By Whitney Johnson, Harvard Business Review
As adults, we are often much better at work than we are at play. In fact, we seem to turn play into a form of work, one at which we are sadly less competent. Take, for example, office retirement and birthday parties, complete with balloons, pastries, and the requisite crudité platter. It’s usually a drop-by-between-meetings party. Say hi. Grab a plate of goodies to eat, alone, at your desk. Even the guest of honor may only do a fly-by.
At Disruption Advisors we have found that most of us don’t have a good plan to celebrate accomplishments, and the lack of celebration has only become more pronounced and consequential after two years of pandemic isolation. This is unfortunate because, as I explain in my new book, Smart Growth, celebration is an important opportunity to cement the lessons learned on the path to achievement, and to strengthen the relationships between people that make future achievement more plausible. When I speak of celebration, I don’t mean inebriated partying, but rather commemorative events that encompass complex emotions including solemnity and poignancy, as well as pleasure and joy in the journey.
Every initiative — or growth journey — we undertake, whether personal or professional, can be modeled by an S Curve of Learning. At the base of the S we are on a launch point where we encounter fruitful struggle. Resources and expertise may be in short supply. Growth is slow, sometimes hard to discern, but it is happening. Small, achievable goals and appropriate metrics help us see momentum and experience early victories. As expertise and momentum build, we tip into a sweet spot of competence, a phase of rapidly accelerating progress and productivity. Many projects may come to successful completion during this time. Eventually, however, our growth slows as we approach mastery. The top of the S can be a danger zone of boredom and stagnation. It’s time for a new challenge.
Eventually we do have to move on to a new challenge but it’s important to remember that celebration is itself an important milestone on the S Curve, whether it’s an individual’s, a team’s, or an entire organization’s S Curve.
As I said, most organizations do not seem to have a celebration strategy, and individuals also have an “on-to-the-next” mindset, as though it is contrary to productivity and efficiency to relish, even briefly, reaching our objectives. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Fortunately, it’s easy to integrate celebration into your life and organization. Start with these four strategies:
Celebrate early and small.
Progress is hard won early in a challenge (the launch point on the S Curve). It can be discouraging and require painful perseverance. So why wouldn’t we celebrate the early victories, no matter how small? Leading behavioral scientist, B.J. Fogg, explains the link between emotions and habits. Habit formation is not, as conventional wisdom claims, a matter of 21 days of consistent practice. Celebrating small wins stimulates dopamine release in the brain, a feel-good chemical that reinforces the learning experience and strengthens our sense of connection to those we work with. Change and growth are promoted through positive emotions more than through disciplined practice. Keep in mind that celebration is an experience and, in the workplace, it is most effective when shared with colleagues. It is not a certificate, a gift card, or an employee of the month parking spot, although those rewards may serve a purpose too.
Just as the accomplishments we celebrate don’t have to be large, our celebrations don’t have to be grandiose; they just need to be meaningful. Cancer patients completing a course of chemotherapy are encouraged to ring a bell while being applauded by involved healthcare givers. This psychologically powerful acknowledgment, though small, should never be skipped.
Celebrate in the interim.
The sweet spot of the S Curve is the phase of greatest productivity. As an individual or leader, there are good reasons to want to extend this stretch of the curve for as long as reasonably possible. This can require reconfigured teams, stretch projects, and imposed constraints to keep the challenge level high enough to prolong growth and engagement. These techniques ensure that many smaller mountains will be scaled en route to the ultimate summit. Celebrate all of them. We don’t just celebrate our first birthday and our last; we celebrate every birthday in between. Whenever an objective is achieved, have a plan to commemorate it, even if the actual objective and commemoration are modest. Make sure individuals recognize their own achievements and know that their managers and teams recognize and appreciate them too. Celebration reinforces lessons learned, practices adopted, and strengthens the foundation and esprit de corps for future accomplishment.
Celebrate at the top.
This seems obvious, but apparently it isn’t. For an example, consider the typical retirement celebration described above. Even for the big, ultimate events, we struggle to hit pause on our busyness to truly acknowledge the mountain conquered. Fred B. Bryant describes celebrating his victory atop Snowmass Mountain in Colorado, in Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, coauthored with the late Joseph Veroff. Bryant had attempted the climb twice previously, without success. He knew it was unlikely he would ever return. So he lingered with his friends, taking in the spectacular view, and committing the sensations of the moment to memory: the smell of the air, the sound of the wind, the details of the scenery. He mentally reviewed the challenges he had overcome to reach this moment. Then he embraced his friends—his climbing colleagues—and expressed his gratitude to have shared the climb and the celebratory moment with them. In all, he spent about ten minutes at the summit, basking in the joy and poignancy of the moment of mastery.
Your mountain might be landing a dream job, a product launch, closing the deal with a big client, going public, or one of many common, but uncommon for you, events. The celebration need not be long or elaborate but it must be meaningful.
Celebrate the day.
Each day is an S Curve of its own. I encourage you to think of them this way. Take a few moments in the morning before engaging in tasks — even before reading email — to think through the day to come. What is the most important objective to achieve today? This is the mountaintop, the summit of the day’s S Curve. Whatever else the day requires, keep this critical objective the top priority. The morning contemplation is your base camp from which to attack the climb. At the end of the day, celebrate achievement, or your progress toward it. B.J. Fogg says celebration can be as simple as looking in the mirror and claiming, “Victory.”
Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology, a frequent self-disruptor and a literal climber of mountains made this analogy when I interviewed him for the Disrupt Yourself podcast, “I always told myself when you feel too comfortable, you have to move….It’s like in climbing; you can’t just camp somewhere. You can rest. You can look around. You can take a deep breath, have a snack. But you’ve got to keep moving, otherwise you get complacent.”
Celebration is an event, not a destination. It’s the little pause where we survey the road we’ve traveled and the mountain we’ve climbed. We can have a snack, with our colleagues or friends, rather than alone in our office. We rest, we catch our breath, we contemplate the next opportunity ahead, before descending to climb again. But the fact that the interval is brief doesn’t make it unimportant, or harmless if neglected. Celebrating achievements great and small is high octane fuel for further achievement. We don’t just celebrate the win; we celebrate to win.
