There’s a particular kind of talent that large organisations systematically undervalue: the person who solves the problem nobody noticed was a problem, the team member whose collaboration makes everyone around them more effective, the engineer who mentors three junior colleagues without anyone formally tracking it.
These contributions don’t show up clearly in performance reviews. They don’t map neatly to quarterly OKRs. And yet they’re often what sustains the culture of an organisation when everything else is under pressure.
I built Champions Circle to make them visible.
What Champions Circle Was
Champions Circle was a platform and programme that enabled employees to surface their own achievements across categories that mirrored the organisation’s actual values: Innovation, Thought Leadership, Customer Centricity, Collaboration, Social Responsibility, and Diversity and Inclusion. Employees could share what they’d done. Colleagues could see who was championing these values in practice — not in statements, but in behaviour.
The design principle was deliberate. Most recognition systems reward output and seniority. Champions Circle was built to reward the full spectrum of value that people actually create — including the kinds that don’t come with a promotion attached.
The Leadership Insight Behind It
Building this programme came from an observation I kept returning to in my leadership roles: the gap between who an organisation says it values and who it actually recognises is, in most companies, surprisingly wide. The effect of that gap is not neutral. People notice it, adjust their behaviour accordingly, and the culture drifts toward what gets rewarded rather than what gets stated.
Champions Circle was an attempt to close that gap — to make the recognition system an accurate mirror of the values the organisation claimed to hold, rather than a lagging indicator of seniority and output alone.
What It Revealed
The most interesting outcome wasn’t the programme itself. It was what surfaced when people were given a structured way to share their contributions: hidden talent that senior leadership hadn’t been aware of, cross-functional collaboration that had been happening informally without visibility, and a depth of social responsibility and community contribution that the organisation was benefiting from without acknowledging.
Making contributions visible is, in the end, a leadership act. It signals what the organisation actually believes matters.
In your organisation, whose contributions are consistently invisible — and what would change if they weren’t?
Let’s keep learning — together.
harish.balasubramanian 
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