SuperLeaders: Celebration
In This Episode
One thing SuperLeaders do differently is celebrating wins - but not the kind of wins you think. Tune into this episode of The LeaderLab powered by LifeLabs Learning to find out what type of wins matter most.
Want to dig a little deeper? Check out the research our guest referenced in the episode:
Teresa Amabile and Small Wins: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=40244
Hedonic Treadmill: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/hedonic-treadmill
Job Crafting: https://hbr.org/2020/03/what-job-crafting-looks-like
Transcript
Vanessa Tanician, narrating: Hello, and welcome to The Leader Lab, the podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. I'm your host and LifeLab's leadership trainer, Vanessa Tanicien. In each episode, my Labmates and I distill our findings into powerful tipping point skills, the smallest changes that tip over to make the biggest impact in the shortest time.
Vanessa Tanician: Welcome back to The LeaderLab listeners. We're continuing the conversation on SuperLeaders and what they do differently. To remind you what a SuperLeader is, it's a person who creates psychological safety and decreases anxiety for themselves and others. To help us with this topic today, we have Abby Reider. She's one of my colleagues at LifeLabs learning as a facilitator, as well as having a background in clinical and organizational psychology, social and emotional intelligence, diversity equity and inclusion, and mental health. She's a real star. Welcome to the lab, Abby.
Abby Reider: Thanks Vanessa. It's so great to be here.
Vanessa Tanician: Abby, I'm curious, what have you brought to add to our SuperLeader toolkit today?
Abby Reider: Well, Vanessa, I'm so glad you asked. This is one of my favorite skills. Celebration. It's not just any kind of celebration, but celebrating small wins.
Vanessa Tanician: Hmm. I'm all about a big party, but you're talking about a small, maybe one-step, two-step kind of party? Tell me more.
Abby Reider: I mean, I'm all for those big parties too, and we don't have to get rid of those, but I want to talk about the importance of celebrating the small things along the way consistently. This is all about pausing to celebrate on various levels, on an individual level, on a one-on-one level, and on the team or org level, to reflect and celebrate the wins and build on strengths and successes to keep people motivated, energized, and excited at work, and also to prevent burnout, which we're seeing across teams is a really huge issue right now.
Vanessa Tanician: We've talked about burnout a couple of times on The Leader Lab, a couple of episodes have referenced this, but I'm curious about this other piece that you said about motivation and building on strengths. How do you know that that's the case?
Abby Reider: Yeah, thanks for asking. First of all, our society, we're constantly thinking about improvement and that can be exhausting. Right? We're constantly, what's next? What's coming down the pipe? How can we have a breakthrough? How can we change? How can we keep moving forward? What we often forget to do is to focus on what we've already accomplished, which actually motivates us for the future as well. It helps us notice what went well. One of my favorite studies about this comes from the Harvard Business School. Teresa Amabile and her partner Kramer, they did something pretty interesting. They went into a number of different organizations and they asked people to keep track in a journal, every day, what was going well that day and how did they feel about work. Their results were really surprising. It wasn't those big wins like a promotion or a big project going well that actually raised people's happiness levels. It was the small wins, but it wasn't just small wins, it was consistency that was key.
Vanessa Tanician: Well, what I'm already really digging is that you are bringing up what I remember to be called the hedonic treadmill, I guess also known as hedonic adaptation. It's this observed tendency of humans to quickly return back to whatever level of happiness we were despite major positive things or major negative things that happen in our life. You'd think that the launches and the promotions and all of that would make the biggest difference, but that's not the case.
Abby Reider: Not at all. It's really the consistent small wins. That's why I'm so excited to introduce a skills audit, just a small thing that makes a huge impact on people's morale, sense of accomplishment and wellbeing in the workplace.
Vanessa Tanician: Well, don't keep me in suspense. What's the tool?
Abby Reider: All right, let's do it. The way I like to frame it, and the way that's really easy to remember, the tool is called a win's audit.
Vanessa Tanician: Okay, a win's audit. Nice strategic pause. How does it work? Let's take it for a spin as I like to say.
Abby Reider: Yeah. There's three levels that I like to think of doing when I do a win's audit with myself or with other people on my team. Self-reflection, so that's the individual level, then the one-on-one or interpersonal level, so thinking about how am I doing this with my direct reports and the people I work with individually, and then on a team or an org level. Let's do it one by one and I'll bring you through it. You ready?
Vanessa Tanician: Yeah. I'm definitely ready.
Abby Reider: All right, let's go. The first one is individual self-reflection. Right? For us as leaders, we have to keep our energy up and reflect on what's going well for us. What I'd like to ask you is, Vanessa, what's something that went well in the past week or the past couple weeks for you?
Vanessa Tanician: You know, honestly, taking a break. Actually using PTO and coming back to work and noticing that everything was fine was a big deal. Making sure that I am role modeling, a shout out to Missela's episode. This behavior was such a win for me.
Abby Reider: Yeah. I appreciate that more as someone who cares so much about mental health. Another thing though is what we are demonstrating right here. If I was your manager, this is actually exactly what we'd be doing, celebrating your small win in between us. That actually brings us to the next level of audit, which is how are we celebrating with each other by asking questions just like this. Right? How are you doing that, Vanessa? How do you help other people on your team when you're on meetings with them, when you're helping your direct reports celebrate their small ones?
Vanessa Tanician: It wouldn't be a LeaderLab episode without bringing up Thu-Hang. Thu-Hang has been doing lots of amazing work. Right now she is working on a pretty big design edit that just came down the pipe for our team. It's a big deal that we are finally being able to release this and have this be available for all of our lab mates. The fact that she's taking on the helm of that one is a huge one.
Abby Reider: Yeah. That is a big deal. That's the second level. Thanks for sharing. The third level is how are we doing this on a team or org wide? How are we doing this as an org? What I love at LifeLabs that we do, and I know that this happens at companies that we teach across the board, we have a gratitude channel. Some people call it tacos, some people call it kudos depending on where you're at in the world, but it's really shouting out the people who have gone above and beyond to be in service of the company or to just be helpful to you. We have the gratitude channel, and then we also have an impact channel. Seeing the ways that we have created wins for our clients is huge and it really puts some fuel in the tank, you know?
Vanessa Tanician: Yeah. That's essential. Connecting to that impact really increases people's sense of meaning, which is very closely connected to engagement. This is it. We just did the win's audit. I mean, I've already got this huge dopamine blast going on in my brain, Abby, so thank you for that.
Abby Reider: That's the point, right? That's the point, and that's what the research shows. Celebrating small wins does actually translate to releasing dopamine, this neurotransmitter in our brain that helps us feel good and also keep going during times of stress.
Vanessa Tanician: What's also really incredible is that celebrating small wins consistently and often allows us to job craft because suddenly we are aware of where our strengths are as well as what lights us up. If you're looking to Google a little bit more about that later, check out, Amy Wrzesniewski's work on job crafting. Now that we've done the win's audit, I want to know, as a leader in the working world, so I have my win's audit, what happens next? What else should we know about this when we want to take it to our teams or to our company?
Abby Reider: Yeah. Operationalizing these sorts of skills are really important, so I'm glad you asked about that. It can be as simple as carving out some time on our calendar. I know people on our team, they actually carve out time on their calendar every week to proactively give people small, positive, specific feedback.
Vanessa Tanician: I think what's also really cool about that is that it's eventually going to make performance reviews or any sort of performance assessment so much easier.
Abby Reider: Yeah. Another thing Vanessa, is it actually builds on itself. When other people are celebrating each other, it has a ripple effect, and then those people get excited and they want to give it back, and they're more likely to celebrate others. They're building and building off each other's energy and celebration and positive affirmation and morale.
Vanessa Tanician: I love that ripple effect. That brings us to our Leader Lab listener experiment. Abby, what should people be experimenting with in their laboratories of life?
Abby Reider: Yeah. I'd really like you to be asking yourself on both a personal and a work level, what's going well for you, and when are you making opportunity to reflect on an individual, one-on-one, and team level?
Vanessa Tanician: Got a love of win's audit. Thanks so much for being on the show. Abby.
Abby Reider: Thank you. It was my pleasure, Vanessa.
Vanessa Tanician: That's a wrap of another episode of The LeaderLab. Make sure to subscribe and share this with at least one other person so we can all be SuperLeaders. It's pretty awesome. The LeaderLab is executive produced and hosted by me, Vanessa Tanicien. Neadra James is our senior producer and Alana Burman is our director and editor. If you'd like to hang out with us on social, go ahead and find us on LinkedIn at LifeLabs Learning, and on Twitter at LifeLabs Learn. To bring training to your team, head on over to LifeLabslearning.com. See you in the lab soon.
