Does your team know when you are proud of them?

Hi Nik,

Every week I share one thing I have observed in the field of commercial leadership. This week it is about recognition and the direction it flows.

Most leaders I speak with genuinely care about their people. What I notice more often than not is that the recognition signal is the last thing to get attention, usually because the leader does not feel they need it themselves.

This week in the field

Something I keep coming back to is how often a leader's own relationship with recognition shapes the way they lead. What I tend to see is this: a leader who has never needed external validation quietly assumes their team operates the same way. The feedback loop that should be running from leader to team gets compressed into something brief, transactional, and quickly moved on from. The deal gets done, a word is said, and the next target is already on the table. What I have noticed is that the people on the receiving end of that pattern do not register it as recognition at all. They register it as the baseline.

What it means in practice

What seems to shift things is when a leader separates their own relationship with praise from what they observe their people actually responding to. In my experience, the moment a leader starts connecting specific recognition to a specific behaviour or outcome, rather than giving a general well done in passing, something changes in the team's energy. What I have also noticed is that the leaders who do this most effectively treat it almost like a coaching tool: they use recognition to reinforce the standard they are trying to build, not just to acknowledge that something happened.

The question to sit with this week

If your team were asked privately how they know when you are genuinely proud of what they have achieved, what would they say?

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