Celebrate Each Success
The use of small wins and breakthrough projects is especially important when organizations are going through difficult times and teams feel overwhelmed by the changes. Through this tactic teams learn to redirect their energy toward factors that are directly within their scope of control and are better able to buffer themselves against stress.
When selecting a small-scale improvement project for your team, begin by identifying one major performance area that, if improved, would contribute substantially to your organization’s success and at the same time make your group feel like a winning team. To ensure success, select a goal that:
1. Is urgent and compelling-a real attention-getter.
2. Is a first-step goal achievable in a short period of time-in weeks rather than months.
3. Is a bottom-line result, discrete and measurable.
4. Is one the responsible participants feel ready, willing, and able to accomplish.
5. Can be achieved with available resources and authority.
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Celebrate each success. It’s important to provide ample opportunities to celebrate team successes. Teams suffering from a deficit of positive feedback can quickly become demoralized. Take, for example, the manager of an international sales force whose team was responsible for selling sophisticated computer networks in the European and Middle East markets. Often the proposal development and review time for these projects stretched out over eighteen months or more. In consulting with the team on steps they could take to improve their performance, I discovered that over time members had been putting less energy into their proposals.
According to members, one problem they faced was their manager’s insistence that proposal milestone were not causes for celebration. Whenever a milestone was successfully crossed, the manager would quickly remind his team, “This doesn’t mean anything until we’ve won the proposal. It’s still early in the bidding process. A lot can happen.” What an inspiring speech! It’s sort of like standing at the twelve-mile marker of a marathon race and telling a runner, “Don’t start feeling optimistic yet. You’re only halfway there. You have more than twelve grueling miles to run under the hot sun.” Many marathon runners would soon drop out after such a pep talk.
