Recognition and Appreciation Gone Sideways

Recognizing and appreciating your project team members is an important part of project leadership. But some people wield it like a 6-year-old who just found daddy’s gun. This is posted on behalf of a colleague who wishes to remain anonymous.  So many bridges to burn . . . so little time! - Kimberly

Sketched Face“I was a senior Manager at one of the big 4 consulting companies working in one of the firm’s offices with my staff. Each year the firm conducts a global employee survey to see how management is doing. Well, as it turns out our site had pretty poor scores in the “rewards and acknowledgement” area. As one would expect, word came down from high to the site partner that we needed to pay more attention to acknowledging and rewarding contributions. Here’s how it was handled.

First of all, every manager (I being one of them) was REQUIRED to hold a staff appreciation meeting within 1 week time. At that meeting it was REQUIRED that the manager publicly announce some wonderful thing that each person did. No staff member, was to be spared being acknowledged and verbally rewarded (god forbid they should incur any un needed expense that might affect the senior level bonuses).”

“So, in accordance with the mandate I called an “appreciation” staff meeting with my team. Now, let me interrupt myself to explain how big consulting companies (or at least this one) work. It all comes down to “time is money”. In other words, every hour a staff member spends must be charged to a “charge code”. If the “charge code” happens to be a client contract, then the firm gets revenue. If the “charge code” is not associated with a client then the it comes out of overhead and affects the bottom line profitability of the division and in this case the specific site. This in turn directly affects the profit of the site and the bonus of the partner running the site. Because of this, the invitation to this mandatory staff meeting, included a note indicating that the meeting time was not to be included on the time sheet, however each employee was still expected to log in their full 40 hours for the week. So, the “great job guys” meeting was being held on the employees personal time. How motivating!”

“There we are back in the meeting. I give “atta-boy’s” to my supervisors and as we planned ahead of time, each of my supervisors in turn gave “good job” anecdotes to each of their team members. As this was going on I checked off each name on my staff sheet to turn in to upper management as proof that we had done our duty. So, here we are in a meeting that everyone knows was forced by upper management. Even though I’m being sincere in my praise of good work, there is no way in hell it could possibly be perceived that way. Most of what was said had already been said in other meetings or one on one sessions anyway.”

“Next my boss comes to the podium, and echo’s what a good job my staff has done and how important they are to the organization. This was followed by a similar speech from the next level up. Talk about stone cold negative body language in the audience. I was impressed that no one in my staff said anything negative. They were probably too stunned by the stupidity of management. Now here’s the kicker. Even though it was mandated (and everyone knew it was mandated) that everyone would be recognized, my boss, as well as the next level up did not say one word about me, the leader of this team. Oops!! In the few days after the meeting just about everyone on my staff came around to my office and asked what was up with that, and “How come so-and-so didn’t say anything about you?”, etc. They also were not real polite in expressing their opinion of those “leaders” above me.”

“Needless to say, I no longer work for that company.”