If you opened LinkedIn this morning, you saw it. A post about a boss who replied to messages at midnight. A thread about a CEO who fired the company by email. A carousel listing fifteen “red flag” interview questions. A viral video of someone describing why they quit on day one. The reactions, the comments, the reposts — they all confirm what’s already obvious. Modern work is full of failure modes. People are tired of pretending otherwise.
And they are right to talk about it. For too long, bad management got a free pass because the people experiencing it had nowhere to say so out loud. LinkedIn changed that. The vocabulary — toxic, gaslighting, micromanagement, green flag, red flag — gave a generation of workers the words to name what they were going through. That matters. Naming the problem is the first step to fixing it.
But naming the problem is only the first step. And in 2026, we are stuck on it.
Here is the gap we want to close. The conversation about work, in public, is overwhelmingly about what’s broken — the bosses to avoid, the cultures to flee, the warning signs to spot. There is almost no conversation about what’s working. The great manager who quietly protects her team from a chaotic exec. The leader who turned a struggling division around without firing anyone. The coach who got a mid-career engineer to admit, for the first time in his life, that he didn’t actually want to be a manager. These stories exist. They are not rare. But they do not travel.
Critique alone does not change a culture. Modelling does. We need both — the warnings and the examples. Right now we have only one. That is why we are building this awards program.
Our hypothesis is simple. If we can find the people who consistently make work feel like it should — and put them on a stage with the same seriousness LinkedIn currently reserves for the people who don’t — we change which behaviours get copied. Not because the people we recognise are saints, but because they are visible. Because what gets celebrated, gets imitated.
We are not naive about the limits of an awards program. One winner per category does not fix the labour market. But we are also not naive about the power of recognition. Ask any musician what a Grammy meant. Ask any chef what a Michelin star did to their career. Now imagine that for management. Imagine “Best Manager of the Year” carrying the weight of a real, contested, verified prize.
That is what we are building. The Best People to Work With Awards. Independent, Swiss-based, internationally open. Every nomination backed by five verified testimonials from people who actually worked with the candidate. No popularity contest, no LinkedIn vote count, no sponsorship-as-influence. The work, and the people doing it, on the stage.
You can wait for the world to celebrate the people you work with. Or you can be the one who nominates them. Edition 1 opens September 2026. We hope you’ll join us.