What You Recognize, Gets Repeated

What You Recognize, Gets Repeated.

I learned at any early part of my restaurant career that recognition was one of the most powerful tools in a manager’s tool box. Recognition to me can be as simple as “Thank you” or “Great job!” or as complicated as formal awards, such as trophies and plaques, to bonuses or to other more costly options.

Personally, I have always found the best ROI to be with regularly re-occurring low-cost, no-cost recognition.

As an Area Manager (a millennium ago) I used to send out a daily newsletter fax to my 10 restaurant team with the previous night’s results, some timely updates on things going on and some simple recognition with an accompanying smiley-face. Everyone on the team knew how to achieve both the recognition and the smiley-face. We had defined some simple benchmark KPIs that would earn a manager this simple shout-out. An example was as pithy as: “Team Susan: Balance between speed and labor achieved! Great job! :-) .”

The daily fax newsletter became a habit. I sent it out virtually 7 days a week with vacation among the rare exceptions. The Restaurant Managers, after a period of time, began to expect the fax newsletter…to the point that if I were late sending out the fax, and they knew they deserved that smiley-face, I would get a phone call asking me what had happened. The simple goals set in place to earn recognition and a smiley-face became cultural within the area, and the amount of smiley-faces earned became more and more regular as time went on culminating in the team earning a top spot among hundreds of other areas across the nation in overall results one year. We became one of the top areas in a huge organization, and a large part of it I attribute to the teams’ quest and thirst for recognition. The more we recognized, the more the daily goals were achieved. Daily results morphed into weekly results, which translated into quarterly and yearly results. The more the recognition, it seemed, the more we achieved the results. That’s when I realized: What you recognize, gets repeated.

And then there was the skeptic.

One day I was told I was to help train someone who came from another department that was moving into Ops. This was a future “BIG BOSS” and I needed to show him all the ropes. After 8 weeks of working side-by-side with him, he was to take over my team for 1 month and I was to step away. I had not adequately sold him on the smiley-face concept that accompanied the recognition well enough, and he promptly stopped using them in the newsletter. After a week of being harassed by the managers, he called me with some humbling news: He decided to start using the smiley-faces again. He said: “I didn’t realize how important this was to them…” He continued: “They really crave that recognition.”

I am not here advocating you use a smiley-face in your daily communications. My brief story illustrates the power of low-cost, no-cost recognition if used consistently, frequently and transparently. The recognition becomes something people begin to crave, desire, and covet. The recognition drives performance and even some friendly competition among peers. The recognition reinforces the very results/behaviors we as leaders seek.

I took over a region once and even though the business was “broken”, I immediately set out to catch people doing a great job. It was not easy as the business had been previously neglected, but I communicated some standards and results that I would be looking for as I visited restaurants. After just 1 week, I found a team doing a good job with the pre-defined objectives/results. I gathered the team together, took a picture of them and e-mailed it to the rest of the region recognizing this team for their efforts and results. The effect was immediate. As I continued to tour restaurants in the region, I would be asked by managers if their visit was “good enough” to have a picture of the team taken and sent out. People had been so ignored by the previous leadership, they were absolutely starving to be recognized and do a good job. The result was an immediate improvement in some KPIs that we had identified…and the recognition began to drive results.

At the end of the day, people do not get out of bed in the morning to be bad at their job. If they do, that’s a whole other topic. Most people want to be good at what they do. That is why the number 1 reason people quit a new job in the restaurant industry in the first 90 days is because they feel they were not trained adequately to perform their job well enough. People want to be good at what they do. This is why most people respond to encouragement and recognition. Most people will strive to be recognized and appreciate it. That is why, as simple as it sounds, it’s true: what you recognize, gets repeated.