And the winner Is…

There is a peculiar reverence in business for external awards. Lists, badges, rankings. The kind that arrive with glossy logos, breathless press releases and LinkedIn posts written as if modesty were a software bug. 40 Under 40. Top 100 Innovators. Most Influential Leaders to Watch. Pick your flavour.

They’re often spoken about as if they’re the professional equivalent of a Nobel Prize. As though somewhere, in a glass building staffed by wise and impartial elders, a small group of people are diligently scanning the world, weighing merit, debating impact, and finally bestowing honour upon the truly exceptional.

That building doesn’t exist

There is no secret committee at Ad Age, Fast Company, Time, or any of the countless award brands quietly surveying the global workforce to identify brilliance. No one is poring over your body of work in Basel, Leeds or Milwaukee thinking, we really must recognise this person. In most cases, these awards operate on a far more prosaic model.

It usually starts internally. Someone says, we should enter our work for awards. Or it appears in an annual review as a strangely formalised ambition: one of my goals this year is to win an award.

Then comes the process. You apply, or someone nominates you and there’s an entry fee. There’s often sponsorship, a table to be bought, a logo placement to be agreed, a dinner to attend. You promote the result loudly if you win and quietly forget it if you don’t.

Many of these awards exist to generate revenue, visibility and content for the organisations that run them. They’re not scams exactly, but neither are they disinterested arbiters of excellence. The incentives are structural. The louder, better funded and better connected you are, the more likely you are to appear on the list.

The odd logic of age-based brilliance

Age-based awards are a particularly odd subset. 40 Under 40 carries the faintly comic implication that achievement has a hard expiry date, as though meaningful contribution becomes less impressive the moment your forties arrive. It rewards acceleration, not depth. Trajectory, not substance. And it quietly penalises anyone who took a non-linear path, had children, changed careers, moved countries, burned out, or simply bloomed later. It also encourages a lot of posing.

What this looks like from the inside

I’ve seen this from the inside, across different industries. I’ve watched perfectly capable people scramble to package themselves into award-shaped narratives, inflating scope, smoothing complexity, presenting teamwork as solo genius.

I’ve also led teams that have genuinely won awards, three times if I count correctly. We did good work. We deserved recognition. And yet you won’t see those awards mentioned on my CV. Not because I’m hiding them, but because they’re largely irrelevant. We were paid to do good work. That was the job. The award was a by-product, not the point.

Even then, the outcome depended as much on who submitted the case, how it was written, and how neatly it fitted the judges’ current tastes, as on the work itself.

Awards don’t measure quiet excellence. They’re terrible at recognising systemic impact. They struggle with people who improve organisations rather than personal brands. They don’t reward those who leave things better than they found them without making a song and dance about it.

When companies play Oscars

Internal awards ceremonies often manage to make this problem worse. In dysfunctional organisations, they become elaborate acts of corporate theatre. A company that can’t fix its operating model, leadership issues or culture will happily spend a small fortune recreating the Oscars instead. Spotlights. Hosts. Sizzle reels. Applause on cue.

The work being celebrated is frequently mediocre, overly sanitised, or selected because it’s safe rather than meaningful. The aim isn’t excellence. It’s distraction. A brief sugar rush of morale designed to convince people that things are improving when they’re not. Nothing exposes a lack of confidence in leadership faster than a room full of people being asked to clap enthusiastically for work they know, privately, didn’t really move the needle.

Why the game keeps getting played

For agencies and companies, I get the game. Awards help sell work, attract clients, recruit talent and justify fees. They’re marketing tools, and when used knowingly, that’s fine. No one pretends Cannes Lions are peer-reviewed science. They’re theatre, and everyone involved understands the rules.

For individuals, though, it’s more awkward. Calling yourself award-winning rarely signals what you think it does. To experienced eyes, it often reads as insecurity rather than authority. Borrowed credibility rather than earned trust. The same goes for those glossy magazine covers that look suspiciously like editorial but turn out to be paid placements. They don’t say this person matters. They say this person paid to be here.

At best, it’s faintly embarrassing. At worst, it makes you look desperate.

What actually seems to matter

None of this is an argument against recognition, gratitude or celebration. We all want our work to matter, and it’s human to enjoy being seen. But there’s a difference between being recognised by people who’ve directly experienced your impact, and being selected by a system designed primarily to sustain itself.

The people I most respect in business rarely mention awards at all. Their reputations travel ahead of them through other people’s stories. Their value is obvious in the problems they’re trusted to fix, lead or build next. Their careers make sense when you zoom out, not when you isolate a single trophy.

If an award comes your way, enjoy it. Smile for the photo. Thank your team. Then put it back on the shelf where it belongs. Just don’t confuse it with a Nobel Prize.

And maybe don’t build your identity around a number that stops counting the moment you turn forty.