The Power of Awards in Motivating Teams and Elevating Performance
I’m going to tell you a few stories. Real ones. The kind that make you sit back and go, “Wait… people still do things this way?”
Because honestly, I thought fair competition was dead. I thought everything was pay-to-play, who-you-know, or who can make the prettiest slide deck.
It costs nothing. Like, actually nothing.
Not “$99 early bird.” Not “free if you buy the dinner table.” Zero. You fill out a form, send your story and your numbers, and that’s it.
I have friends who spent $15,000 entering other “prestigious” awards and got a plastic trophy and a photo with someone’s uncle. Here? Nothing. They even pay for your flight and hotel if you make the final ceremony.
That alone should tell you something’s different.
How they decide who wins (the part that still feels unreal)
They hide your name. Seriously. The judges see the work first, the founder second.
They score everything on four simple questions:
How many real people has this helped? They want receipts. Photos, data, thank-you letters from actual humans.
Can this grow big without breaking or hurting anyone?
Is the team healthy, fair, and built to last? They look at how you treat the newest person, not just the founder.
Has the founder been knocked down and still got back up? They actually ask for your worst moment and what it taught you.
Outside people who have no connection to the awards check every single number. If one thing doesn’t match, you’re out. No appeal. No “my cousin can explain.”
I watched a 24-year-old woman from a tiny village in Uganda beat a team from California that had already raised millions. Her video was shot on a phone that kept cutting out. Their video had drones and cinematic music. She won because her clean-water system actually reached 40,000 more people for every dollar spent. The California team stood up and cheered louder than anyone.
The Nairobi food-rescue founder
She started picking up leftover food from hotels and delivering it to families who hadn’t eaten properly in days. She did it from the back of a borrowed motorbike. For three years almost nobody noticed.
She applied to the Global Impact Awards because her little sister filled the form while she was asleep. She thought it was a joke when they called.
Three weeks after winning, the biggest supermarket chain in East Africa called and said, “We’ll give you all our surplus food if you teach us how to do this right.” Then the government called. Then restaurants. Then schools.
She went from feeding 400 families a week to 4,000 families a week in under three months. She hired her neighbours. Her mum quit her cleaning job to work with her. Other women in different cities started their own versions. Nobody told them to. They just saw it was possible.
The boy in the Philippines who turns plastic bottles into houses
He was 19 when he started. He watched typhoons destroy the same poor neighbourhoods every year and thought, “There has to be a better way.”
He figured out how to turn trash into bricks that are stronger and cheaper than concrete. He built his first house for his grandmother.
After winning the award, he got calls from mayors, from construction companies, from the national housing department. He now has factories in three provinces and employs 200 people — most of them from the same neighbourhoods that used to get destroyed every storm.
The refugee doctors in Jordan
They run mobile clinics for people who can’t afford medicine. Many of them used to be patients themselves.
They applied with a handwritten application because their internet kept cutting out. They won.
Suddenly hospitals that used to ignore them wanted to partner. The government started paying for medicine instead of letting people suffer. Other refugee teams in different countries started copying the model.
One of the doctors cried when she told me, “For the first time, someone looked at us and saw doctors, not charity cases.”
Why this feels so different from every other award
Most awards are parties for rich people to feel good about themselves. This one is a search party for people doing the best work in the hardest places.
They don’t care about your accent. They don’t care if your video is perfect. They don’t care if you went to fancy schools or no school at all.
They only care about one thing: Did you actually make life better for people who needed it most?
If yes, they will move heaven and earth to make sure the right people see you.
Even big companies are copying the idea (and it’s working)
I know people inside Canva, GitLab, and a few other companies who told me they stole the exact same system for their own teams.
Every few months anyone can show something they built that actually helped customers or colleagues. Same fair rules. Same outside checks. Winners get real things — extra pay, a month off, a chance to teach everyone else what they learned.
One engineer told me, “For the first time in ten years I’m excited to come to work on Monday. I actually want to win — not for me, but because I know the judges will only pick it if it’s genuinely useful.”
People stay longer. They help each other more. They stop playing games and start building things that matter.
I used to think all awards were fake
I really did. I had a folder full of proof.
Then I watched normal people — mums, students, refugees, kids who never left their villages — stand on a stage and have the whole room cry with them because their work was finally seen.
I watched copycat projects spring up like flowers after rain. I watched governments change rules because one small team proved a better way.
I watched fairness actually work.
If you’re still reading this…
Applications are open until the end of February. It still costs nothing. They’ll still check everything like detectives.
Maybe you’ve been working on something good and nobody has noticed yet. Maybe you’re tired and wondering if it’s worth it.
I don’t know your story. But I know this: sometimes all it takes is one room full of honest people saying, “We see you. Keep going.”
And everything changes.
You might not win. But you’ll get honest feedback that makes you better. And if you do win?
