Premise:
I did a 100-day challenge of clicking a picture and sharing it on Instagram of something that I thought was beautiful. Now, I constantly see beautiful things all around me wherever I go. Being intentional about what we want to notice, results in our brains getting very good at noticing it all around us.
Leadership works the same way. Culture is shaped not only by strategy and incentives, but by what leaders consistently notice, celebrate and tolerate.
From childhood we are trained to find and focus on what is wrong instead of focusing on what is right.
When we are trying to create a culture that supports and expects a specific kind of behavior, we need to find and catch people exhibiting the behavior we want and celebrate them and the behavior. When we do this every day, we have two big effects on the teams.
- This becomes something embedded in the culture and something that makes the day feel incomplete without the celebration moment. It makes people feel a sense of accomplishment and energizes them.
- This reinforces the message that a win is a win no matter how small, and that gradually encourages the team to look beyond big milestones and appreciate smaller victories as much.
Recent research suggests that small wins celebrated regularly are a potent way to keep teams engaged and motivated.
In a landmark study from Teresa Amabile, participants were most energized and motivated not in the aftermath of a big celebration, but when they had little breakthroughs — when they found small wins to celebrate.
There are four kinds of activities that are worth celebrating daily:
Desired behaviors:
If we are working on curating a culture that expects the team to change their behaviors, we need to celebrate every time someone exhibits the new behavior that we want to make the norm, until, it becomes the norm.
Meaningful progress:
We usually celebrate achieving big milestones but miss celebrating meaningful progress along the way. Celebrating meaningful progress keeps the momentum going even when making progress gets difficult.
It is our responsibility as a leader to keep our eyes open and identify and celebrate any meaningful progress that moves us closer to our common goals. This is a celebration of the team.
Meaningful contributions:
It is a great idea to celebrate someone, every time they make a meaningful contribution that helps us move closer to our goals. This celebrates the individuals who make the contribution.
This keeps morale up and creates a culture where everyone on the team wants to make meaningful contributions to the common goal.
Constructive dissent and Identifying blind-spots
Celebrate anyone who identifies a blindspot and brings it to the attention of the team so they can be addressed.
Just like you designate someone to find something worth celebrating every week, it is a good idea to designate someone who is responsible for identifying blindspots and rotate them every week.
They are the devil’s advocate for the week and come prepared to find faults or mistakes in the work that we do. Expect them to play this role to the best of their ability.
This has two different impact – it signals trust and psychological safety within the team and at the same time identifies assumptions and blind-spots that the team need to address to avoid making mistakes.
And by celebrating them and their contribution, every time they uncover a blindspot, we are making this an acceptable and even an expected behavior among the team.
By rotating peopld to look at this specifically, we are training everyone on the team to have a much broader perspective – to look at what we are doing well and where are falling short.
This helps us in celebrating the wins and avoid mistakes, both at the same time.
Celebrate Daily
It is important to know that cultures are not built in a day. They require consistent action over time. So, if we want to create a culture where we celebrate wins daily, we need to find a way to do that daily.
You could create a dashboard (physical or digital) where everyone is encouraged to identify something worth celebrating. You could have a dedicated time on your stand-up meetings or weekly team meetings for celebrations. You could appoint someone as the chief celebration officer for the week, whose responsibility would be to find something worth celebrating every day. And you rotate people in this role every week.
The point is that we need to find something almost every day that is worth celebrating. The celebration could be a group hi-fi or a pat on the back or anything that gives status to the person who is either tasked with finding things worth celebrating or finds them through their own volition.
Contribution matters
Almost everyone has a need to feel that their work matters, that their contribution is valued and they are respected among their peers. Celebrating small wins, either as a team or recognizing someone for their contributions on a regular basis helps fulfill this need.
And by involving everyone in finding a reason to celebrate, we are creating a culture that focuses on everything that they are doing well and at the same time identify blindspots so we can avoid making mistakes.
A daily ritual of celebrating small wins (through contributions, progress, exhibiting expected change in behavior and identifying blindspots) becomes a daily reminder of what matters. This creates a culture where everyone on the team is set up to do their best work ever.
A word of caution
We need to be cautious about not allowing this to avoid this becoming another initiative that lacks genuine intent and instead becomes another form of noise that teams learn to tune out.
This means that while it is important to celebrate daily (as far as possible), it is also important to only celebrate genuine contribution, progress or blind-spots and not celebrate for the sake of celebration. Such fake celebrations accomplish the exact opposite of what we are trying to accomplish.
So, if there is nothing worth celebrating on a given day, accept it, acknowledge it and invite everyone on the team to make an intentional effort to create something worth celebrating the next day.
In conclusion
Most organizations say they want high-performing cultures but measure only outcomes and ignore the behaviors that produce them. A daily celebration practice is how you close that gap: not by lowering the bar for what counts as excellence, but by making the path to excellence visible.
So, what will you celebrate today?
