Monthly Archives: September 2022

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Make Sure To Give and Present Recognition With A Smile

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Like all things dealing with nonverbal communication, it is always culturally specific, so we can interpret a smile in different ways around the world.

But for North America, Americans smile wider and more often than any other people, and that’s validated by research. So, be sure to smile when giving recognition to people in the U.S. and Canada.

And apparently, according to writer Olga Khazan from The Atlantic, a Finnish individual posited on Reddit that, “When a stranger on the street smiles at you:

a. You assume he is drunk.

b. He is insane.

c. He’s an American.”

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How To Get Your Leader’s Commitment For Recognition Program Budget

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We are approaching the last quarter of the year and it may well be time to submit your budget requests for keeping your offline and online recognition programs in place, or even asking for funding to add new programs.

It can seem like a nail biting exercise each year to go through. One way to make this angst less ominous is to get your executive sponsor’s support ahead of time. Follow these practical ways to get your leader’s commitment to your recognition program budget.

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How To Present Your Recognition Strategy and Plan To Your Executives

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Having just completed an organization’s recognition strategy and plan, I know that the next step for my client’s representative is to present the document to their executive leadership team for approval. 

Hopefully, you already have an executive sponsor shepherding the way to the boardroom. They should have the first review of your new recognition strategy and plan. Listen to their suggestions for any revisions they think should you need to make to better support the current and future business strategy. 

They can also advise you on what each executive leader will expect from the document and from your presentation. And they can also tell you of recent successful presentations and what they did to achieve this. You could ask to look at their PowerPoint® presentation and invite the presenter to share their experience with each of the leaders. 

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Building In Accountability With Learning How To Give Recognition

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No matter whether you deliver your recognition education and training online or in-person, how do you hold the participants accountable for using what they’ve learned? 

Very little planning goes into building accountability for what people learn.

This needs to change if we want more people to practice recognition giving the right way. Where do you begin? How do you get people to apply what they learn?

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Why You Should Keep Length of Service Award Programs Going

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One of the common decisions senior leaders make with length of service awards is their perception that they don’t produce any measurable return for the organization, is dropping them completely. 

This rationale of career milestone awards not impacting performance numbers and results has been around for many years. 

However, there is definitely an impact made when you give these awards. So, what benefits are there from continuing with milestone recognition? Should you keep going with length of service award programs?

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How To Write a Handwritten Note That People Will Keep and Reread

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I often ask attendees in my workshop sessions how many have kept a handwritten note or thank-you card. Most of the participants have kept at least one notecard.

Then I asked them how many reread that notecard. Again, a large majority of people acknowledged they’ve done this. I think it surprised them they weren’t the only ones who did this.

This caused me to research this phenomenon further and see if I could identify the elements that made a handwritten notecard a keeper.

Here’s what I found out. 

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