Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for literature, and her immediate response when being told was: "Oh Christ ... I couldn't care less."

An American literary critic, Harold Bloom said concerning the decision, that it was "pure political correctness."

When you consider this and the continual gravitating toward a similar award system in the entertainment industry, we have to do better than this in our businesses when offering awards or recognition to our workers.

I remember one company that was going to recognize their people by throwing them a big dinner. The problem was they invited a bunch of dignitaries to the function, and the workers were made to go to the back of the line to get their food. It was worse than not having it at all, as there were hard feelings and the sense they were second-class citizens. Not a good way of showing appreciation.

Another instance I remember is when people across a company, in different divisions, were being awarded for excellence. The problem was every month an award went out, a different division was recognized, until the end of the year, every division had received an award, diluting its importance. That was also a meaningless effort, as workers understood they were just going to go down the line and give everyone some recognition.

The response by Doris Lessing to the recognition shows the Nobel Prize has become diluted in its importance also. Recently, specifically in the literature category, the prize is awarded to those writing to politically related issues.

That's the reason Lessing responded to her winning the award, and critics like Bloom also.

For us, we need to make our recognition or awards to our people meaningful. They have to be real and truly connected to excellence in whatever area of our company they are working in. It should be something where they even exceed expectations or even take a risk by breaking rules to take care of a customer.

This is a more vital area than may be thought, and we have to take care in how we implement them. The last thing we want to do is cheapen the experience by making it easy to be awarded with.

We need to listen carefully to immediate feedback from our people to see how they respond to it, and adapt to their responses to make it a highly-coveted award or recognition event. In the end, it's about them, and not us. We need to look for those traits and actions that are highly sought after by the company, and let that be the overall determining factor in our award or recognition strategies.