Leaders Celebrate with Their Teams – Part I

Teams need to celebrate. Celebrations are markers to help us remember. Remember milestones reached. Remember projects completed. Remember people who worked above and beyond to solve a problem or to reach a goal. A healthy organization remembers and celebrates. The energy of celebration becomes a springboard that gives an organization momentum and hope for the future. When challenges come to a team (and they always will), the markers of celebration will give your team the confidence to stay the course knowing there will be future opportunities to celebrate.

A healthy organization remembers and celebrates. Click To Tweet

Write celebrate on your calendar and make it a habit to look for opportunities to celebrate with your team. To make it a normal part of your culture, make it a regular part of your leadership.

Write celebrate on your calendar and make it a habit to look for opportunities to celebrate with your team. Click To Tweet

Here are just a few ideas to jump-start your own thinking about what to celebrate:

• Mission and values focused stories
• New people that join your team
• Milestone anniversaries
• Projects completed on time or ahead of time
• Goals met or exceeded
• Milestones reached and key steps accomplished on the way to success
• Innovation and new ideas
• Pilots launched
• Lessons learned through failure
• New initiatives launched
• Problems solved
• Challenges faced
• Proactive innovation or problem solving
• Outstanding customer service
• Development goals reached

Also, look for opportunities to celebrate the personal markers for your team:

• Athletic accomplishments like running a marathon
• Marriages
• Birth of children or grandchildren
• Graduations
• Certifications or continuing education goals reached

As leaders of faith, celebrations give focus to God’s hand of favor, direction, blessing, and often His unmerited intervention or rescue on our behalf. It is so important to celebrate and remember God’s work in us and through us.

“Hallelujah!
Praise God in His sanctuary.
Praise Him in His mighty heavens.
Praise Him for His powerful acts;
praise Him for His abundant greatness.

Let everything that breathes praise the Lord.
Hallelujah!”

— Psalm 150:1-2, 6 HCSB