Building High Performing Teams: Celebrating Success

Improve your team’s culture by celebrating your team members’ successes. Be careful, though…one person’s reward is another person’s punishment.

Success and failure are part of running a team day to day. You need to recognize and promote wins because it’s going to build momentum for the team and make them feel like they’re accomplishing great things.

There are a lot of great ways to acknowledge success. You can give people bonuses, provide them visibility opportunities, do some public recognition, give people increased responsibilities, and even promotions. All of these are very effective ways to celebrate the success of your team members. But remember…just because you think something is valuable doesn’t mean the team member will. You need to understand what personally motivates them and then reward them accordingly. If you’re not thoughtful about it, something you think of as a reward is going to be horrible from that person’s perspective.

For example, if you have somebody on your team who is very introverted and you decide that you’re going to take their success and celebrate it by putting that person on stage in front of a large audience, that introvert might really hate that situation and they’ll feel very uncomfortable. Even though you thought you were rewarding them and celebrating their success, you’ve turned it into a bad experience. 

Or, for example, you have somebody who’s very happy in their current role. They like their level of responsibilities because it allows them to have a proper work-life balance. Let’s say you decide they’re doing a great job and you want to celebrate that success by giving them a promotion with more responsibilities. Now they’re pulling their hair out and they’re very stressed out and unhappy because they really enjoyed their old role. This promotion isn’t a good way to celebrate their success. It’s actually a punishment.

So as you’re thinking about celebrating success for your people, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What would this individual really value?” Be sure that you communicate that success to the rest of the team. It helps build momentum and creates a culture of winning among those team members. People will feel proud to be associated with their teammates who are doing such great things.

Want to learn more about building high performing teams? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning how to build high performing teams. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!