The Golden Gourd: How a $2 Trophy Taught Me the Secret to Meaningful Recognition
Recognition shouldn’t feel like a checkbox. The best rituals are specific, consistent, and a little weird.
In a previous piece, I tossed out a reference to the “Golden Gourd.” I said I’d explain. So—here we go.
Have you ever found yourself trying to recognize someone on your team? You know the sort of thing. Someone has gone above and beyond, and you want to do more than just slap a smiley-face emoji on an email. You want to stop. Pause. Call attention to the excellence and the impact and the grind that got them there.
But—dare I say it?—the automated stuff (“certificate” and “great job” both come in that same shade of corporate beige) just doesn’t stick.
The question was: what would?
It was one of my City Desk editors. (That’s one of the top editors on a newspaper’s local news team.) He worked on my team at a newsroom in my early gigs, and he asked it once, out loud. And he solved it with the single weirdest trophy I’ve ever seen: a spray-painted gourd.
The Golden Gourd.
Yes, an actual gourd, dried out and lumpy and spray-painted gold. It was a not-so-secret knock-knock joke at first. A bit of fun to reward a reporter who’d gone the extra mile. But before long, it became more than that: a monthly tradition, a little point of pride, a reminder to pause and appreciate great work.
Each month, the editors would hand over the Golden Gourd to a reporter who’d done great work that month—broken a story, nailed a hard feature, or just showed up when it mattered. No formal criteria, no voting process, no HR paperwork or approvals. Just real recognition—visible, specific, meaningful.
Years later, I took a job in Philadelphia working for NBCUniversal. And, in keeping with a certain journalistic superstition, I vowed not to bring the Golden Gourd with me.
Instead, I brought the spirit of it—with a nearly three-foot-tall crystal trophy I bought on eBay, or was it Etsy? It was absurd. Staff were initially hesitant to put it on their desks when they won. But that hesitancy disappeared when they realized: people always asked what it was. A perfect opening to share the work for which they were being recognized.
Like the Gourd, it was effective not because it was fancy—but because it was personal, and it was consistent.
The thing is: meaningful recognition doesn’t have to be a big investment or require a custom trophy. But it does have to be real.
For some reason, it’s common in organizations to leave recognition to a canned program: Employee of the Month, spot bonuses, or the occasional lunch with your boss. They’re well-meaning, but they often miss the mark because they feel… well, like a program.
Recognition at its best is cultural. It’s the expression of the environment you’re creating and how you want people to feel within it.
“Recognition not only builds a positive culture, but it also directly impacts employees’ mental health and well-being and indirectly drives innovation by creating a safe space for them to share ideas,”
—Barbara Martell, SHRM-SCP, senior vice president and CHRO at Allianz Trade Americas, via SHRM.org
She’s right—and that makes sense when you look at the data. Here’s some from a recent Canva study on recognition and workplace culture:
81% of employees who feel appreciated say they are satisfied with their jobs
87% say appreciation boosts motivation, confidence, and productivity
75% still don’t feel as appreciated as they’d like
83% of Gen Z say they wish they felt more appreciated at work, higher than Millennials (77%), Gen X (73%), and Boomers (66%)
As leadership expert David Grossman puts it, meaningful recognition is about more than just tokens and titles:
“It isn’t about just layering on the accolades in all their forms, from employee-of-the-month plaques to Hawaii incentive trips. Rather, it’s about leaders and managers truly buying into an authentic culture of appreciation, one in which employees feel seen, heard and acknowledged for extraordinary work.”
—David Grossman, via Forbes
That was what the Golden Gourd was—silly, homemade recognition that worked because it was real. And you don’t need a gourd or a giant crystal trophy to get that kind of recognition to stick.
It’s the underlying principles that matter. Principles that are simple enough to adopt and adjust and make your own:
🥇 1. Make it specific
Empty praise is empty. The value of recognition comes from how it ties to an action, impact, or support. Breakthrough moments. Deadline crunches. Unsung team advocates. Specificity is credible. Specificity reinforces what matters.
🔁 2. Make it regular
Recognition happens best when it’s baked in. Weekly huddles. Monthly handoffs. Standing Slack thread. Rituals turn recognition from an impulse to a habit.
💬 3. Make it public
Watch your colleagues hesitate to accept praise in public. The best recognition rituals let you shout it from the rooftops. The value of recognition is contagious. If you don’t tell the rest of the team what good looks like, you’re missing a chance to drive culture.
🧠 4. Make it peer-powered
That said, as the Forbes piece points out, recognition shouldn’t be one-way traffic. Involve team members in recognition. Build ways to nominate each other. Peer recognition is heartfelt recognition. Recognition that more closely mirrors day-to-day impact.
🧲 5. Make it feel like you
The Golden Gourd ritual stuck because it fit the culture of that team, that newsroom. The best recognition rituals feel homegrown and bottom-up, not HR-invented. If it’s goofy, great. If it’s symbolic, even better. Whatever your rituals become, make sure they feel like them.
🔄 6. Recognize the recognizers
Want appreciation to go viral? Celebrate the givers of praise, too. Recognition rituals that recognize the recognizers create a feedback loop that drives the culture you want.
🧱 7. Reinforce with structure
Grassroots rituals are still rituals. Over time, it helps to have light structure to make them work. That could mean rotating facilitators, secret nominations, even tracking to see who is (and isn’t) being recognized—and who is always there to nominate others.
🚫 8. Don’t wait for perfection
Waiting to set up a perfect recognition program is the biggest barrier to effective recognition. You don’t need a committee. You don’t need a budget. You do need to start—and to mean it.
In thinking through how to recognize people, we often try to go big: plaques, titles, “Team Member of the Decade.” And maybe it’s the years spent in newsrooms that have conditioned me to believe: sometimes, the low-fi stuff is the most important cultural work we do.
The Golden Gourd wasn’t a big prize, but it was meaningful work. It was presence.
And while this story is born of the newsroom, the truth applies to everywhere I’ve ever worked: nonprofits and healthcare teams, corporate divisions and a five-person startup. We all want to feel seen.
In fast-moving organizations where there’s no time for reflection or pause, a simple, intentional gesture can become something more powerful: a signal to everyone about what and who is valued.
That oversized golden squash was just one way to say what rarely gets said out loud: we see you.
What’s the most memorable recognition you’ve ever received?
Big or small, I want to hear it:
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