Motivation First Hand

In about a week I will celebrate my fifth anniversary as an editor of Incentive magazine, so I’ve been thinking about my time here lately, but something happened at a group town hall meeting our brand new senior vice president held this week for the dozen or so magazine she oversees that really struck me.

This was the second monthly town hall in her tenure over Nielsen Business Media’s Travel and Performance Group, of which Incentive is a part. It began in the same way her first meeting did, with Sabrina singling out and honoring of a handful of employees who’d really gone above and beyond recently. This was not a revelation, as some of her predecessors had done this occasionally.

But, this time IT had managed to get the PowerPoint working, and we saw slides with the honorees names, titles and magazines. They were divided into categories matching the newly announced corporate values. Sabrina read them out and we applauded. No awards were handed out, just public kudos

Now, after five years of covering this industry, I know this is a good motivational technique, good for morale, good for loyalty and generally good management. And like I’ve said, other VPs have singled out people at other group meetings in the past. And we’ve done that sort of thing on our own in the Performance Group. (Merchandise and gift cards have been used, and a previous managing editor established the “giant red foam thumbs up” award, given after each issue was sent to the printer, for the best copyediting catch.)

But despite the fact that I “know” how well public recognition works, I was really struck by how much of a difference it made that Sabrina had three slides made up, had taken the time to learn who was being honored, and felt it was important enough to start the meeting with.

Beyond that, the people singled out were drawn from across the ranks of our little group. There was a junior editor and an art director, not just salespeople or managers who’d taken on huge projects. That was nice, too. And just the fact that someone took the time to connect what these people had done to the corporate values made clear that some thought was put into the process, which matters more than I would have thought it did—even though I was just one of the people in the audience applauding.

This stuff doesn’t get old.