Why the Recognition Profession Still Struggles for Strategic Respect in Business
Academic Director, Enterprise Engagement Alliance, Stephen M. Covey Professor Emeritus, Marketing and Entrepreneurship, Marriott School of
Business, Brigham Young UniversityWhy the Profession Still Lacks Strategic Clout
Business Disciplines Gain Respect Through Measurable Value
The Academic and Talent Gap
A Major Opportunity Is Emerging
Lessons From Total Quality Management
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Recognition is designed to reinforce the behaviors, relationships, and performance outcomes organizations depend upon to succeed. Properly designed recognition can strengthen trust, reinforce shared purpose, encourage discretionary effort, support collaboration, improve retention, increase customer focus, and encourage the consistent behaviors required for long-term organizational performance. Behavioral science has long demonstrated that people respond strongly to acknowledgment, reinforcement, feedback, status, and social validation.
Nonetheless, one of the greatest misunderstandings in the marketplace is the belief that employee engagement problems can be solved primarily through more rewards, swag, surveys, communications, experiences, technology features, or even appreciation alone. Those tools may support engagement, but they rarely address the underlying causes of disengagement unless used as part of an authentically led system.
In many organizations, employees are not disengaged because there are too few recognition posts or insufficient merchandise choices. They are disengaged because they lack a clear understanding of organizational purpose, goals, expectations, accountability, communication, alignment, trust, and how their contributions connect to meaningful outcomes. Recognition works best not as a stand-alone activity, but as part of a broader management system designed to align leadership, communication, measurement, rewards, development, and continuous improvement around shared organizational objectives.
Why the Profession Still Lacks Strategic Clout
That is one reason the recognition profession still occupies a surprisingly modest position in the hierarchy of business disciplines. Compared with finance, marketing, operations, strategy, or artificial intelligence, recognition rarely carries the same institutional prestige, academic visibility, executive influence, or recruiting appeal among young professionals. Few universities teach recognition as a formal management discipline. Few CEOs rise through recognition functions. In many organizations, recognition remains viewed primarily as a tactical HR initiative rather than a strategic operating capability.
The issue is not that recognition lacks value. Quite the opposite. Recognition touches some of the most powerful drivers of human behavior: motivation, trust, identity, belonging, and meaning. The challenge is that the field historically evolved more as a service and fulfillment industry than as a formal business discipline. Over time, much of the marketplace became associated with points platforms, gift cards, catalogs, travel programs, events, and rewards fulfillment. While many of these solutions provide real value, they collectively positioned recognition more as a program category than as a measurable management system tied directly to organizational outcomes.
Business Disciplines Gain Respect Through Measurable Value
This matters because business disciplines gain influence when they become associated with measurable enterprise value. Finance influences organizations because it connects directly to profitability and capital allocation. Operations commands respect because it improves productivity and quality. Marketing evolved from advertising into a sophisticated discipline involving analytics, consumer psychology, and revenue growth. Artificial intelligence now attracts enormous investment because executives see direct implications for productivity and competitive advantage.
Recognition, by contrast, often still speaks in the language of appreciation, morale, and engagement without consistently connecting those efforts to operational or financial outcomes. As a result, many executive teams continue to view recognition providers primarily as vendors rather than strategic advisors.
The Academic and Talent Gap
Another challenge is the lack of broad academic infrastructure surrounding the profession. Recognition has relatively few equivalent institutions, certifications, journals, or research centers with mainstream business visibility. That absence affects how younger professionals perceive the field. Ambitious graduates naturally gravitate toward disciplines associated with analytical rigor, executive influence, technological transformation, and long-term career mobility. Recognition rarely is presented as a sophisticated enterprise discipline grounded in behavioral science, systems thinking, organizational psychology, or measurable performance improvement.
A Major Opportunity Is Emerging
Ironically, however, today’s business environment may create the very opportunity the field has long needed. As organizations confront declining engagement, burnout, labor shortages, retention problems, customer experience challenges, and workforce disruption driven by AI, executives increasingly recognize that human performance cannot be separated from organizational performance. The profession’s long-term opportunity may not lie in positioning recognition as a standalone category, but rather as one component of a broader enterprise engagement and performance system designed to align people, purpose, behavior, communication, incentives, leadership, measurement, and continuous improvement around measurable organizational outcomes.
Under that framework, recognition becomes less about rewards fulfillment and more about reinforcing strategic behaviors within a disciplined management system.
Lessons From Total Quality Management
In many ways, this mirrors what occurred decades ago in Total Quality Management. Quality was once viewed narrowly as inspection. Over time, organizations realized that sustainable quality required enterprise-wide systems involving leadership, measurement, process management, culture, training, continuous improvement, and stakeholder alignment.
The same evolution may now be occurring around engagement and recognition.
The organizations that ultimately elevate the profession likely will be those capable of combining behavioral science, operational rigor, transparent measurement, and systems thinking into integrated enterprise performance strategies tied directly to measurable business outcomes.
If that happens, recognition may finally gain the strategic standing its underlying human importance has always deserved.
Enterprise Engagement Alliance Services
Celebrating our 17th year, the Enterprise Engagement Alliance helps organizations enhance performance through:1. Information and marketing opportunities on stakeholder management and total rewards:
- ESM Weekly on stakeholder management since 2009. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- RRN Weekly on total rewards since 1996. Click here to subscribe; click here for media kit.
- EEA YouTube channel on enterprise engagement, human capital, and total rewards since 2020
Management Academy to enhance future equity value for your organization.3. Books on implementation: Enterprise Engagement for CEOs and Enterprise Engagement: The Roadmap.
4. Advisory services and research: Strategic guidance, learning and certification on stakeholder management, measurement, metrics, and corporate sustainability reporting.
5. Permission-based targeted business development to identify and build relationships with the people most likely to buy.
Contact: Bruce Bolger at TheICEE.org; 914-591-7600, ext. 230.
