How to Finally Get the Recognition You Deserve at Work
By: Pete Ross
Tags: Careers, Jobs, Career Advice, Work, Life Lessons

How to Finally Get the Recognition You Deserve at Work

Have you ever felt like you were taken advantage of in your job?

Did you feel as though you gave so much, achieved so much, and it was never rewarded, much less even noticed?

Did it make you bitter and resentful?

Man, I’ve been there.

I was always resentful of the people who seemed to get all the praise and adulation for doing what I saw as absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, I would often ask in my head “what is it you even do here?” when they’d get yet another award or promotion. It took me a long time to get out of that habit, because it was only recently that I realised the key to being able to turn it off.

Let me take you back about 6 years…

I began a new job in a division of a company that was essentially in the startup phase. My job title said one thing, but the reality was that I juggled half a dozen hats, I flew around the country constantly and I had to take on and build things that I had no experience in doing. I learned a hell of a lot, but boy did I burn myself to a cinder doing it.

And out of it all, I got no recognition for the fact that I’d essentially taken a build your own skyscraper kit with no instructions and managed to piece it together, under the pressures of customers for whom every emergency was actually an emergency.

Fast forward a year after I left that role, and my replacement got showered with adulation and recognition for what a top notch job he was doing. He got promoted and a slew of opportunities on top of that. Everyone loved him. Needless to say, I was pissed.

It felt like I’d built this entire thing from scratch for the business over three goddamned years and no one noticed. They just took for granted that everything worked, as though it had always been like that. Even worse, I was made to feel like that was my fault, because, and I quote “you need to take us on the journey.” Then, someone else comes along after and puts a coat of paint on it and everyone’s like “holy shit, how good is he!?”

It’s only with time and a new perspective that I’ve been able to see the truth of why we had such vastly differing experiences of recognition.

You see, this job involved not only setting up a lot of new processes, accounts and even physical spaces, it also involved putting out a lot of fires. Every single day there was a new problem that would arise and I would have to drop what I was doing and work out a way to fix it. Now, thanks to my time in the military I can put out fires with the best of them, but there’s one important caveat: I never, ever enjoy it.

And that’s where we differed. My replacement, let’s call him Jack, was phenomenal when it came to his temperament and how he made everyone feel. Putting out fires is not something that’s on my list of enjoyable things to do, but he was so laid back about it and made people feel so at ease that it’s no wonder everyone loved him so much. In contrast, I must have come across as a perpetually annoyed, impatient, demanding twat.

But apart from my issue with temperament, there was another cardinal sin I was making that torpedoed any recognition I might have gotten for my work…

I was keeping score the whole time.

Every little thing I did, I was filing away as ammunition for a future promotion. Every extra hour of work, every trip I made, everything I did that wasn’t part of my job description, every little achievement, I kept track of it all in the back of my head. I was probably only a year into the job before I was looking to maximise every day not because I loved it, but to get to something I deemed better.

The big problem with keeping score is that it breeds entitlement. I thought because I’d done x, y and z that I should get a promotion, that I should get awards, and if I’m being totally honest in my appraisal, maybe I should have. I did do a great job. The problem with the growing sense of entitlement is that you can’t see that anyone else might be doing as much as you are. You’re the only one who’s under siege and putting in the big hours. Everyone else has it easy.

The other issue with entitlement is that it only leads to one other place: resentment. And let me tell you from experience, resentment is the most toxic emotion you can have. It’s toxic because not only does it wither you away from the inside out, but everyone around you can sense it. It’s like cartoon stink lines are coming off you.

So how do you get the recognition you deserve?

It’s such a cliche to say that you need to give without the thought of receiving. Despite the fact that it’s true, that old saying is missing half the information you need to apply it effectively. If we were to modify the saying so as to actually be useful, here’s what it might look like:

You need to get yourself into a position where you’re happy to give without the thought of receiving.

That’s a very different message.

Having received a bunch of praise and gratitude recently at work, I can tell you that the reason for it is because I’m in a job that plays to my natural strengths, where the fulfilment alone means that I don’t keep track of what I do for other people. That’s a very different baseline to being constantly stressed, from having to do a job you aren’t really suited for.

The question you need to ask yourself

I’ve moved past setting goals for myself each year and for the past few years instead had an overarching theme that encompassed everything I wanted to achieve. My theme for 2020 was a question, and that question changed everything:

How much can I give?

It wasn’t about goals, it wasn’t about achievement. This year was purely about how much I could give to everyone around me. How much I could help others achieve their goals. How much extra responsibility I could take on. How much benefit I could provide for everyone around me. And nowhere in that question was there any sense of what I’d get out of it.

And yet I got more out of it than I could have ever imagined.

So if you’re tired of feeling resentful and unnoticed, the key to overcoming that isn’t to push harder, to work harder, to burn yourself out even more. The answer is actually to let go. Let go of the outcome. Let go of your attachment to recognition and upward mobility. Let go of how you think the world should work, and take a leap of faith.

Now let’s be clear — leaps of faith don’t always work out. There will be people who take advantage of you and situations where you give so much that at some point you have to cut your losses. That doesn’t diminish the concept. Just because it doesn’t work out immediately, doesn’t mean it won’t eventually. At some point you may have to go and find a workplace that does appreciate you and treats you right.

The key thing to remember

One of my biggest mistakes was to always do things that were good for the business. That was always what my sights were set on, because if you do good things for the business, that’s what will get noticed and get you rewarded. There’s a huge problem with that though: a business doesn’t give a flying shit about you, because it can’t.

It’s just a business. It’s nothing more than a concept, an entity that’s given form by a shared understanding of society. It’s the people in the business that matter. Help them. No one cares that you saved the company $100k if no one likes dealing with you. At the end of the day the people around you in the workplace don’t care anywhere near as much as you think they do about your achievements. They care far more about how you leave them feeling every time you interact.

When in doubt, go first

Before I shut down my laptop on Christmas Eve for my vacation, I realised that I had a lot of people to thank and praise who I’d worked with very closely this year. So I took around an hour to send out a bunch of emails to these people with their managers copied in, heaping the lavish praise upon them that they deserved and letting them know how much their contributions meant to me.

After all, most people’s souls are crying out for recognition, for the feedback that what they do matters. So I gave it to them. The responses I got back were no less sincere in their gratitude and praise for my own efforts. Now, I could have been completely cynical and thought that they only gave it back because they got it in the first place. I don’t believe that though.

I believe that by going first and telling them just how much they meant to me, their memory was jogged with all the positive interactions they’ve had with me. Our lives are busy, so we often only think of people when they’re either a constant feature or we’re reminded somehow. And hopefully my email not only spurred the thanks to me, but maybe to someone else they’d forgotten as well.

It’s very easy to have a scarcity mindset and say “well fuck everyone, no one gave me any thanks, so I’m not going to give it.” If everyone thought like that, we’d live in a very cold world. Someone has to set the ball in motion, so even if you are tired and resentful, try to think of someone else you know who doesn’t normally get recognition and give it to them. Make it your mission to let them know that someone appreciates them.

There’s a reason I used the picture of Gatsby toasting Nick for this article besides the fact that it looks great. Don’t be the person that looks to have the toast made to him — be the person who does the toasting of other people. They’ll love you for it. Make other people feel like giants, and they’ll automatically assume that you’re one too.

So if you’re fed up with the same situation and want to change things in 2021, turn your focus outward instead of inward. Go first. Make it your mission to leave everyone happy for having dealt with you. Pull back on trying to achieve things for yourself and use that time and energy to instead help others out. Most importantly, do it with a smile and the attitude that you expect nothing back from it.

You’ll be amazed at the result.