Reasons to Eliminate an Onerous Year-End Task

A contrarian argument

Applying for (and winning) communications industry awards isn’t worth the time and effort.

The reasons for avoiding the communications awards industrial complex range from the practical to the philosophical. Comms professionals should ignore fleeting constructs around status and, instead, focus on searching for something more gratifying in their career than an acrylic paperweight.

This essay is divided into the following sections:

• It’s About Money, Honey
• Five Practical Reasons to Skip the Awards Process
• Recognition Isn’t Appreciation
• Status Games
• Better Uses of Time

Caveat: This discussion mainly applies to in-house comms pros. If you’re a consultant or agency, it’s probably worth the time and effort to collect industry awards because it’s one of the few proofs of work or value you can share with potential clients.

What was surprising, even to himself, was that he had started to look for signs of acknowledgment in everyone he met. — Benjamin Rask in Hernan Diaz’s Trust

It’s About Money, Honey

As you know, the program features dozens of categories, covering Communications Campaigns/Initiatives, Employee Experience Campaigns/Initiatives, Intranet Campaign/Initiatives, Remote Culture Campaigns/Initiatives and Video Campaigns/Initiatives and Tech. Plus, six Grand Prize categories.

The above list of award categories for communications professionals arrived by email from one of the numerous industry organizations that annually dole out dozens of trophies for a wide variety of efforts.1

• This particular award program lets you submit awards in 82 categories including not one, not two, but six grand prizes.

One troubling aspect of the awards submission process is the cost factor.

• For the above awards program, it costs $475 per entry for the standard categories and $550 per entry into the Grand Prize categories.
• There’s also a late fee of $250 per entry after a certain date.
• But if you submit to multiple categories, you pay the original fee ($475) just once and $250 for each additional category.

So, a comms team that wants to submit to three “standard” (i.e., not Grand Prize) categories pays a total of $975 (unless they’re late, then they pay $1,725).

• This ~$1,000 is no trivial amount, especially for comms teams small enough to sit next to each other on an airplane.
• Which means deep-pocketed agencies and large comms teams with budgets in the millions have an advantage before judging even begins.

The top awards in our industry aren’t always given to the most deserving work. The trophy often goes to comms teams who can afford the entry fees.2

Instead of chasing industry awards, management should take the money they would have spent on the submissions and give it as a bonus to the employees who did the work.

• Let’s be real: would you rather receive a trophy you’ll leave behind on your desk when you change jobs (or careers!) or $1,000+ in cash money and applause at your next global team meeting?

Five Practical Reasons to Skip the Awards Process

Look at your To Do list, which will never, ever, ever end. And consider the six things that landed on your desk on Tuesday that you had not planned for. Between that infinite list and the unplanned requests you received this week (and will receive next week), where do you have time to spend several hours applying for awards that bring marginal-to-no benefit to your comms career?

• That’s right, I’m looking at you, Managers. How easy it is for you to tell your direct reports, “We should apply to Such and Such Awards, the deadline is next week, get on it,” and then move on to your next meeting. The request is a chaos bomb in an already upside-down work week.
• Prediction: if managers and directors were required to do the award applications legwork, submissions would plummet by 85%.

Here are five practical reasons for not applying for industry awards:

1. Time and Resources

Preparing award applications is onerous, requiring a significant investment of time and resources to gather the necessary information, assets, and analysis, write a compelling submission/essay, and meet the application deadlines. The time and effort could be spent on other, more immediate (and higher) business priorities. Or better yet, on innovating in your role (🔒).

2. Distraction

Focusing too much on pursuing awards can distract from your core activities and objectives. The time spent chasing awards is a diversion from reflecting on and improving your work and the comms experiences for your audiences. (Or, see again, innovating in your role.)

It’s a distraction. If you start thinking about doing something to achieve that [award], then you’re not focused on making this beautiful thing. It undermines the purity of the project. — Rick Rubin on 60 Minutes

3. Costs

Most award submissions cost money, which is precious for those with tight or tiny budgets. Imagine if — it’s possible! — you don’t win. Was it worth the time and money? There are also opportunity costs. Imagine dropping $500 or $1,000 to enter a single competition. Instead those funds could be used to pay for:

• 10 LinkedIn Learning courses you can use to improve myriad skills,
• attendance at a top-notch conference where you can learn from and network with the best in our field,
• a Mister Editorial subscription, so you can learn how to use AI to do comms, read and learn from actual exec comms, and get ideas into your head like “industry awards aren’t worth the time and effort,” or
• all of the above!

4. Oversaturation

See footnote 1: one database I consulted lists 32 different award programs for comms pros. And see again the sample awards program I picked on above, which lists 82 competition categories and six grand prizes. If everyone has a chance at a trophy, how special is yours?

5. Minimal career booster

Related to the point on oversatuation, winning an award probably has little meaningful effect on your reputation or career. For the many positions I’ve hired for I have cared not an ounce if you’ve won an industry award. And in applying for roles at other companies I care not an ounce that I don’t have an industry award attached to my LinkedIn profile.3 Let your work speak for itself.

These five practical reasons should be enough to dissuade you from applying for an industry award. If, however, you are hung up on recognition and status from strangers, keep reading.

Recognition Isn’t Appreciation

Recognition can take many forms. A spot bonus. A shout-out in a team meeting. The boss taking you out to lunch.

• An industry award is a form of recognition. (Recognition from strangers.)

But recognition isn’t the same as appreciation.

Appreciation “acknowledges a person’s inherent value,” says Kevin Dickinson, a columnist at Big Think. “It doesn’t consider someone’s worth to the company coffers but reveres what that person brings to the culture and community.”

“In simple terms, recognition is about what people do; appreciation is about who they are,” says Mike Robbins, author of Focus on the Good Stuff: The Power of Appreciation.

An award bestowed by strangers representing a bland industry organization is recognition. It says nothing about who you are as a person and even less about the unique attributes you bring to the team each and every day: a go-getter attitude, willingness to take on tedious or complex projects, the ability to remember everyone’s birthdays and the names of their children, creativity, a modern aesthetic, moral and emotional support, technical acumen, intelligence, mentorship, dad jokes, etc., etc., etc.

• Ever notice when you ask people what they love most about their job they often mention the people they work with? They’re talking about you — the inner you. Not the you who won an award for Best Intranet Article About Open Enrollment. The inner you that lights up a Zoom call or picks up the slack when someone has the flu. That’s appreciation.

Appreciation builds morale and motivation by being intrinsically rewarding, writes Dickinson. It “shows people that the value they bring can be just as, if not more, important than measurable metrics such as hours or output.”

Of course, we need both recognition and appreciation. An attagirl and a spot bonus are motivating forms of recognition, but they must be paired with genuine caring and recognition of the person for who they are, not just the “measurable outcomes” we’re often graded on in year-end evaluations.

• Managers, check yourself: When conducting an employee’s annual review, are you paying more attention to “metrics,” like the number of press releases and average open rates of emails, than you are to intangible measures that form our self-worth, such as inventiveness and leadership?

Status Games

When we talk about recognition we talk about status. And when we talk about status we talk about comparison. Comparing your contribution to — in our case — the communications profession against those who appear (over and over again) in your LinkedIn feed.

Status games happen among all peer groups. The comms profession is no different. That’s because we belong to a tribe — we are comms-rades. Signaling status adheres us to this group.

• When you announce on LinkedIn that you won Best Comms Effort of the Year award you signal to your network a status marker, one that you hope raises you in our ranks.
• When on the same platform you announce that you won Best Church Volunteer in Small Town, your status signal carries much less weight among your comms tribe. (But maybe that same announcement on Facebook raises you in the eyes of your family and community — different tribe; different signals.)

The danger comes when you tie your identity to the pursuit and collection of awards.4 What happens if that recognition never comes? Or if it stops coming? No obituary has ever started with “She won a few comms awards.”

• Your job is not your (complete) identity.5

Status must be spread around different parts of your life so that if one falls through your self-identity is not crushed.

• Ultimately we’re talking about balance and what meaning we ascribe to different parts of our lives: artist, parent, volunteer, spouse, caregiver, pastor, mentor, community leader, coach, friend, etc.
• Don’t put so much weight on an award for something not part of your core identity.

Status is important and worth striving for (in moderation). There are better ways to do it, though.

“There is happiness in the love of labor. There is misery in the love of gain.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath

In his timeless essay “How To Do What You Love,” Paul Graham — computer scientist, essayist, and entrepreneur — sums up the senseless quest for status, or what he calls prestige:

What you should not do is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You should not worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can ask the opinions of people whose judgments you respect, what does it add to consider the opinions of people you don’t even know? … If you do anything well enough you’ll make it prestigious … Just do what you like and let prestige take care of itself.

Being good at something and giving back to your tribe are healthy forms of esteem, says the philosopher Sam Harris, one that can help spin a virtuous wheel.

Being good at something is a way to gain status. Do you want to be known for an award most of us don’t care about? Or do you want to be known as the go-to person who can translate executive jargon into plain language or the expert on AI tools for internal communications?

• Related: Communications As Craftsmanship (🔒) & Be Exceptional at One Thing (🔒)

Giving back to your tribe of comms-rades is another way to gain status. Create value for your peers and you’ll be recognized for this.

• Maybe you’re known for maintaining a database of free tech tools comms-rades can use to do their work more efficiently.
• Or maybe you publish an irregular newsletter that aims to level up your peers so they can take their careers to new heights.

Better Uses of Time

Reasons. Costs. Time. Resources. Distractions. Oversaturation. Minimal effects on your career. Thin forms of recognition. Status games. All reasons not to pursue industry awards for the communications profession. There are much better uses of your time.

In my award-winning (jk! 😉) essays “How To Earn More Money in Corporate Communications” and “Communications As Craftsmanship” I put forward several arguments and ideas for finding reward and meaning in communications work.

• “Winning industry awards” is a phrase that appears nowhere in the several thousand words.

As I said in the final essay in the craftsmanship series (🔒):

You will be in great demand and be compensated for it if you do exceptionally good work nearly all of the time.

The quality work might need to be a side hustle until it gets noticed and you’re properly rewarded or your talent is recognized by another employer. In the early years of your career you must accept the slog. Remember: quality over quantity and time in the industry pays dividends.

Impatience is an unhelpful trait. You must put in the work and do it with genuine interest and earnestness. Read lots of books. Attend conferences. Watch webinars. Volunteer for unique projects. Learn. Be eager. Get a mentor. Above all, do good work consistently.

If Communications survives as a creative profession, it will be out of passion. When passion is applied to comms work it becomes craftsmanship

🏆

1 One database I’ve seen lists 32 different awards programs for communications professionals.

2 Not all awards require entry fees, but most of them do. One of the things that makes winning a Nobel Prize or an Academy Award special is that you don’t have to pay to be considered for recognition. (Can you imagine an entry fee for the Nobel Peace Prize? How would that color your perception of the winner?) Not that comms awards are on the same level, but you get the point. Pay-to-play is another term for what’s going on.

3 Please let’s not add to the eye-rolling vanilla LinkedIn profiles that begin with “Award-winning comms professional who is passionate about…”

4 And while we’re at it, there is equal danger in the pursuit of a variety of certifications with abbreviations you can append to the end of your name and job title, like baubles on a Christmas tree.

5 Anyone who has lived in NYC knows this from personal experience. How many writers, artists, singers, comedians, and actors do we all know living in the City That Never Sleeps? When meeting someone for the first time, “I’m a writer” is a perfectly normal and acceptable answer to the question “What do you do?” Only several months later do you learn that to pay the bills they have a 9 to 5 deep in the bowels of a massive corporation. The writing happens on nights and weekends. “Executive assistant” is their job, but “writer” is who they are.

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