How recognition builds trust

When’s the last time you shared a team member’s win with the rest of the organization?

When did you last celebrate a team member’s effort to move outside their comfort zone, even if it resulted in a failure that time?

Celebrating successes, as well as failures that result from efforts to grow, helps to build psychological safety on your team, instill pride, and motivate them to continue to take chances, get messy and grow. In fact, recognition of your team members’ accomplishments is a key driver of employee engagement: when an employee believes they will get recognition, they are 2.7 times more likely to be highly engaged.

Recognition shouldn’t just be done in a performance review or one on one, though you definitely should regularly share your positive feedback in those spaces as well. As a leader, you need to provide the space for celebrating wins and recognizing achievements and growth efforts with your whole team regularly; and this needs to be even more intentional if you are a remote or hybrid team.

For example, at Raise The Bar, we hold a monthly All Hands Meeting, where all the key leaders share headlines about their area of focus and share team members’ wins. We also celebrate milestones through emails and social media posts.

So, I’m going to take an opportunity here to celebrate Raise The Bar’s new COO, Heather Blonsky! Heather joined us over two years ago as the Head of Operations, and since then, she's brought her visionary thinking to help us scale exponentially in a thoughtful and intentional manner. She's built processes from the ground up, helped refine our training and methods, and made sure our leader experience has been nothing but stellar. And all this during a pandemic, in which we had to quickly pivot.

Heather has really been working on herself to become an even more impactful leader, one who not only coaches and grows her team but takes a larger perspective of the business when making crucial decisions. Great job, Heather!!

I’d also like to celebrate our Leadership Coach, Kimberly Flood! Kimberly recently took on extra work in hosting a thought provoking podcast episode about women and their contributions to sustainability, on top of all her other work and commitments. Kimberly was intentional about designing the quest