What Organisations Stop Seeing As They Scale

It’s easiest to reward visibility because if you’re visible, people naturally assume you must be doing great work, and vice versa. I have seen this happen across many organisations, including my own at different points. The people presenting in large rooms become easier to remember than the people solving difficult problems for months with their heads down. Over time, that changes behaviour in ways organisations may not initially notice because people slowly start optimising for work that can be seen.

The launch team gets celebrated. The team that spent eight months rebuilding the infrastructure underneath the launch often disappears into the background.

Someone who presented the strategy becomes more recognisable than the person who actually made the economics work.

Legal teams close restructures that quietly unlock entire business lines across countries, and nobody outside the room ever hears about it.

The problem is not bad intent. Invisible work is simply much harder to see.

A few years ago, while redesigning our Founders’ Award at Cars24, we started thinking more seriously about this. We realised that if a recognition system is not designed thoughtfully, it will slowly drift towards rewarding visibility, confidence and proximity to leadership more than actual contribution.

And once people inside the organisation start believing that, culture and good people both go for a toss.

Hence, to avoid that drift, we built multiple stages into the process of identifying worthy teammates for the Founders’ Award at Cars24, a recognition that runs once a year and gives employees meaningful skin in the game through large vested ESOPs.

With the bar intentionally set high, there have been years with multiple winners and years with none at all, and that’s completely okay. Because the rarity is not a flaw in the system, it’s what gives the award meaning.

The goal was never to create another appreciation program. We already have many ways of celebrating teams and wins across the company. The intention behind this award was much narrower and harder: can we consistently identify the people whose work materially changed the trajectory of the organisation, even if most people never saw it happen?

That question became the foundation for how we evaluate the award internally.

And over time, three filters emerged.

First, the work must have created measurable change

Not effort. Not intent. Not “great attitude.” Something in the business should genuinely look different because this person did the work. Better margins. Faster systems. Lower costs. Higher conversion. A capability that did not exist before.

The second filter: Would this outcome still have happened without this specific person?

A lot of strong work inside companies is collaborative by nature, and that’s a good thing. But this award is meant for unusually high individual contribution. The kind where replacing the person would likely have changed the outcome, the pace or the quality of execution materially.

And the third filter is leverage

Did the work improve more than one immediate outcome? Did it make other teams faster, decisions better, systems cheaper, customers happier or the organisation stronger beyond a single metric or quarter?

The work we value most tends to compound.

Moreover, what matters just as much as the filters themselves is the scrutiny around them.

Inside the review room, claims get challenged aggressively. Not because we want the process to feel intimidating but because recognition only means something if people trust that the standard is real.

If someone says a project saved the company significant money, we ask how. If someone claims an operational shift improved efficiency, we ask what changed downstream. If the impact cannot survive questions from people outside the function, the citation usually is not ready yet.

That process matters because companies are full of work that sounds impressive in summary form but looks very different once examined closely.

And the reverse is also true.

Some of the most consequential people inside organisations are often terrible at self-promotion. Their work sits quietly inside systems, legal structures, cost negotiations, platform migrations, compliance architecture, underwriting models or infrastructure improvements. Nobody applauds when these things work properly because ideally nobody even notices them.

But many companies are standing on top of those people.

I think this is one of the biggest blind spots organisations develop as they scale. The work that keeps a company running and the work that gets talked about publicly slowly become two very different things. And if leadership is not deliberate, recognition starts following narrative more than contribution.

That creates long-term cultural damage because eventually the serious operators notice.

The people who are motivated more by solving hard problems than by visibility are usually paying very close attention to whether the organisation can actually identify real contribution, especially in functions that traditionally operate far away from attention.

Legal. Finance. Platform engineering. Risk. Operations. Infrastructure.

When recognition systems consistently fail to find these people, organisations accidentally start teaching everyone the same lesson: visibility matters more than contribution.

I don’t think most companies intend to send that message but many eventually do.

For us, the Founders Award is really an attempt to resist that drift intentionally.

Because recognition at the highest level does more than appreciate people. It tells the organisation what kind of work the founders genuinely value, and people listen to those signals far more carefully than leaders realise.