5 Ways to Find and Celebrate Wins on Your Team

Finding and celebrating wins is critical to building a high-performance culture; here are five ways you can create a positive focus

As a strategic coach, one of the key areas I look for is an individual and team mindset. Is the team framing issues in the right way? How is their current perspective hindering their ability to see new solutions and strategies? Where are their positions and assumptions holding them back from better and deeper communications? Identifying these and helping the team create higher levels of awareness is one of my core jobs as a coach.

I work with high-performance teams in high-growth companies and they all tend to be driven, ambitious, and highly capable. The challenge lies in their tendency to also be analytical and highly critical of their own performance. Not a bad thing in itself, but without some balance, it can erode the team’s morale. Here are a few things I see great teams doing to create a positive counterweight.

1. Make it systematic

Great teams start by looking for things they are doing right that are leading to success. They find these patterns and nascent habits and then look for ways of baking them into their process, so that they keep on doing them. They also look for ways of repeating their success in other areas of their work.

Perhaps the morning huddle that is working so well to align the sales team could be used in the shipping department to catch late orders and expedite them to stay on schedule and avoid customer complaints? Reflect on your work, find things that are serving you well, and celebrate them. Acknowledge the team and individual efforts that went into the systems and habits that lead to good results. Reward the effort and make sure you keep doing the things that are working.

2. Use your core values

Celebrating positive actions and results that demonstrate core values creates a positive and effective reminder and reinforcer. Using core values to find wins shows they are not just pithy statements painted on the breakroom walls; they are a tool to guide behaviors and decisions.

I run an exercise with a team where they must tell me at least three recent stories of them living their core values. If they can’t, I make them take the core value off their list. (I’ve taped over words painted on walls to make the point.) If they can’t tell me how they are living a core value, then it’s an aspiration of where they want to go, not a description of who they are.

3. Volume over perfection

Great teams don’t spend a lot of time trying to find the perfect or the biggest win. It’s about developing a mindset and a habit of thinking positively and finding things that are going right. Once you build this muscle, you start noticing bigger and more important wins that will allow you to drive process improvement more effectively.

I have teams that have contests on who can find the most wins in a time period. In every quarterly planning session, everyone brings a list of wins, and people compete to see who can bring the biggest list. It can be humorous at times since there is no size requirement for the win, but over time, they will notice bigger and more important wins that can be critical to strategy and operational success.

4. Make them personal

When you’re celebrating wins, acknowledge individual efforts and contributions. Connect the action with the positive results to encourage and reinforce the behavior. In some cases (and for the right people) this can be done publicly, but private one-on-one feedback can be just as powerful. Consider the action and the individuals’ personalities and what they would best appreciate.

5. Announce them regularly

I start all of my planning sessions and workshops with a round of wins. It could be personal or professional, just something that is going well or recent positive results. This helps get the team into a positive and constructive mood and sets the tone for the session. I also suggest that company newsletters and other regular communication start with a handful of wins for the company or department. This will force leaders to look for them over time so they have things to write about.

While businesses are full of mistakes, problems, and challenges that need to be fixed and improved, it’s easy to get too focused on this and lose sight of the bigger picture. Making it a point to find and celebrate wins in your business or department will go a long way to improving your morale as well as giving you insights on how to create more success in the future.

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