Recognizing Up

Over the last few weeks, I have been asked by two people as to why recognition programs were always about recognizing down, rather than recognizing up. Can’t organizations allow employees to recognize good managers and good leaders?
Though my first reaction was “We can’t do that”, I found the thought intriguing. If we categorize managers into three buckets – the senior/executive level managers, the middle level managers & junior/supervisory level managers. The senior managers typically get paid very well, receive significant visibility both within and outside the organization, have powerful roles with a reasonable span of influence and large budgets they can control. When we look at the middle level & junior managers, they need to deal with employees at the ground level, manage their bosses, and have limited decision making ability. Let’s say an employee comes to a manager with a significant issue. The manager’s job then is to escalate it to the senior manager and try and facilitate a solution. So the middle level & junior level managers are caught in the middle. This juggling act can become pretty stressful for them. This could be the reason why a lot more employees are choosing to be in non-supervisory roles – their return on investment for the effort and the pain they go through is not significant enough. So in some ways, if these managers who perform the juggling act day-in and day-out, can start getting recognized by their sub-ordinates, it may start having a reasonable impact on the engagement levels of the managers.