Are you recognized? What is recognition? What does recognition do to you? I have a thesis that recognition can be strong or stronger depending on who the giver is. Best giver is your peer.
First I want to give you some examples from life that support my thesis around different levels of recognition and how strong it gets.
I bought a basketball cap for my kid of age 7. Of course, I sold out my
purchase as much as I could saying; – Son, this is such a cool cap, it fits you just perfect. He responded back; -Thanks Dad, I’ll ware this at school tomorrow. Next day at school the first Mate he met called directly: -O man, what a cool cap. He was recognized by his peer. This went straight into the heart of my son. His peer recognized him. This is peer-to-peer recognition and it is stronger than if a parent or a little brother of age 4 commends you.
Another example to explain this thesis. Imagine Zlatan would practicing free kicks with Messi. If Messi would give Zlatan some good words about his free kicks, Zlatan would be stronger recognized than if his coach would commend him for them. A peer-to-peer recognition is again the strongest.
Salesrep-to-Salesrep, Dev-to-Dev, CEO-to-CEO, Geek-to-Geek, ITPro-to-ITpro, Manager-to-Manager. They all go strong when it comes to recognize each other, peer-to-peer.
If you could transfer this peer-to-peer recognition into your work space the company culture would change dramatically to an amazing playground. I’ll refer to my previous blog post around this topic where the discussion mostly handled receiving recognition from your coach/manager/boss to you. This is important as well but as a coach or leader it is more important to make those peer-to-peer recognition opportunities/meetings happen. If you make this happen, the peer-to-peer recognition will appear.
In our company we have a lot of consultants. They often go onsite on their own, in different assignments. No one sees them in the perspective of recognition. The customer demands and only. The coach/manager/boss have no clue what they are doing out there not to mention the Account Managers or Salesmen who’s only interest is to sell and to make the customer happy. The consultant’s peers and colleagues are working on other assignments which they do not really know of. And they do not have time to put any effort into each other’s assignments.
Play with the idea that you want to apply peer-to-peer recognition in your company and you believe this is the way to go. Where would you start? We started years ago with small steps where we arranged meetings for peer-to-peer to get together. One-on-one meetings in the beginning, where the task was to explain to each other what they do at their customer site. One just asked questions about his/her project. Half time they switched position and the other one asked questions. They gave feedback back and forth. Peer-to-peer recognition. All of a sudden someone knew what you actually were doing.
A battle occurred!
Stay tuned – A definition of a battle is soon to come…
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