It seems almost criminal that the most important lessons in human psychology are learnt at the earliest stages of our growth and education, but are then almost forgotten for the rest of our lives.
As children, we learn the power of recognition at home and in school. Money would be of no use to a four year old but a gold star on a chart, a merit badge pinned to a shirt or a certificate from the head teacher means absolutely everything. These tokens recognising achievement become a major part of our lives. Parents and grand-parents applaud these badges of honour and many children will store these little mementoes in a safe place as a lasting reminder that they are brilliant.
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Derek Williams – Chief Executive of
The WOW! Awards shares his thoughts.
What we learn in our youth somehow seems to get relegated as a memory of youth, not something that can be used in today’s world of the busy professional. In our eagerness to impress and progress, we forget about the power of recognition and start to focus on the power of reward instead. As leaders and managers we become conditioned to believe that most people will only work hard for money and if we want them to work harder, we will have to pay them more. So much so that it becomes a fear. The fear that people will only respond to money or reward.
This fear then gets reinforced by other fears; the fear that customers only want to complain, the fear that we have to micro-manage in order to get the best possible outcome and the fear that softness is weakness. As a result, we create organisations that, to the outside world, appear hostile; not quite what customers might have been looking for!
In 56 years, I have only ever had one good idea; the idea that customers could 'catch people doing things right'. Everything else that The WOW! Awards has become can be attributed to other great thinkers. What we have begun to understand from The WOW! Awards is both fascinating and contradicts the fear that we, as leaders, have…