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“It’s the small wins on the long journey that we need in order to keep our confidence, joy and motivation alive.”
― Brendon Burchard
Organisational leaders often make the mistake of neglecting smaller wins and waiting until the end to celebrate. Typically, celebrations or recognition of achievements don’t happen unless a goal is accomplished, a project ends successfully, or a quarter comes to a close. Waiting to host such “endgame celebrations” could adversely affect your team’s morale and enthusiasm.
But why do leaders postpone celebrations for the finish line? Isn’t celebrating the small wins and the journey itself equally important?
A Past Study that Shows Why Celebrating Small Wins Matters
In their 2011 book, Teresa M. Amabile and Steve J. Kramer used data from close to 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies to state that making progress in meaningful work can uplift workers. Celebrating small wins can help in the process by encouraging engagement, joy, and creativity at work.
The more often people experience a sense of progress, the more liable they are to be creatively productive in the long term. When it comes to daily progress, even a small win can create a big difference in how an employee feels and performs.
Why Leaders Should Celebrate Small Wins?
As a leader of your organisation, here are the compelling reasons to celebrate the small wins of your employees and/or team.
1. Boost Team Morale and Motivation
As a leader, celebrating your team’s minor achievements will show that every effort counts. This will act as a powerful motivator and boost team spirit, creating a work environment where employees feel their efforts and contributions are noticed and appreciated.
Celebrating small wins help recognise the hard work and progress happening along the way to the bigger goal. Additionally, it reinforces a sense of accomplishment. These things increase motivation and help maintain momentum to continue working toward achieving the larger goals.
2. Create a Culture of Appreciation
When you celebrate small wins consistently as a leader, you can help establish a culture of appreciation within the organisation. This culture promotes ongoing acknowledgment of efforts, creating a positive and motivating environment where employees feel valued, happy, and empowered to share their triumphs and are ready to support one another.
By building a culture of appreciation at work, you can boost teamwork, foster a positive sense of self-worth and belonging, and encourage your people to work optimally.
3. Encourage Continuous Improvement
When small wins are celebrated, teams get the chance to reflect on their progress and learn from their experiences. As a leader, celebrating small wins will let your people evaluate what strategies worked well and what they could improve in the future.
Such reflection and evaluation that emphasize continuous improvement can help teams adapt and progress more efficiently, which ultimately leads to greater success in accomplishing long-term goals.
4. Build a Confident Team
Small wins can play a big role in building and boosting your team members’ self-esteem. The cumulative effect of small wins can also enhance your people’s confidence level, self-belief, and resilience. As every small goal is achieved, the team’s belief in its abilities grows bigger, which makes them better equipped to handle larger challenges in the future.
By celebrating small wins, you can build a confident, resilient, future-ready team high on self-esteem. Such celebrations can even help people notice how far they have come along.
Realising the progress they have made over time can be crucial during bigger and more complex projects where they will need to stay motivated when setbacks occur, which are common with such projects.
5. Maintain Momentum of the Journey
The long journey towards larger goals can become tedious without celebrating the small wins. These wins can make the journey interesting by infusing energy and some colour into the team’s fabric, signifying progress.
As a leader, you may find these small, quick wins negligible but they are significant as they offer the early fruits of labour and set the foundation for future achievements. By celebrating these small wins, you can let your people know that every effort, result, and contribution is valuable and noticed.
The ripple effect of such celebrations will be long-lasting and keep your people on track to investing continued effort with enthusiasm until the bigger goal is achieved.
Final Words
Celebrating small wins and midway milestones can help keep your team together, in high spirits, and motivated enough to proceed toward achieving the bigger goals. Such celebrations can even create opportunities to reflect and recalibrate.
Did your team finish a challenging phase of the project without hiccups? Celebrate it!
Did an employee go above and beyond the allotted responsibilities to finish a task? Recognize it!
Did you achieve a project milestone before time? Celebrate it!
All these micro celebrations will act as fuel to energise your team and make it push forward.
If you already celebrate every small win and need to add more driven professionals to the team and in leadership roles, contact InHunt World!
This article was written by Sonali