Perks Incentive Blog

Recently I saw a blatant example of kissing up and it made me wonder:

How do we know the difference between workplace recognition and just plain kissing up?

I knew I was seeing kissing up. My Kiss Up Detector’s (KUD) red lights were flashing and sirens were going off. Like most of us, I may not be able to tell you why I know someone is kissing up, but I just know I know!

But just knowing isn’t good enough. As a recognition advocate I am expected to figure out what is setting off my KUD. In this particular instance, I had been copied on an email from Manager 1 to Manager 2. Manager 1 was trumpeting the praises of Manager 2. The praise was plentiful and many people were copied, amplifying the exposure for Manager 2.

Praise is a good thing, so why did I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end?

After a bit of introspection I decided my KUD was going off for two reasons:

KUD Alert 1) The praise was effusive and grand. At the same time it was vague. There wasn’t a single specific detail in the entire lengthy email. Manager 2 may have been pleased, I don’t know. To me, the lack of information made the email seem insincere.

KUD Alert 2) One hundred or so of us  were copied (100 - really). Why were so many copied? It certainly wasn’t to bring us up to speed on what Manager 2 had done. That would have required at least a few details. Did Manager 1 assume we already had the information we needed? Was I  the only one who had no idea what was so grand about Manager 2? Why was I copied? I found myself looking for a motive beyond giving deserved praise.

Vague and overexposed. Combined, these two factors had my KUD flashing big time. I was curious. Was the recognition real or was I really sensing a Kiss Up? I did a little sleuthing. With very little effort I learned that Manager 2 is being promoted soon and Manager 1 wants her job!

Now that is a juicy bit of gossip that explains everything. But is it true? I don’t know. It may be, or maybe the suspect email sparked the fertile  imagination of an employee who thought it was the only reasonable justification for such effusive praise. From there, other puzzled employees could have helped to spread the rumor. So the question remains, does my Kiss Up Detector work? I really don’t know. There is always the possibility that Manager 1 simply gives sloppy praise.

How about you? What sets off your Kiss Up Detector?

Greetings, Make Their Day readers. My name is Alex Lamb. When my good friend Cindy invited me to contribute a guest post to her blog, I was both honored and delighted, but it took me a moment to figure out what message I wanted to share. My expertise is not in employee recognition, per se, but in improv theater and its implications in economics, psychology, and the study of leadership. After some thought, I decided that the idea I’d like to share is this: the employee recognition in your company can be revolutionized by understanding the role of cleaner fish in marine ecosystems.

Fish, Altruism, and Vampire Bats
At first glance, this might seem like a rather bold claim. After all, what do cleaner fish have to do with employees, let alone the recognizing of them? You might have seen cleaner fish on science documentaries from time to time. They’re the little fish that spend their lives swimming around in the mouths of larger fish, picking away the bits between their teeth, and miraculously not been gulped up. Am I implying that employees are little fish and that the secret of recognition is choosing not to swallow them? Not exactly.

Cleaner fish stay alive because of an evolutionary principle called reciprocal altruism. The large fish benefit from having their teeth cleaned. The cleaner fish benefit from getting a free meal and some measure of protection. Everyone wins and so the relationship is stable enough to persist for generations. The same patterns of cooperation can be seen in alligators and clover birds, between squirrels and songbirds, and even among vampire bats. However, nowhere in nature is reciprocal altruism, or reciprocity for short, so complex or nuanced as among human beings.

Influence and Christmas
In his book Influence, Robert Cialdini shares the story of a scientific study that reveals the power of reciprocity clearly. In this experiment, student volunteers carried out simple tests working in a pair with another student selected to be their partner. What the volunteers didn’t know was that in every case, that partner was an actor. Somewhere during the course of each session, the actor would briefly leave the room. In about half of those cases, he’d return with a can of coke for himself, and another for the volunteer. Then the test would proceed as normal. At the end of the session, the actor would ask the volunteer if he wanted to pledge a contribution for a charity event that the actor claimed to be taking part in that weekend. The rate of contribution in those cases where the coke was offered hugely exceeded that of the cases where it was not. In other words, when I do something for you, you feel gently compelled to do something for me, whether you like it or not.

The effects of reciprocity go way deeper than this, though. Human beings don’t just pay attention to the gifts they receive. They pay attention to all the subtle stuff that comes with them. Consider Christmas, or any other gift giving holiday. What makes these occasions both powerful and occasionally awkward isn’t what we get so much as what we see on each other’s faces when those transactions take place. This idea is magnificently captured in the song ‘Present Face’ by Garfunkel and Oates. In a nutshell, the first part of reciprocating to a gift isn’t the gift you give back, it’s how you receive the one you were just handed.

Gifts in the Workplace
Recognizing others brilliantly depends on realizing that every statement that one of your employees makes is a gift. By this I mean every remark in a meeting, every question, no matter how difficult, and even every email. Sometimes it’s hard to see things that way, but keeping this idea in mind will help you far more than you might expect.

Why? Because the reaction you give someone when you receive a gift is a message, and that message says ‘I’m responding in the way that you expected’. The brain loves getting messages like this. This is because your brain works by constantly trying to guess what will happen next. It’s a predicting machine.

Every time you talk to someone, your brain is automatically trying to anticipate their next word, or what expression they’ll pull. When the brain is able to get more guesses right than wrong, it rewards itself. It starts to automatically trust that other person. So when we make sure that each statement that one of our team members makes is getting reflected in our expression and choice of words, they feel like their actions had a predictable, measurable outcome. In other words, they feel noticed.

The Clegg Effect
This isn’t to say that reciprocity means automatically accepting everything everyone tells you as if it’s a new pair of skis on Christmas day. However, what it does mean is that making sure that your team members feel heard before you contribute information of your own makes a huge difference. For a great example of this principle in action, I recommend the first ever British Prime Ministerial debate, which happened earlier this year. You can find it here.

In the course of ninety minutes, this debate temporarily turned the politics of an entire nation on its head. A big part of what made that possible was the delivery style of one party’s leader, Nick Clegg, and his grasp of the reciprocity principle. Of course, there’s plenty more going on here besides, but as the video reveals, Nick Clegg has a powerful grasp of how to respond to audience questions, make them feel included, and incorporate their material into his own vision.

Lead like a Cleaner Fish, Not Like a Shark
In conclusion, then, by treating each employee effort we encounter like a piece of food glued to teeth of a much larger fish–a fish that deserves our respect–we guarantee our survival and our effectiveness as leaders. As leaders, we need to aspire to listen and react with intuitive grace and confidence, and to make our responses naturally reflect the expectations of others. This might sound like a tall order, but fortunately there’s a highly developed toolkit for developing such responses that’s easy and fun to use. That toolkit, in case you hadn’t guessed, is improv theater.

The best of experiential learning for leadership development, Leadership Skills for the Analytical Mind, is a joint venture between Cindy Ventrice and Alex Lamb. To learn more visit www.techeq.com.

A few months ago, I wondered,”Is the economy affecting employees’ sense of being valued?”
For the past two years employees have coped with a lack of raises, reduction in benefits, and increased workload. I wondered, was this having an effect?

People who don’t feel valued aren’t usually engaged or motivated, so knowing the affect of economic changes on sense of value is important information for companies struggling to stay productive.

So I conducted a survey that asked:

“Do you feel more or less valued than a year ago?”

The largest percentage (42%) of respondents said they feel less valued than they did one year ago. In contrast 31 percent reported no change and 28 percent said they feel more valued. Given the circumstances in most organizations: cutbacks, downsizing, extreme budgeting, it doesn’t seem surprising that people might feel less valued than they did a year ago.

What you might find surprising is why they feel less valued.

The most sited cause of significant change in the way they feel was not pay, benefits, or work overload. It was the behavior of the manager or supervisor (49%)!

It always seems to come down to the relationship of the individual to the manager. People can tolerate just about anything but a manager who doesn’t seem to care.

To see the results of this survey click here.

Brooke Thomas came up with an award that I love!

She writes:

A couple of months ago, we were getting ready to launch a new application to the whole company. Our last gating milestone was our internal validation process for which we had only one regular employee (and two recently hired temps who weren’t up to speed yet). These validations are extremely tedious and it takes a special someone to march through them.

This employee was extremely stressed out and working long hours. I sent her a Mike Rowe “Dirty Jobs” life sized card board cut-out with a note, saying I realized her job was very tough right now but I was sending her some ‘help’ in the form of Mike Rowe. Needless to say everyone in her office loves Mike and she can in turn ‘loan’ him out when others feel like they have thankless dirty job.

I hope it turns into a sort of ‘underground’ peer recognition program.

Very creative Brooke!

The Dirty Job award acknowledges that achievement doesn’t always mean doing something grand or exciting. Sometimes it just means rolling up your sleeves, getting dirty, and getting the job done!

The best ideas always seem to come from readers. Do you have an idea to share?

A new article was posted on the Inc Magazine website on the subject of How to Reward Employees on a Budget. Read it and then let me know what you would add to the list!

We often hear that believable recognition is specific recognition. Specifics certainly help in demonstrating that you really “see” the recipient, but is that really the key to making recognition believable?

The foundation of effective recognition is respect. With respect, employees tend to see recognition in the everyday acts of managers and supervisors. Give them difficult customers to help and they know you trust their capabilities. Same thing when you ask them to take their vacations at a different time than you do. They see the recognition potential in your actions if you have a respectful relationship. But is it enough to overcome slightly vague recognition? A note from a reader gives us some insight into this. She received the weekly tip, Put It In Writing:

People generally love thank you notes and written words of appreciation. They love them so much, in fact, that they hang on to them for weeks, months, or sometimes years! It takes you a few minutes longer to create a note than it does to just tell someone how much you appreciate their contribution. The effort is worth your while.

In response to this tip, the reader sent me the following message:

I have notes of appreciation or recognition that I received years ago. Some are as simple as a post it note that says “Great Job!!!” that I know really came from the person’s heart.

I have saved notes both from my supervisors and the people I supervise. I don’t usually save the notes if I know they aren’t from the heart….if they are just a superficial nice thing to say.

I read this and thought, “great job” isn’t very specific. Yet here is a reader to hung on to the note because it was meaningful. This made me wonder (and ask):

What tips you off that a “great job” is from the heart or not?

She wrote back:

Good question. I think that their other behavior supports the recognition. That they aren’t just saying it to check it off their to-do list. Also, when they look me in the eye when they talk to me, a written note is more likely to have more meaning. Also, supervisors don’t always have to agree with me or my ideas, but when they at least take time to listen and consider my input it goes a long way in feeling heard. If I feel heard, I have an easier time believing what they say or write is genuine -if I am important enough to listen to, they probably really care if they take the time to write a note.

The reader refers to other behavior: looks me in the eye. listen and consider my ideas, these behaviors sound like respect to me. The lesson? Work on the respectful relationship first, you can get eloquent with your message later. Your returns will be greater.

Copyright Cindy Ventrice