Recognizing and Engaging Employees For Dummies

Chapter 7

Getting Managers to Recognize Employees

In This Chapter

Converting low-use managers into high-use managers

Praising up to get your boss to recognize you

Advocating for recognition, no matter what your title

Employees expect to be recognized when they do good work. Dozens of studies and surveys support this statement, and almost any employee is likely to confirm it. Thanking employees for doing good work increases the likelihood that they will want to continue that high quality of work for you and your organization, and it serves as a catalyst for getting others to perform better as well. For these reasons alone, you would think that almost every manager in today’s organizations would use recognition as standard operating procedure. But that’s not true. In fact, the opposite is most often the case.

In this chapter, I discuss why certain managers don’t use recognition as much as they should (while others embrace it), how to help the holdouts convert, and how others across the organization can get managers to buy into the importance of recognition.

The $64,000 Question—Why Do So Few Managers Recognize Employees?

During my three-year doctoral study at the Peter F. Drucker ...