Recognition Is Not an Optional Skill for Leaders

The most influential thing you say in a meeting isn't always your own idea. Sometimes it's making sure someone else's best moment doesn't go unnamed, especially when they aren't there to say it themselves.

Most senior leaders don't underuse recognition because they don't value their people. They underuse it because no one ever taught them to treat it as a skill.

It was always just a gesture. Something you did at the end of a project. Something HR built into the all-hands template. Or, if you're like a lot of the international executives I coach, something that simply isn't part of how you were raised to operate. You work hard, let the results speak for itself, and assume nobody needs to be told that you did your job well.

My guest Victoria Rozanska, who leads global partnerships at Google, shared her experience with exactly this issue on an episode of my Leadership English podcast. In a lot of the places she's worked and lived, doing great work quietly was just what you did. Then she landed at a company where the opposite was true, and she had to learn something no leadership training ever quite prepares you for:

What gets acknowledged is what gets remembered.

Everything else, no matter how good, quietly disappears. That's why I want to challenge how most international executives think about recognition. It's easy to file it under "nice to have," something warm you do when there's time for it.

But the executives I coach, the ones who build trust across global teams, retain their best people through acquisitions and reorgs, and get buy-in from people who don't even report to them, don't treat recognition as an afterthought. They treat it as instruction.

Because recognition isn't kindness. It's leadership communication, and it may be the highest-leverage kind you have.

Recognition Tells People What Success Actually Looks Like

Nobody learns the company culture from their onboarding or from the website. They learn it by watching what you notice. Every time you recognize someone publicly, you're answering a question the whole room is quietly asking.

What actually gets rewarded here?

If you only recognize the deal that closed, people learn that outcomes are the only currency that counts. If you recognize the person who caught the error before it reached the client, or asked the question that changed the direction of the project, you've just taught fifty other people to slow down and think.

You are always communicating as a leader, often more loudly through what you choose to point at than anything you actually say.

Recognition Builds Trust Faster Than Most Leaders Realize

The common assumption is that recognition is mostly about making people feel good. To a point, it is, but that's the smallest part of what it actually does.

When people consistently see thoughtful work get noticed, something shifts underneath the surface. They speak up sooner, flag the problem before it becomes expensive, or admit the mistake in the room instead of quietly managing around it for three more weeks.

Psychological safety isn't built by telling people it's safe to speak up. It's built by proving, publicly and repeatedly, that contribution gets seen. That's the real reason high-performing teams communicate differently than average ones.

Recognition Transfers Credibility, Which Is Why It Matters Most at the Top

Picture a cross-functional meeting. You pause and say, "Before we move on, I want to name something. Priya, in Operations, caught an issue that could have delayed this launch by two weeks. Because she raised it early, the team solved it before it ever affected a customer."

You didn't just thank Priya. You introduced her judgment to a room that had never had a reason to trust it before. You lent her your credibility, and that's not a small gift. It's one of the only things at your level you can give away without spending anything, and it compounds every time you do it.

Recognition as Access, Visibility for People Who Aren't in the Room

This is the part I think gets missed most, even by leaders who are otherwise excellent at recognizing individuals directly in front of them.

I once coached an executive who ran the southern region for his company's product line. He had a solid team with consistently strong numbers, but almost nobody above his level knew any of their names, because his team never set foot in the executive meetings where reputations at that altitude actually get built.

He started doing something simple. In every executive meeting, he'd spend thirty seconds naming a specific win from his team, by name, before diving into his own update. Not "the region had a strong quarter." Instead, something more specific like, "I want to flag that Marcus restructured our client onboarding process this month, and it's already showing up in our retention numbers."

Within two quarters, people two levels above Marcus knew his name. Not because Marcus had ever been in that room, but because his manager had done something most leaders never think to do with their access. He elevated his team by using his access to give them visibility.

Recognition isn't only something you extend to a peer, in a room you're both already standing in. Its highest use is often the opposite, in bringing someone else's name into a room they can't get into themselves, and doing it deliberately, again and again, until it stops being a favor and starts being their reputation.

If you're senior enough to be reading this, you almost certainly sit in rooms your best people never will. As a good leader, that access is not just yours to keep. It's a resource, and how you use it on their behalf may be one of the most consequential leadership decisions nobody ever tells you you're making.

The Cultural Shift Many International Leaders Have to Make

This is where I spend a lot of time with my clients, and honestly, where I've had to do my own work too.

If you grew up in a culture where humility means staying in the background, where you were taught that good work speaks for itself and doesn't need a spokesperson, publicly recognizing people, or naming your own team's wins in a room full of executives, can feel almost performative.

You worry it sounds inauthentic or like bragging. Understandably, you assume if the work was good, everyone already saw it. However, often, they didn't.

In most American and international corporate environments, visibility isn't bragging, it's part of the job. Recognition isn't exaggeration, it's routing attention to where it's actually earned. And learning to do that is one of the quiet, impactful shifts that separates an excellent contributor from a trusted executive.

How to Do This Without Sounding Forced

The leaders I coach on this almost always start with the same worry, that it will sound fake or like they're trying too hard. However, the fix isn't being more general. It's focusing on specificity, because vague praise does sound forced. Yet specific praise sounds genuine and insightful. Instead of "great job, everyone," try this instead:

In a Meeting

"I want to point out something before we move on. Carlos took a genuinely complicated technical issue and made sure the client understood exactly what we were deciding and why, before we moved forward. That's the kind of clear communication that builds trust, and it's something I want more of, especially with our less technical clients."

Notice what happened. You recognized one person, and you coached the entire room. That's what exceptional leaders actually do with recognition. It's never only about the past. It's also a quiet instruction about the future.

In an Email (Strategically Copying the Right People)

"I didn't want the team's efforts to go unnoticed. The way the contract renegotiated saved us significant money without damaging the relationship with our top client. I know that balance is harder than it looks, and I really appreciate how this was handled."

In a One-on-One

"I noticed how you handled the disagreement on Tuesday. You didn't concede the point, and you didn't make it personal either. That's a great skill to have."

Each of these names a specific behavior, not a general quality. Each explains why it mattered. And each is short because recognition that runs long starts to serve the person giving it more than the person receiving it.

The Deeper Shift

Here's what I want you to take from this. The person already knows what they did. The value of saying it out loud is almost entirely in what it teaches the room about what's valued here, who can be trusted, what "good" looks like when nobody's written it down.

Recognition was never something you do for someone. It's something you do in front of everyone else on their behalf, and sometimes, in rooms they'll never even know you brought them into.

I talk about this and the invisible tax in this podcast episode with Victoria Rozanska. The invisible rules. The ones your native-speaking colleagues absorbed without noticing.

The shout-out culture that confused her on day one and became a leadership habit she now uses intentionally. The small talk that she learned to treat as a trust-building system, not filler. The workplace phrases that changed how her team heard her before she had even finished her point.

This is not an episode about having the right connections or the perfect English.

It is about what actually gets you in the room. And what keeps you there.

If this describes something you have been carrying for a while, something you have felt but maybe never heard named quite this clearly, the Leadership English Insider community is where this conversation continues.

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