As leaders, we don’t celebrate enough! I’m talking of course about celebrating accomplishments – applauding ourselves and each other for a job well done. Now, it’s not because we don’t care (we do!); it’s because we’re busy and once we’ve gotten something done, we barely have time to check it off the to-do list, let alone find time to praise and commend for it. But if we want to create positive and productive workplaces, then celebrating accomplishments is important. And lord knows, I too am guilty of not doing it as much as we should! Let’s face it, the truth is that leaders today are busy – we have things to do, people to see, places to go – we don’t have time to pause in the present to celebrate accomplishments. But we should. Celebration of achievement is so important to both employee morale as well as future success. So here is one idea to institutionalize celebration, one way to make sure that we periodically pause to acknowledge our staff and ourselves.
Implement a regular “round table brag moment” into your usual team meetings. Set aside 5-15 minutes (depending on the size of your team) to go around the table with everyone sharing one success since the last meeting. Don’t set any criteria – you’ll find that while most people will share a point of pride from their professional lives, you’ll occasionally hear something from the personal arena – and that’s okay. Take a moment to acknowledge each one as you go around, and encourage praise and appreciation from one another around the table. Set this up as an expectation so that your staff know that this will come up and is required of them at each regular meeting. And by the way, this applies as well if you happen to have “virtual” staff that participate via telephone.
So I’m curious – do you already do something like this at your regular team meetings? If so, does it work? And just as important, have you seen something like this not work? If the latter, what could you change to avoid the pitfalls (and still gain the benefit)?