Design celebrations to lead

What’s a typical work celebration in your firm? Quiet, exotic, chatty, dignified, ceremonial, or just plain drunken?

Is it a well-designed event with leadership objectives?

Celebration, particularly in conservative expertise-based organisations, is often dismissed as a fuzzy, ‘nice’, inessential or alcoholic activity. It’s not ‘serious’ enough. However, this is a naïve view of how celebration functions.

If you are running a team of people it’s your responsibility from both management and leadership perspectives to get this right. It's up to you! Do it badly and lose the commitment of the entire organisation; or do it well and generate that crucial uplift in performance.

In other words, good leaders celebrate skilfully.

Leadership outcomes

What are the performance outcomes?

• You identify and lock-in commitment to maintaining performance.
• You improve team cohesion.
• You more readily identify negative behaviours to correct.
• You embed more deeply in the firm the learning, insights and understanding that you identify from the mistakes.
• You get the space to send important warning signals about slipping back.
• You can more easily elicit ideas for better performance.
• You get to see where the stress of high performance is most damaging.
• You can link and reinforce sources of innovation.

I’ve seen each or many of these outcomes from a well-designed and managed celebration event. How do your celebrations match up?

Great Design

Your design of the event is critical:

• Get help with your event. Event design and management is an area of expertise that you simply may not possess. A good events organiser has some wisdom about how your people will be feeling about the event and will help you shape their experience. Respect the skill of ‘event management’ they way you’d want your expertise respected.
• Get clear on what qualitative outcomes you want - team strength, reputation, reduction in stress, or perhaps to become more approachable.
• Think through, with your L&D leader, what will best embed the lessons from the transaction. Does storytelling work best with your people? Or will you create a fun booklet of lessons learnt? Will you ask for feedback as a live exercise? Who will win the award that matters?
• Work out what the mistakes were. What were your personal mistakes?? What will be your story to illustrate the lessons you have learnt? Show you understand the challenges.
• How can you use the event to initiate and capture the innovations and changes the organisation should undertake? (Don’t let that brilliant junior associate get too drunk to remember his suggestion!!)
• This is a perfect time to lift the crowd with energy, passion, conviction, motivation and humour. Trust and demonstrate your capacity to lead. If things were tough, show pride. If things were easy, show humility. Show that you understand their contribution. Be genuine.

Good celebration is the time quickly and efficiently to give your professionals the simple things they crave - acknowledgement, encouragement, collegiality and challenge.

Be a Legend!

Even a short event can go into the corporate memory and colour the organisation’s culture for a long time. Especially in the toughest times, skilful celebration can be legendary – and the most powerful way to Lead.

'As the researchers concluded, even small acts of celebration, as they accumulate, can have large effects on team performance. The take-home message is simple: Celebrate with those in your family or class or neighborhood or workplace, in whatever ways make sense within your group. Good things may result.'

(Kraus, M. W., Huang, C., & Keltner, D. (2010). Tactile communication, cooperation, and performance: An ethological study of the NBA. Emotion, 10, 745-749. Quoted on http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-good-life/201012/team-celebration-and-performance)

You see, professionalism is more than mental expertise. It's also an emotional capability. Connect to your professionals more deeply through good celebration and they'll follow you to the ends of the Earth!