At the end of a very intense, challenging business day Duncan Mason (not his real name) pulled from the third drawer of the desk in his den, a small, hand-addressed envelope and slipped out the enclosed note. It was a pensive, quiet moment following a stressful day at the office as he began to read the heart-felt words written by his former boss some twenty years earlier. Duncan had received the note as a young, relatively new engineer, having just successfully completed one of the company’s most important and challenging projects of the year. Now, at fifty years of age Duncan still found these complimentary words of appreciation assuring and motivating as he faced new and greater challenges. This small, but powerful gesture of recognition is still important to Duncan despite the fact that today he is a boss himself as the division president and a member of the private company’s board of directors.
This is an impressive and true story. It’s a striking illustration of the incredible and enduring impact that something as simple as a hand-written note from an appreciative boss can have. And while the note his boss sent cost nothing more than the notepaper and a postage stamp, the recognition value was priceless.
 At PVS Chemicals, Jim Nicholson, president and CEO, has a favorite cliché—“The speed of the pack is the speed of the leader,” he says. “It works in motorcycle gangs—it works in business.” His implication is that as a leader, you set the tone by how you deal with your people. When you find ways to individually recognize and reward the people who collectively help achieve company goals, you inspire and motivate them to perform at the maximum. That “true leader” attitude is even more important in challenging and difficult times. While financial bonuses may be welcomed rewards, they are generally not the ones that motivate the most, let alone stay with the person for years to come. Here are just a few small, but memorable ways that some of today’s leaders build people by recognizing them:
At Pizza Hut they give a Big Cheese Award; it’s fun and representative of their business.
At Weight WatchersInternational CEO Linda Huett recognizes the diversity of her people’s talents by taking them out of silos.
Ann Hambly, the former CEO at Prudential Asset Resources, once gave her own frequent flyer points to an employee whose father had died and personally made all the arrangements for him to take some stress away at a difficult time. “It’s not just me. She would do that for any loyal employee,” the employee noted.
At BHE Environmental the leadership decided that paying for sick time was not very motivating, so they decided to pay people for being well. If someone ends up in the hospital, that’s certainly covered and company President John Bruck says they’ll probably even send you flowers. But, if you’re not sick, they pay you a day every six months for being well. Employees like the focus on wellness.
At PVS Chemical the president picks one day a quarter and designates it “Call Jim Day.” “You can call up, you don’t have to identify yourself, it’s just an open direct access for folks to call and vent or praise or complain,” President Jim Nicholson explains. It is open to employees, their spouses, even their kids. And there are no filters—no secretary who screens the call.
At The Container Store they borrowed an idea from the Fun Committee at Southwest Airlines and a committee gets together to do things for employees that are just plain fun. Some events have included a chili cook-off and a Wizard of Oz costume party where even the cofounders dressed in costume.
At MascoTech they created a process for catching people doing something right. They call it WOW stories. “A Wow story is very simple,” explains CEO Frank Hennessey. “It is when you see somebody that’s doing something that’s absolutely incredible, and you can’t help but say, ‘Wow!’ So we publish stories about them in an internal newsletter.” The employees appreciate the recognition.
At a food distributorship they’ve instituted a system where each week in the president’s staff meeting, personal notes are written for good deeds, good performance and exceeding expectations. The manager/leader who writes it signs it, and then all of the rest of the leadership signs it as well.
Regardless of one’s position there is one fact that remains as long as life itself; each individual wants to know that they matter—that they play a viable role and make some difference. As a leader it’s your responsibility to know each of your people well enough to show them in personal, individual ways that they do matter and they do make a difference. And the cost for doing that has little to do with money. But the cost for failing to do that most assuredly will negatively impact your bottom line in employee disengagement, turn-over and mundane performance. 
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