improvements and innovations. The implication was that the seasoned manager did not really care enough to take the time to create the recognition that was needed to keep people motivated.
His response was to describe the deep awe he felt for what his people were able to produce and how often he told them so. He spent time helping them each individual see the value they and everyone else had contributed. He found that the corporate program seemed artificial, out of sync when he saw good work happening, and he could not bring himself to make such nominations even when his own supervisor wrote him up for the omission. No one seemed to notice that his people continued to feel valued and created improvements far beyond the units that were receiving formal recognition and corporate rewards. What they experienced was genuine appreciation expressed in real time, by a real person who could truly understand their efforts. It was far more meaningful, immediate, and frequent than any formal program could achieve. In fact it was genuine and authentic to the core.
We are rapidly forgetting the old-fashion ways of relating to one another and replacing them with what I feel are acts of irresponsibility, embedded into corporate programs. The ability to talk to one another, to care for one another, to appreciate one another as individuals, seems diminished in organizational settings. This is happening largely as a result of the many techniques and training programs that are being generated and introduced into businesses. We have substituted formalized feedback for talking to one another on a personal level. We select persons to be recognized rather than just tell them regularly how much we appreciate them and their work. We don’t regularly express our immediate feelings of appreciation and awe. It might be said that we are being conditioned to relate with our “positions” to one another—role to role, as “recognizer” to “recognized,” “feedback giver” to “feedback receiver”— rather than just self-to-self as persons.
Part of the challenge is that we have lost the capabilities that are necessary to carry out these practices. As we are brought up and perhaps as we attend school, we are not generally developed to have core self-managing skills and interactive capabilities. Nor when we go to work in a business are we engaged in such development. So no wonder we have increasingly resorted to formal processes that set up procedures for appreciation, personal problem solving, and engagement.
The manager’s story had such an impact on me that I interviewed hundreds of managers and found a similar trend among really long-term successful teams and business units. The successes were based on old-fashioned, people-to-people relationships, not formal programs. I have come to see this as a part of authentic leadership and authentic organizations. Here are the characteristics that were recurring.
Keys to Authenticity
- Do It in Real Time. Express you gratitude, appreciation, and value immediately, while you feel it.
- Make It Person to Person. Do it for another real individual and do it as yourself, not as manager to worker or as part of your functional role.
- Demonstrate Real Understanding. Do it now, in proximity to the actions and behaviors you appreciate, rather than at quarterly annual awards or appreciation events.
- Make Genuine Statements. And make them specific to the experience and to your feeling of appreciation, rather than generic ideas. Say more than just, “Great job.”
- Be Non-competitive. There is no need to select the “most deserving.” Everyone deserves appreciation at least one day every week.