Every Friday I send my team personalized recognition DMs. That part sounds like good management.
Here is the part that sounds less like good management: a script reads their Slack activity first and tells me what to look for.
I have been arguing with myself about whether this is fine for a while. I have mostly made peace with it.
What the System Does
Every Friday morning, a script runs through the week’s Slack activity for everyone I manage. It looks for specific things: customer interactions that went well, problems someone solved without escalating, moments where someone went further than the role required, instances where they helped a colleague at 6 PM when they had no reason to.
It produces a brief. A few sentences per person. What they did, where it happened, why it mattered.
Then I read each brief. That part is not automated. I read it, decide whether it reflects something worth acknowledging, and write the message myself.
The DM sounds like me because I wrote it. It references the specific thing because the brief found it. It does not say “great job this week.” It says something about the actual thing that happened.
The Objection I Keep Hearing
“But is the recognition real if a script surfaced it?”
Yes. Here is why.
The script found it because I built the script to look for things worth noticing. The criteria are mine: what good looks like on this team, what I care about, what deserves acknowledgment. The script does not invent what happened. It finds what happened inside a volume of information I cannot process manually.
The alternative is not me noticing everything myself. My brain will not comb through a dozen Slack channels every week and retain the relevant signal from each one. The alternative is me noticing whatever happened to cross my direct attention. Which means the people who email me get recognized. The people who do excellent work in threads I did not open do not.
That is not a better outcome. That is recognition distributed by accident instead of intention.
What Changes When Recognition Is Systematic
The things worth recognizing are rarely the loudest things.
The team member who de-escalated a situation before it became a problem. The one who answered a colleague’s question at the end of a long day. The person who followed up twice on something that was not technically their responsibility.
These things do not make it into end-of-week summaries. They do not escalate to managers. They happen, they matter to the people involved, and then they are gone unless something was watching.
Before the system: I recognized what was loud enough to reach me. Loud does not always mean important.
After: I recognize what is worth noticing, whether it was loud or not.
The script is not doing the management. It is making sure the management I am already trying to do gets applied to the right people, rather than just the most visible ones. That is the whole value of building systems: not that they replace judgment, but that they make sure judgment gets applied where it actually matters.
The Part I Did Not Expect
Recognition changes behavior. Not because people are performing for the observer, but because knowing that someone noticed makes people more likely to do the thing again.
The signal I am trying to send is not “I am watching you.” It is “I noticed what you did and it mattered.” Those are different messages. The first creates anxiety. The second creates engagement.
The system makes the second one deliverable at scale. Without it, I’m delivering the second message to whoever happens to cross my desk. With it, I’m delivering it to whoever actually earned it that week.
That difference compounds.
Blake Bailey runs Bailey Business Ventures, an AI transformation consulting practice. He manages a team across five continents, does not have superhuman attention, and is extremely grateful for grep.