When an Award Doesn’t Feel Like an Award
So, last year I was on a small team at work that won one of my company’s annual recognition awards. Which should be at least a small ‘Yay!’ But, the circumstances of the win were such that it actually just made me kind of annoyed, and that flipped the switch in my brain that goes into rant mode. For some reason, the rant that came out was formatted as an explanatory rant to my TaeKwonDo Instructor, even though he had absolutely zip to do with any of it – my brain just grabbed the analogy and went with it.
So, here is an explanation of why winning the technology award at work last year didn’t really feel like winning an award, given as a martial-arts teaching/training analogy:
Imagine that there was an award given out in our region called the Best Mentor Award. Imagine that when they give out this award, they name a specific student or mentee that prompted them give the award that year to the instructor/mentor who’s being honored.
Now, I know that the point of teaching isn’t to win awards, but imagine that you do have a couple of students you’re particularly proud of. There’s this one student who trained with you since he was little. A wonderful student, who always worked really hard, and really got the things you tried to teach him. He’s talented too, made it all the way to nationals and got gold. Which is really cool. Winning’s not the point of TaeKwonDo, but if someone was going to win, you’re really proud it was this great kid.
And then there’s this other student. You weren’t her instructor as long, maybe five years. She came to you a lot later, and she’s not as talented, but she’s really got drive. Or at least, now she’s really got drive. She first showed up to your gym because she was tired of feeling beat down and scared all the time – she wanted to learn how to defend herself. And as she learned and improved, you were able to teach her that physical strength is the least of it. She’s off doing other things now, but when she left your gym, she was a confident, empowered person. And you’re really proud to know you were part of that.
So, teaching isn’t about winning awards. But when they give out the Best Mentor Award every year, you think about those two students sometimes, and are glad to see other instructors being honored for being able to teach similarly great students, for being a force for good in the world.
Now, imagine that this year, you are given the Best Mentor Award! Except, when they read the name of the student who inspired them to give you this award, at first you don’t even recognize the name. It says he was one of your black-belts, but you’re 90% sure that’s not true. In fact, you’re 95% sure something got mixed up when they assigned this award. Then you remember that you did teach a guy by that name for a year or two maybe ten years ago. Trained him up from green belt to red belt. He was a perfectly good student, but didn’t stick around very long, moved out of state. Although you might have heard he’d gotten famous for something? But it wasn’t the sort of thing you followed, so you aren’t sure.
You send a polite “Something’s not right” to the Award Committee, because you want the person who earned the award this year to get it. But they say, no really, it’s you, for this guy. He’s famous and his Kung-Fu movie just grossed a billion dollars and he told them how you were such an inspiring instructor when he was coming up through the ranks. You deserve to be honored. And they give you the award.
And when you talk to other people about this they say, well we all know you’re a wonderful instructor and you work so hard. It’s about time. It’s an honor to be honored. Be glad. You deserve to be honored!
Except, that teaching isn’t about awards; it’s about the students. And all of the knowledge of TaeKwonDo, important, fundamental sort of knowledge, really isn’t about fighting, and certainly isn’t about being famous. You’re happy for this student you taught ten years ago, glad he’s having a good life. But you don’t want to win an award for him. You just don’t. It just misses the point.
So, yeah. That pretty much sums up how I feel about the work award I won last year.
At first when they named the project and listed me as one of the team members, I had zero idea what project they were talking about and was pretty sure I was listed by mistake. When I pinged them to say, ‘Hey, this is a mistake,’ they clarified the project enough that, if I squinted at it sideways, I did remember doing something relating to that stuff. But my contribution was really ancillary. I’d barely even thought about it after it was done. And so that was disappointing on a couple of points:
1) I’ve done projects that I’ve really busted my butt over and am really proud of. I don’t need an award to be proud of them, but getting an award for something I barely remember kinda makes if feel like nobody cares about that stuff I busted my butt over. (And yes, of course, those projects were done in different years and weren’t eligible the year of this award).
2) A lot of people are doing a lot of really awesome work at my company. I really don’t like the thought of their work and innovation being passed over in place of this thing I barely remember, just because mine was the sort of thing that turned out to be really visible to just the right set of people who matter. (And maybe even because somebody thought it was my department’s ‘turn’ to get the award that year??)
The work isn’t about getting an award. And last year, it really just felt like it missed the point.
(End rant.)
P.S. For clarity – this is absolutely not meant to be disparaging of my co-workers who were listed on this award with me. As far as I could tell, they were all at least somewhat befuddled that this project won, and they have all done really awesome work on lots of things.