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Recognition and
Reward: Fueling
the Fires of
Service Success
Recognition drives the human engine.
—Leonard Berry
Texas A&M University
“Catch somebody doing something right today” is an admoni-
tion that succinctly captures years of managerial wisdom and
a ton of behavioral science research. It has special meaning
and import for the service management effort. If you want peo-
ple in your organization to think and act in customer-oriented
ways, seek out ways to catch them doing just that, and reward
and recognize them for making the effort.
It is a reasonable and rational guideline, a precept hard to
disagree with—and one more easily broken than kept. The
biggest problem, of course, is that in the modern service work-
place most managers seldom see more ...