Last week was kind of crazy because I started my May job, we had Dr. Welsh's Last Lecture (so sad, love him!) and we also had out hooding ceremony for the graduating second years as well as my brother's portfolio show.
Dr. Mike Welsh and our fabulous second years! Congratulations guys, you made it!
Yesterday was really interesting. I just happened to catch SA chat on twitter. I can't lie, most of the time I find it annoying because for an hour my twitter is blowing up with tweets and retweets. Yesterday though, they were talking about one of my favorite subjects, Recognition. I just really enjoy encouraging people and telling them when they have done a great job. I think a lot of that came from my dad. He is very open about telling me and my brother how proud he is of us when we have done a good job. In fact, I love recognition so much that I wrote an article for publication on it called "Creating a Culture of Recognition". Fingers crossed it gets picked up! The exciting news though is that people wanted me to share it during sachat so I did and a lot of people responded really well to it. I also got a lot of follow request yesterday.
This is what it looks like when this many people are all looking at one google doc. It was a weird sensation to have that many people looking at my work. There were also a lot of comments about the language "culture of recognition". Everyone really seemed to respond to this well. I think that in student affairs we do a lot to make sure we are continuously pouring into our students but we don't often take the time to recognize other professionals. You may argue that "of course we do, we have banquets and luncheons and all sorts of awards." True, we might, but I really do believe that recognition is something that needs to happen more than just once a year. It needs to happen constantly.
One of the more interesting things that I read while researching the article is that recognition really works best when you reward others for working towards a common mission or goal. I think that perhaps this is something that we can capitalize on. We need to be specific about what we are calling recognition. One of the questions yesterday was basically asking how we keep recognition from causing competition and the answer is simple. "Recognition is different from incentive. Incentives inspire competition. Recognition inspires personal challenge. " This got retweeted a lot! Recognition I think is also different from appreciation. I think that appreciation tend to be a little more private. It is between you and the person that you are thanking (I know this may not be true in all cases but on the whole) while recognition is something that can be more public.
Speaking of public recognition is is also imperative that you have different ways to recognize people because not everyone likes public recognition. One of the things we discussed was a form that my supervisor had me fill out before I started that asked how I liked to receive feedback and recognition. While we were only together for 3 weeks I thought this was a highly novel idea because she was able to tailor her supervisory style to my needs from the get go.
I trust that you will hear more from me in the future about recognition. Until then check out the transcript of the sachat when it come out in the next few days here.
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