Celebration is a powerful thing.
In life we look for any reason to celebrate!
Any excuse to have a party.
A scored goal,
a wedding,
graduation,
an award,
first job,
or a promotion.
Maybe just a holiday!
People love to celebrate.
But at work, the celebration seems to stop.
It's like getting the job was worth celebrating
achievement unlocked!
But the next time we celebrate is when we get a promotion?
Or a new job?
No wonder the world is obsessed with climbing the corporate ladder.
I mean, there's always another task
always another milestone to hit,
another sale,
another roadmap,
another sprint goal,
another feature.
Simon Senek refers to this as the infinite game.
Work is never done.
For the companies that matter
they're going to keep going, they're going to keep doing this for as long as they possibly can.
Get up,
go to work,
do it again every single day.
Each day we get up and do it again,
Each quarter we plan and do it again, each year we get our budgets and then we do it again.
Like learning
or relationships
or life.
The goal is to get up each day and keep going.
That doesn't need to be celebrated, right?
But what if it does.
What if we looked for a reason to celebrate any opportunity we get.
What would that do?
What would that change about the way we work? How we get things done.
How would celebration change our posture towards
each other,
our jobs,
our products,
the world!
BJ Fogg and his TED Talk talks about how celebration can be one of the primary ways
that help us to form new habits faster.
After you do a tiny behavior that you want to repeat in the future or maybe expand,
what you need to do is celebrate victory.
So let's say you want your teams to collaborate better.
Then celebrate when collaboration goes well.
Or maybe let's say that you want your teams to test assumptions more often.
Then anytime you run a test celebrate the results.
Any opportunity you can
Try to focus on teaching people to see one another, the work that they're doing, the value that they're bringing
and celebrate that between each other!
Let's talk about a few tips to celebrate well. Or maybe some rhythms to help you to celebrate with your team.
First off, build it into your routine!
So every sprint retrospective make sure that you're taking a time
to first start off with how did we win this week?
What's something worth celebrating?
Start with those celebrations before you get into the hard work of talking about how you're going to work better together.
Or do something like we do at Crema called Winz days.
Every Wednesday morning we gather the entire staff together and we focus only on wins.
What went well this last week?
Now, yes the event of actually sharing the wins is actually a lot of fun
But my favorite part is collecting the wins.
It means you have to go out to your Slack channels, out to your groups, or to your chats,
or to your leaders, or to your employees and say
Hey! Tell me what went well this week. What's something worth celebrating?
Is there something that we can look at, can we do a demo?
Is there an employee that just went above and beyond?
Was there a launch or a deployment that went well?
Let's celebrate it!
These meetings are short, they're like 10 - 15 minutes
But it's so powerful to bring everybody together and teach them to be thinking and looking for reasons to celebrate.
Now, celebration does not mean that everyone gets a trophy.
This is not about making sure that everyone feels good.
Our job is not necessarily to just make everybody feel good.
Our job is to build habits and routines to help us to do better work together.
So when you're celebrating together, celebrate people that actually achieved something.
They accomplished the goal. That they actually sat and moved into that discomfort that was kind of hard to do.
Celebrate those moments worth celebrating.
Finally, not everyone wants to be put on stage.
So keep in mind knowing your team.
Know your employees, know your peers.
Not everybody wants to be called out on the video chat.
Not everybody wants to be given a trophy or a medal because they don't like that personal attention.
So maybe a celebration is just a subtle
pat on the back, a good job Slack message.
A little, subtle gift card or something that just says thank you
you're doing great.
Those little celebrations will again still remind people to be tuning for looking for opportunities to say we can do this great work,
and it's worth celebrating!
So tell me
How are you celebrating your team?
How are you celebrating each other, how are you celebrating your leaders and how are your leaders celebrating you?
I'd love to hear about ways that your team is celebrating and
how it's effective in building new habits and getting better at the work that you do.
Drop us a comment below and let us know what's working for you as you celebrate.
So just get out of the way?