I want to thank my friend Mark Hines for turning me on to this.
The Six Deadly Sins of Leadership (per Jack and Suzy Welch)
6. Skipping the Fun Part
What is it about celebrating that makes managers so nervous? Maybe throwing a party doesn’t seem professional, or it makes people worry that they won’t look serious to the powers that be, or that, if things get too happy in the office, people will stop working their tails off.
Whatever the reason, too many leaders don’t celebrate enough. To be clear here, we do not define celebrating as conducting one of those stilted little company-orchestrated events that everyone hates, in which the whole team is marched out to a local restaurant for an evening of forced merriment when they’d rather be home. We’re talking about sending a team to Disney World with their families, or giving each team member tickets to a show or a movie, or handing each member of the team a new iPod.
What a lost opportunity. Celebrating makes people feel like winners and creates an atmosphere of recognition and positive energy. Imagine a team winning the World Series without champagne spraying everywhere. You can’t! And yet companies win all the time and let it go without so much as a high-five.
Work is too much a part of life not to recognize the moments of achievement. Grab as many as you can. Make a big deal out of them.
That’s part of a leader’s job too – the fun part.
This content was originally presented as a lecture at the Jack Welch Management Institute
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