4 Tips for Creating a Culture of Recognition

In 2021 the Pew Research Center surveyed over 6000 workers and identified low pay, lack of opportunities for advancement and feeling disrespected as the top 3 reasons for employee turnover. As a middle manager, you do not have autonomy to address the first two reasons for turnover in the short-term, but you do have the ability to have influence with the third. A desire for respect is a universal human need. Every day employees show up to work and do their jobs and as a leader you play a key role in showing your employees that you appreciate what they do.

Showing employees that you appreciate them is easy to do, but you must be purposeful. It is well documented that individuals are more likely to acquire new behaviors when they establish them as goals. If you want to show your employees you appreciate them, review the four actions below and set a goal for yourself to practice these over the next 21 days.

1. Write a note to your employee. Most communication is either verbal or digital. It is rare for us to receive or give positive written communication outside of performance review cycles. As a leader your words matter to you employees. By taking the time to write a thank you note to your employees, it shows them that you genuinely appreciate what they are doing. In addition, it gives them something that they can keep as a reminder of the excellent work they have completed. Make sure the note is specific, add the date and your signature. Pro Tip- develop branded thank you notes with your name on it. Just having these at your desk or in your work bag will encourage you to use them.

2. Praise your employee on social media. LinkedIn and other social media platforms are a great forum to show your employees appreciation. With more workers being remote, shifting to virtual recognition is a great way to provide public praise. By praising your employee in a social media post, you can recognize them in front of their peers, which makes a profound impact especially with extroverts. Pro Tip- connect with your employees and co-workers on social media platforms to maximize the reach of recognition post.

3. Give them a small token of appreciation. Little things matter especially when they are a surprise. Something as simple as a recognition pin, a gift card for coffee, or a candy bar can go a long way in showing someone that you appreciate what they do. The key here is to give the employee something they will appreciate. Take some time over the next week to poll your team on what types of recognition they feel would be impactful. Pro Tip- if the individual you are showing appreciation to has a family, the gift could be for them. Families of employees make sacrifices to support their career, showing them appreciation goes a long way to make the entire family feel valued and respected.

4. Surprise thank you call. Making an unexpected call to an employee to thank them for the work they are doing can go a long way to showing appreciation. An unprompted recognition call gives you an opportunity outside of one on ones, and performance reviews to energize an employee and let them know that their work matters. Pro Tip- if you are a manager of managers, ask your direct reports to provide you with the name, phone number, and reason for recognition of their direct reports. Skip level recognition can be impactful because the employee does not interact with you frequently, and likely see you as a powerful and influential person.

Leaders have a direct influence over the culture of their team. By role modeling recognition, you help to develop a culture that shows respect and appreciations. All businesses have limits on employee compensation, and advancement opportunities but there are fewer constraints on the amount of recognition you can give employees. By providing your employees with better and more frequent recognition, you demonstrated that you appreciate and respect the contribution they provide to the organization.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

The Art of Making Decisions That You Can Live With

As a leader within your organization, you are accountable to various stakeholders. Depending on your role, you are accountable to your supervisor, board of directors, or investors. You are also accountable to your peers, direct reports, and customers. If you think even more broadly, you are accountable to your vendors, community, and society at large. With so many people you are accountable to, it can be difficult to know what action you should take when dealing with a complex and important decision. Having a framework can make the decision-making process easier. As you tackle complex problems, I encourage you to define the decision you need to make, explore different perspectives, make values-based decisions, and stick to your commitments.

Define the Decision

Taking the time to explore the different perspectives of those impacted by your decision is a great way identify potential actions you can pursue. Before you can explore different perspectives, you must clarify the decision that you are looking to make. In doing this, you want to define the decision in one sentence with no judgement. By clearly define the decision that is under consideration with no judgement, you open yourself up to see thing more clearly.

Gain Perspective

Once you have identified the decision, you can begin to explore the perspective of different people that will be impacted. Talking with individuals that represent different perspectives is ideal. When you are short on time an alternative approach is to imagine yourself from the perspective of different stakeholders. By doing this, you can explore how your opinion on what should be done changes based on those perspectives. For example, if you are trying to determine whether to offer better health benefits to employees, you could start by imagining yourself as a middle-aged employee with children. What would they want the company to offer in benefits? Would their opinion be different than a single young professional within the organization? How about your customers? Would they care about the quality of benefits you provide employees? Now consider your Chief Financial Officer or your company’s investors. Would they have a different point of view on what the company should do? By pausing and considering each stakeholders perception on the topic, you expand your thinking, and are better able to see all the potential risks and benefits of your purposed actions.

Make Value-Based Decisions

Once you have taken the time to consider the various perspectives related to your topic, it is time to consider what values you will use to guide your decision making. Leveraging your values when making decisions is crucial. It helps to ensure there is alignment between who you say you are, and the actions you take. People follow leaders that they trust. Being inauthentic is one of the quickest ways to erode trust. When you clearly communicate your values, and use them to guide your actions, people can rely on you being consistent. This consistency promotes psychological safety and encourages trust.

After defining the values, you will use in making your decision, it is time to start brainstorming. As you brainstorm, you want to develop solutions based on the different perspectives that you have identified. Going back to the earlier example, from a middle-aged employee perspective, you might see value in adjusting the benefits package to be the best in the industry, because retirement and health care benefits are more important to you than base salary. From a young professional’s perspective, you may keep things the same, since you see more value in a higher salary than better benefits. From a customer perspective, you may be in favor of better benefits provided it does not lead to increment product or service cost. From the chief financial officer or investor perspective, you may be in favor of improving the benefits if you can reduce other cost, or past the expense on to customers. As you consider these perspectives, you want to bounce the purposed actions, and anticipate impact off your guiding values. This will help you to determine if the actions you are considering resonate with who you want to be as a leader.

For some leaders, making money is a core value, and they will allow this to guide all their actions. For other leaders, fairness is a core value, and they will sacrifice earning in pursuit of this end. Regardless of what your guiding values are, you will only find peace in your decision if the actions you take align with your values. Taking the time to define your values upfront, and then sticking to them through the decision-making process will help you to be at peace with the decisions that you make.

Commit to Action

Once you have aligned on your course of action, it is important to make a commitment to execute your plan. During the brainstorming period, it is great to take in as much information as possible. You should talk to different stakeholders if you can, and get their thoughts on potential solutions, but once a decision is made, you must commit to it. Trust in organization wavers when leaders do not honor their commitments. There is a time for fact and opinion gathering, a time for commitment, and a time for action. As a leader, it is important that you are clear with our organization when each of those time periods start, and when they end. This will give your organization comfort in knowing that you allow for debate but once a decision is made, it is final.

To rise into a leadership role, you must demonstrate to people that you are trustworthy, and that you will take care of their interests. As you move higher within organizations, the number and diversity of the people that you serve increases. This creates both the satisfaction of being able to provide value to more people, the challenge of competing priorities and the burden of making decisions that will result in some people being winners, and other people being losers. When faced with complex problems, it is easy to give in to the loudest voice, or to the stakeholder with the most power. When leaders do this, they typically make decisions that do not align with their values. Non-value-based decision-making leads to inauthenticity, inconsistencies in actions, and an erosion of trust. As a leader you must fight the impulse to move quickly. Being purposeful in defining the decision you need to make, seeking out different perspectives, making value-based decisions, and committing to decisions once they are made, will help you to build a culture that aligns with who you want to be as a leader.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

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If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

What is Co-Active Coaching?

The Co-Active Training Institute has been around for 30 years and has trained over 65,000 coaches worldwide. The program has been certified by the International Coaching Federation which is the largest coaching accreditation organizations in the world. The Co-action training model is powerful because it challenges clients to declare their values, self-reflect, develop actions items, and commit to change. The model’s foundation is based on 4 guiding principles.

People are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole

The first principle is that people are naturally creative resourceful and whole. In the Co-active model, it is not the job of the coach to fix the client. The client does not need fixing. What the client needs is assistance defining who they want to be, support in identifying negative thoughts, strategies for tapping into internal motivation, assistance in identifying options for improving their current situations, and encouragement to hold themselves accountable for their goals.

Dance in the moment

The second principle is dance in this moment. This principle is rooted in the fact that coaching is not therapy. During coaching sessions, we will only lightly touch on the client’s past. The past is fixed and cannot be changed. Our focus and attention are on the future. During coaching sessions, coaches will talk about what is happening now, and coming up with strategies to help the client move from their current state to their desired goal.

Focus on the whole person

The third principle is focus on the whole person. In the co-active model, coaches examine a client’s life from nine different segments. Career, Family and Friends, Significant other/Romance, Fun & Recreation, Health, Money, Personal Growth and Physical Environment. The reason coaches focus on all these segments is that they are all interconnected. As a client works on one segment of their life, it is important to understand the impact that it is having on other areas.

Evoke Transformation

The final principle is evoke transformation. People work with coaches because they want to experience a change in their life that they have not been able to achieve on their own. Coaches are taught to hold space for clients, so that they can self-reflect, gain emotional intelligence, define their goals, establish and renew motivation and develop actions plans to improve their lives.

Within my coaching practice, my primary focus is helping leaders define what they want from their careers and developing strategies to help them grow. As a former corporate executive and small business owner I know the importance of surrounding yourself by people that push you to be the best version of yourself. I help clients transform by deeply listening to them, asking thought-provoking questions, and reflecting back to them the things I have heard. With the information, I affirm the client's identity, challenge thinking that does not serve them, encourage action, requesting commitments and act as an accountability partner.

In summary, the Co-active coaching model can be summarized as a coaching approach where a coach, helps clients to define who they want to be, and what actions they will take to transform from who they are today, to who they want to be. Part of the magic of the coaching process is clients having the ability to get personalized unbiased help. If you have never experience executive coaching, I encourage you to give it a try. It will likely be one of the first times in your life that you speak to someone for 45 minutes, have their undivided attention, and know that they are exclusively listening to you with the unbiased goal of helping you self-reflect and develop plans to improve your career or business.

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Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching service for managers, executives and small business owner.

For tips on leadership and professional development follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771