Ep #4: Why Tracking and Celebrating Your Wins Matters

You are listening to episode four where I talk about tracking and celebrating your wins. Let’s do this.

Welcome to The Family Business Leader Podcast. A podcast for multigenerational family business leaders who want to become the leader they were meant to be. If you’re ready to learn how to develop your own authentic leadership style, successfully lead your family business and create your own lasting legacy while still honoring theirs this is the podcast for you. I’m your host, Ellie Frey Zagel, family business leadership coach and third-generation family business leader. Let’s get to it.

Hello my friends, how are you? Let’s talk about tracking and celebrating our wins. Doesn’t that sound like fun? It is fun. Do you track your wins or accomplishments? And what I mean by wins is anything you do to grow yourself and to get a result you didn’t have previously, really anything that’s progress. So why is this important? My clients are leaders with full schedules. They manage growing at often complicated businesses, there is so much going on.

They often don’t see all they have accomplished through the urgent crisis in front of them. So they go from urgent to urgent, from crisis to crisis, from fire to fire. And they don’t see all that they have accomplished. When interviewing knowledge workers, the Harvard Business Review found what they call the Progress Principle. Let me explain what that means. So of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation and perceptions during a work day the single most important is making progress in meaningful work according to HBR.

So whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply producing a high quality product or service, everyday progress, even a small win can make all the difference in how they feel and perform. It’s at hbr.org The Power of Small Wins. It’s the difference between doubling down and giving up. So it’s human nature to want to track and recognize progress. And when you do you feel a little boost of energy and you want to double down. And if you don’t it feels endless, disempowering and you want to give up.

Brené Brown in her podcast, Armored vs. Daring Leadership talks about when leaders regularly express gratitude and celebrate small wins they tend to double down on their efforts. So that is what we are talking about today, tracking and celebrating your wins, and leading by example to create a culture that also celebrates the wins of progress. But before we step into the topic further I would like to highlight a review from B327.

A great resource for next gen family members, I recently had a chance to talk with Ellie and I was so impressed with her warmth, knowledge and capabilities. I have listened to a few episodes now and have shared them with my family. Being part of a family enterprise can feel isolating, Ellie makes it less so. It can be isolating B, working with your family. And I’m so glad that you found the podcast to help reduce this isolation. And thank you so much for sharing with your family.

That’s why we’ve created both the Successful Generations Podcast as well as The Family Business Leader Podcast. So please continue sharing and you’re never alone when dealing with family dynamics at work. And I hope these episodes continue to help.

Back to tracking your progress, celebrating your wins, I make all of my clients share their weekly wins with me. They even have a small journal that I provide where they can store in their suit pockets, or a purse, or a desk, really wherever they can keep it top of mind. I personally learned how to track my wins in my work with Michael Hyatt and in his mastermind. But many, many people talk about the importance of tracking your wins and celebrating.

I have noticed that when my clients track their wins over the course of time their confidence increases. Burnout tendencies decrease, they’re less depleted. The fun increases because it’s really fun to track and celebrate your wins. And my clients start to ask for bigger promotion and raises if they’re not currently in the President and CEO spot because they know that they can do it because they’ve tracked it, they’ve seen it. They haven’t forgotten that they can do hard things because they’ve done it before.

One of my clients, a second gen CEO tracked her wins for an entire year. She then reviewed her list and shared with me her pride and excitement. To have this huge list of wins over the course of an incredibly rough year was everything. Another second gen couple who run their family’s business created Winning Wednesday. A fun weekly tradition to celebrate teammates, Winning Wednesday has created belonging, camaraderie and pride amongst the office employees and leadership team of that company.

So the first part of this exercise is taking out a piece of paper or going online, to your notes section of your phone, or an online document and start tracking your weekly wins, watch the list grow. I suggest trying for two to three wins per week and for my clients they can be business or personal. I just want them to track them. And don’t keep them in your mind. Actually get them out on paper.

The studies have shown that getting this work out on paper helps you remember it. So it will help you remember your wins and hopefully keep that feeling of pride with you for longer.

What is a win you might ask? A win can be having a tough conversation, overcoming something that you have been procrastinating on for months, moving a project forward, figuring out something that didn’t work, why it didn’t work so you can try something new. Making and implementing a decision you have been delaying, getting a new client, coming out under budget, getting creative and sourcing a part no one thought you could. There are so many examples. So I want you to start working on your wins.

Alright, now that you have that first step, the second step is it’s time to celebrate, cue the music, confetti and disco ball. Seriously, one of the things that in one of my masterminds we did to celebrate our major milestones, our major wins was to a video, a little miniature dance routine to one of our favorite songs. So we kind of said kind of on a post-it note, or in a Facebook post we kind of put what the win was.

And then there was a picture of us individually dancing to our favorite song, kind of celebrating the amazing-ness of what we have accomplished and kind of sharing that with the rest of the group so everybody could kind of celebrate with us. So hopefully that doesn’t sound too cheesy. You can hear from my voice that I’m smiling and laughing a little bit, it was super fun. Although I love music and I love to dance so maybe that’s just me. But a lot of people did it so it can’t be just me.

Celebrating does not have to be extravagant. It doesn’t have to be expensive. I have my clients create a list ahead of time of all the ways they can celebrate wins of any size. And this tends to be really hard for my clients to do. I’m not exactly sure why. I will explore that. I am exploring that. But they say to me, “It feels really extravagant to celebrate wins. I don’t want to brag. It feels a little arrogant or it’ll take too much time.”

And yeah, celebrating wins is super fun. It reinforces the progress, kind of like an exclamation point. And it doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. So a win can look like a pat on the back, honestly sometimes I just, I say something that just really made sense or I say it in a way that my client’s just like, “Yes, I get it.” And I’m like, “Have a nice little pat on the back.”

It could be a fancy coffee. It could be a new book. I love books, or a new notebook, I love notebooks, paper. It could be flowers. It could be a dinner out with your significant other or a friend. It could be a lunch with your team. It could be a thank you note. It could be a fly fishing trip to Patagonia. Maybe that’s just me. But you see on this list and it’s a very short list of these examples, is it could be something that takes half a second, a pat on the back.

And it could be something to celebrate the big wins, major accomplishments like a trip that you’ve always wanted to go on. So now it’s your turn. I want you to create a list of as many ways that you can think of to celebrate the small wins and the big ones. And this should be fun. You maybe even want to get your significant other to join in with you or some of your senior leadership team. This doesn’t have to be a chore. I really want this to be fun, thinking about how you want to celebrate your progress.

So the last step is to review your wins periodically and then share them with your team and your family. People want to know. Remember my second gen CEO, she listed and shared company wins over this past very tumultuous, very stressful year with her senior leadership team at an offsite. The pride and gratitude she felt sharing the list with her team overshadowed a lot of the stress and the stressful conversations that they were having, allowing them to commence the meeting from the mindset of we had some wins. We did some good versus everything is really hard right now.

So I don’t know about you but I’d rather any day of the week go into strategic planning, offsite planning from a mindset of okay, it was up and down but we had some wins versus everything was awful. I’m sure you can see the value of that.

By tracking and celebrating your wins you also become an example of what’s possible in your company. You are now recognized as a leader who tracks and celebrates progress of all kinds, not just the big progress, but also the small progress. You become a leader who doesn’t just focus on the negative, how you didn’t reach the goal. You become the leader who focuses on how you did come closer what you did learn, not that you’re ignoring the other side.

But instead of focusing all of your attention, and mindset, and energy on the negative, the gap, the delta of what you didn’t achieve what you were looking to achieve, you’re focusing on what you did and how you did get one step closer and the progress that you made. I don’t know about you but that type of leader is a leader that people get really excited about working with.

Alright my friends, that’s all for today, just a quick note, if you work with your family and are interested in working with me, applications are now open for The Family Business Leader Mastermind. Come join us. The link is in the show notes. I’d love, love to have you. Alright, I will see you next week.

Well, there you have it. Thank you so much for listening to The Family Business Leader Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to share it with someone who needs it. If you’d like more information about family business leadership development, please visit successfulgenerations.com. I can’t wait to connect with you again next week, until then.