There is a particular email I have received more than once in my career. Friday afternoon, all-hands distribution list, subject line "Amazing work team!!" Three exclamation marks. No names. No specifics. Sent by someone who had no idea what any of us had done.
Everybody deleted it. A few people forwarded it to each other with a comment I will not repeat here.
Here is the thing nobody warns new managers about: appreciation done badly is worse than silence. My co-author Debra Corey calls it the piss-off factor, and once you know the name for it, you start seeing it everywhere.
Silence is neutral. Bad recognition is a signal.
Say nothing to your team and they will assume you are busy, distracted, or a bit rubbish at the human parts of the job. Annoying, but neutral.
Send the wrong thank you and you have told them something specific. You have told them you were not paying attention. You have told them your praise is a form filled in, not a thing felt. Worst of all, you have told them exactly how little you know about what they do all day.
They will remember the thank you longer than they would have remembered the silence.
What the evidence shows
Gallup and Workhuman tracked nearly 3,500 employees from 2022 to 2024. Well-recognised employees were 45% less likely to have left after two years. Strong result. Recognition works.
Now the uncomfortable half of the same study. Only 22% of employees say they get the right amount of recognition. More than half, 55%, either receive none at all or receive recognition failing every quality measure Gallup tested. So the majority of what passes for appreciation in offices right now is landing somewhere between useless and insulting.
Then there is the research on public league tables. A 2024 study in Accounting, Organizations and Society looked at peer-to-peer recognition systems and found something worth pinning to your wall. Leaderboards ranking people by recognition received reduced helpful behaviour. Leaderboards ranking people by recognition given increased it. Same tool. Opposite outcomes. The difference is whether you turned appreciation into a competition.
And underneath all of it sits the oldest finding in the field. Deci, Koestner and Ryan pulled together 128 experiments in Psychological Bulletin in 1999 and showed tangible rewards tied to doing a task reliably reduce the underlying motivation to do it. Pay someone for what they were doing out of interest and their interest goes down.
Bolt a prize onto good work and you have quietly reframed the work as something nobody would do without a prize.
None of this argues for saying nothing. It argues for the thing being real. Recognition is a claim about reality... you saw a person do a thing and the thing mattered. Get the claim wrong and you have not given a gift. You have made a statement about your own inattention, in writing, to somebody who was there.
Four ways it goes wrong
Generic praise. "Great job everyone." A thank you with no object attached is a thank you to nobody. Worse, it flattens the person who worked three weekends into the same sentence as the person who watched.
Recognising the presenter, not the builder. The person who demoed the feature gets the applause. The two engineers who rebuilt the data layer at 2am get nothing, because you never saw them do it. Do this twice and your quiet people stop trying.
Praise where money belonged. Nothing curdles faster than a certificate handed to someone underpaid for eighteen months. Appreciation is not currency. Using it as currency reads as a con, because it is one.
The monthly ritual. Employee of the Month is a scheme where you announce eleven losers to celebrate one winner, every month, forever. The award drifts to whoever has not had a turn. Everyone learns the rotation. The trophy becomes a joke passed around the office like a bad Secret Santa.
The rule of three
Real appreciation has three components. Miss one and the whole thing collapses.
Specific. Name the thing. Not "great work on the release" but "you spotted the race condition in the payment retry before it hit production, and you did it on a Friday." Specificity proves you were watching. Nothing else does.
Timely. Within days. Praise arriving at a quarterly review has no emotional connection to the work. It has become admin.
Attributed to effort you witnessed yourself. If you did not see it, ask the people who did. In my experience the best source of recognition intelligence is a quiet ten minutes with your team leads asking one question: who saved us this month and how?
Notice what is missing from the list. Money. Certificates. A gong at the all-hands. Those are delivery mechanisms, and the delivery mechanism matters far less than whether the content is true and precise.
Where I got this wrong
At Curve I ended up running seven cross-functional teams, up to 43 people including managers. Early on I did the thing every well-meaning leader does. I praised the visible.
Demo day heroes. The person presenting to stakeholders. The engineer who fixed the production incident at midnight, loudly, in the incident channel where I happened to be reading.
Meanwhile someone had spent six weeks writing tests nobody asked for, and those tests are the reason we had 30% fewer incidents by the end of the year. I found out months later. From somebody else. In passing.
I had been running an appreciation system optimised for whoever stood nearest to me. My quiet people were being taught to be louder or be invisible, and the ones with too much integrity to grandstand were slowly filing me under "does not notice."
What fixed it was boring. I asked my managers, every month, to bring me two names and what the person had done. Then I wrote to those people directly, with detail, without an audience. No budget. No programme. No platform vendor.
The first month, two of my managers struggled to name anyone. Not because their teams had done nothing. Because nobody had asked them to look before. Once looking became part of the month, the names arrived without effort, and the quality of what my managers knew about their own people went up sharply. The recognition was the visible output. The attention underneath it was the real change.
This is not a soft problem
Gallup estimates managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement scores across business units. Not the perks. Not the mission statement. You.
When Debra and I researched Bad Bosses Ruin Lives, 99.5% of respondents told us they had experienced one or more of the ten types of bad boss. Near universal. And a decent share of those bad bosses were not monsters. They were pleasant people whose appreciation was so hollow it read as contempt.
Getting recognition wrong is not a failure of niceness. It is a failure of attention. And attention is the whole job.
Try this on Monday
Pick one person. Write three sentences about a specific thing they did in the last fortnight, why it mattered to the business, and what would have happened without them. Send it to them. Copy nobody.
Then work out how long it took you to think of the example.
If it took you more than a minute, you have found your real problem, and it is not your recognition programme.
More on building this into how you lead at Step It Up HR.