#MiPDV – Celebrate Success

How do you celebrate when someone on your team does a great job??

In past jobs, I’ve seen everything from not acknowledging their work publicly to blasé shout-outs in departmental meetings. The person (or people) would get some congratulations from their peers, but that was all.?

We’ve also seen the meetings where the winner is asked to talk about their win. Invariably, these people drone on about their win, and they quickly lose the interest of the audience.?

Quite frankly, none of these approaches invigorate the rest of the team.?

Yet celebrating success is important to future business results. Author David Villa ?? says in Forbes that celebrating success can lead to more success and can impact the bottom line.

Plus, celebrating success is the right thing to do for the individual.?

There are two alternatives that stand out from past jobs because they were effective and meaningful.?

The first example was a branch manager that made it a point to find a reason to bring people in front of the entire office for doing something good. Whether it was a significant win, or a trainee that did well in class, this branch manager found reasons to celebrate accomplishments from everyone. Those who won major awards were given their trophies and checks, while minor – yet still important – recognition was rewarded with a small memento … often it was a trinket which people proudly placed on their desk.?

In any single branch meeting, about one-third of the people would be recognized. When your name was not called, it made you want to work extra hard to ensure you would be called up in the next meeting.

You could see that being called up in one of these meetings was very meaningful to the entire team, whether rookie or veteran.?

What the branch manager knew was that by celebrating all kinds of successes, he built a loyal following of team members who wanted to work extra hard to contribute to the team’s success.?

The second example was a program we used in one of my last jobs in a tech company. We cleverly called the program “Celebrate Success”.?

It’s important to have some context for this program: we had a globally dispersed team of several hundred sellers, so we could not bring them together to celebrate. However, we had regular calls global calls to keep everyone updated and to try to provide a feeling that it was a team.?

We knew it was important to showcase successes, but the company traditionally defined “significant wins” as “big wins” … and usually only US wins would be highlighted. In our organization, though, while big wins were important, some of the most significant wins were much smaller.?

How, then, can you celebrate these successes in a way that will entice team members and peers to learn from and replicate the success??

Borrowing the basis of a program from another company, we created Celebrating Success – a way to celebrate a significant win, to showcase the team members, and to convey important lessons to the rest of the team around the globe.?

We created a separate meeting specifically to celebrate a win. This meeting was short – usually 15 to 30 minutes, and it was recorded for those who were unable to attend the live session.?

Next, we had a very structured agenda:?

• Team introduction – we focused on the 1 or 2 people who really made a difference in the win. To help keep the call short, these were the only speakers from the team.
• Customer overview – what does the customer do? This is important to bring the win to life. In one case, for example, we spoke about a win at a company that manufactures equipment that everyone around the world has seen in their neighborhoods. And we showed photos of the customer’s products.
• What made the win significant – we asked the team to explain why the win was significant. Often it was the first time the customer had done business with us. Other times, the win represented a seismic shift in the business relationship.
• What the team did that was unique – to set the stage to teach a new technique, we asked the team to explain what they did differently to win the opportunity. Often, it meant they had to deal with unusual obstacles.
• The one lesson you learned that you will apply to future deals – we asked each speaker what their biggest lesson learned was from this win. This was the teaching moment for the entire audience, to get them to see that they, too, could do the same thing.?

We also briefed the team and had a short rehearsal before the Celebrating Success call so that they were prepared to look good in front of their peers.?

How was the program received? Magnificently! The teams we highlighted loved being able to teach their peers one new technique, and the audience loved learning something new from someone who’d done it.?

The program was meaningful to everyone – the ones who were recognized got to shine in front of their global peers, while their peers learned something useful.?

Bottom line – celebrate success, and make it meaningful to the team.?

?

That’s mi punto de vista #MiPDV.?

?