Copyright 2005 Denise OBerryWhen was your last team celebration? Have you been way too
busy to bother? Sometimes we get so caught up in day-to-day
work that we don't take the time to step back and celebrate
success. Some teams may even consider team celebrations as
"silly."
It's critical to celebrate success if you want your team to
maintain their high performance. Successes are the
"motivating fuel" that keeps all of us pushing toward
achieving the "bigger and better" goals that we set.
What types of team interaction and discussions normally
occur on a day-to-day basis with your team? If you're like
most businesses, it's along the lines of the following:
- What's going wrong with the current project.
- Recovering from changes that impact your product or
service schedule negatively.
- How to satisfy a disgruntled customer.
If all of your team interactions focus on what's wrong with
your business, what happens over time? Team members lose
sight of the positive things they do. This can have a
demoralizing effect on a team and your business.
Team celebrations help a team bond together. This helps the
members maintain focus on their common goals and direction.
And, celebrations often help team members deal with
stressful changes and prevent "burn-out." They provide
revitalization for the team.
Has your team celebrated any successes lately? What did
they celebrate? How did they celebrate? For some teams,
it's necessary to add structure to the celebration process
to ensure that they make the time. To do this, use our
three-step process:
1. Identify What To Celebrate
2. Determine How To Celebrate
3. Create A Celebration Action Plan
1. Identify What To Celebrate
It's important to determine what events or activities the
team should celebrate. These can be major events or events
that help the team reach a milestone. Get your team
together and brainstorm a list. Your list might look like
the list below.
- Identifying and solving a major roadblock (e.g., customer
or quality related issue).
- Taking on added responsibility.
- Adding new team members.
- Dealing with a project crisis.
With the group together, determine the activities your team
wants to celebrate.
2. Determine How To Celebrate
Next, identify how you could celebrate. Again, with your
team together, brainstorm some celebration activities.
These don't have to be major. They could be fun stress
relievers or activities that help make your team more
visible to upper management. Some ideas are included below:
- Create a presentation for upper management highlighting
the team's achievement. Present with all team members in
attendance.
- Have the entire team meet with a customer during an
on-site visit.
- Invite a senior manager to your team meeting.
- Bring snacks to a team meeting.
- Put congratulatory posters on the wall.
Determine how your team would like to celebrate. Remember,
team celebrations don't have to be expensive, time
consuming, or difficult to plan. Team celebrations can be
formal or impromptu. The key of the team celebration is
that it must be sincere.
3. Create A Celebration Action Plan
Create a celebration action plan for the team for (at
least) the next six-month time frame. Once the action plan
is created, have your team plan the first celebration that
will occur in the coming months. This gives them something
to look forward to while accomplishing team objectives.
It will take a little effort on your team's part to
complete this process, but the pay back in productivity
will be worth it. Get going. It's time to celebrate!
----------------------------------------------------
Denise O'Berry (aka 'Team Doc') provides tools, tips and
advice to help organizations build better teams. Find out
more at http://www.teambuildingtips.com
