When to Celebrate

If you read certain leadership books, they will tell you that you always need to celebrate the wins. I have to be honest; I have read lots of books on leadership and celebrating might be the thing that I am by far the worst at. I don’t know that I have ever celebrated anything work related in my life. Promotions, hitting a goal, or finishing some unexpected thing that came up. When those things happen, to me that’s not something to celebrate, it’s just my job. If you want to be acknowledged as one of the best at what you do, then celebrating would imply that you are surprised that it happened. I walk in to work every night thinking that something amazing can happen. I am part of a team that can do anything it wants to do as long as we focus on the task at hand. So, when we continue to do awesome things, as soon as it’s over, I want to move on to the next thing. Not celebrating has always worked, so why am I thinking of changing my thoughts on the subject, especially this late in the game? The first thing I think about is the younger generation. No matter if I agree or disagree, the younger generation is different than my generation. I didn’t say wrong or right, I said different. They are a generation that wants to celebrate accomplishments. They did the work; they want to see a reward. That’s not a horrible thing, again just because someone doesn’t feel the same as I do, it doesn’t make them wrong. The second thing I think about, and this is the more serious one, work isn’t fun anymore. I remember a time when thinking about going to work and accomplishing something big was motivating enough. The older you get, the more you see and accomplish, the harder it is to be excited for the big game. So now I am in a very unique situation, if I wanted to change and start celebrating, when do I actually celebrate? I want people to know how it feels to accomplish something they never thought they could do, that deserves celebration. I want people to work as a team and understand the role that they have in getting to the final product. Right now, I feel like I am in a world where people don’t even know the impact they have during the process. So maybe my issue is that if I want to change the way I am reacting to something, I worry I need to go back and change everything from the beginning. I need to always know what is normal and what is an actual above average accomplishment. I need to be vocal on the expectations of a job or a shift. I need to break it down so that everyone knows what their role is to accomplish what needs to be done. I need to be able to look at numbers during the shift and give updates on where individuals are and where the team is at. I need to overcommunicate every chance I can. I need to make sure that people who are the role players know how important they are, so they know they are a part of it. Finally, when all of that is done if we overachieve, we can celebrate! I want to point out that I did say overachieve. If all you do is hit the daily target, I don’t think you can celebrate that. I think you always need to try and go over the target. That also means that close doesn’t count. I think that is one of my biggest issues with celebrating. If the goal is to raise one thousand dollars for charity and you raise less than that, why do people still want to celebrate? The problem is that we do celebrate not hitting a goal and as soon as we do that, we lower the standards for every time after that. Next thing we know we are celebrating hitting something that was twenty five percent less than the original goal. I need to be better about celebrating, but I really want people to know what it's like to do something amazing and then celebrate that. I’m old and I’ve seen it all, that’s not true for everyone. I want everyone to feel passionate about the work that they do and want to get better. If I want that, then I need to do better about looking for ways to celebrate!