Recognition Should Not Need a Threat to Show Up

I have watched this play out in more than one organisation. Someone has been doing solid work for years without giving anyone a reason to worry about them. Because they are reliable, they get left alone. Managers spend their attention where the fires are, and this person has never been a fire.

Then something changes. A new manager arrives, not even their own, and starts putting pressure on the team. This steady performer suddenly has energy nobody has seen from them in years. They push harder. They speak up in meetings they used to sit quietly through. Visibility they never asked for starts showing up around them.

The easy read is competitiveness, a reaction to someone new asserting themselves. I don't think that's it. What I think is happening is older and more human than that. We all carry a need to be seen, whether that's at home, in a friendship, or at a desk we've sat at for six years. Being good at your job does not switch that need off. If anything it sharpens it, because nobody has thought to check in for a long time.

Here is where organisations get it wrong. The underperformer gets a plan. The rising star gets a sponsor and a seat at the table. The steady one gets left to run, because the assumption is that being fine means being fine. It usually is not. What builds up instead is something quieter than resentment and harder to point to, a slow sense that doing the work well simply does not register with anyone.

It bothers me that it so often takes a threat to remind a business its steady people are still there and still capable of more. Finding that out through a scare is a poor way to run a team. It tells you the system only pays attention when it feels at risk, and the people who caused it the least risk are the ones who waited longest for anyone to notice.

Steady performers do not need applause. They need someone to look at them on purpose, not just leave them running because the engine has never stalled. A short conversation about what someone has actually built, asked when nothing is wrong, does more than most recognition schemes manage in a year.

I'd like to know what it would take in your organisation to notice the steady ones before something forces the question.