How should recognition vary from top-performing employees to so-so workers who have occasionally shown glimmers of greatness? Another key mistake that managers make is that top performers get enough recognition. The fact is that top performers crave recognition. They collect those awards. They cherish them.

Sporadic achievers require a lot of day-to-day coaching and when their results pop up ... then you recognize their results.

Should managers recognize a poor performer? If you recognize a poor performer, you devalue the recognition of top performers. You encourage and coach the poor performers, and you might write them a note like, "Today was a really good day. Let's try to string three of four of those days together. Here's a pair of movie tickets for you and your husband."

You don't pull them up in front of the team and say, "Susan made it to work on time all week. Let's give her the chairman's award."

From the research and interviews you've conducted, do you have a sense as to whether there are certain types of recognition awards that tend to stick more with IT professionals as a category of workers? Or do recognition programs have to be tailored to the individual, regardless of their role? Recognition has to be very individual. We worked with a lot of IT folks at DHL in Arizona and being timely with recognition is very important to IT people. In their world, they want to be recognized immediately. Three or four days down the road is a different universe, they've moved onto a different project or set of problems. Immediacy is very important to IT professionals, especially younger workers.