Why doesn't my team notice the small wins, only the big ones?

You have people on your team doing hard, honest work every week. Most of it goes unnamed. Only the big finish gets a mention, so the daily effort — the attempt, the hard problem chipped at and not solved, the task done well under pressure — disappears. People notice. They slow down. Here is the part you can skip past if you want comfort: recognition from above is not yours to control. You cannot make leadership see what they do not see. What you can control is whether you see it, and whether you say so, today, specifically, out loud. This is not about running a campaign for appreciation. It is about building a small, repeatable habit inside your own team — naming effort as it happens, not waiting for results to justify it. Do this and the team changes faster than any policy from above ever will.