The best employee recognition ideas celebrate wins both big and small, as they happen. Talk about successes with the whole team, study what made each win work, and end every day by naming three wins. Celebrate, then move to the next challenge. Recognition keeps morale and energy high and balances the focus on what needs to improve.
- Teams tend to treat success as normal and drill into failures. Recognition restores the balance.
- Study your wins as closely as your losses, because some wins happen by chance.
- Three wins a day plants the seeds of a winning culture.
- Keep the blissful side louder than the dissatisfied side, for yourself and your team.
Why is recognizing employees important?
My co-host Arturo Gomez has led teams for 25 years. He has noticed that teams treat success as the norm. It is what everyone trained for, so nobody stops to mark it. Failures get all the attention.
Recognition fixes that imbalance. It brings the energy level up and gives the whole team a lift, a real serotonin boost in Arturo's words. It also shows people you are more than a leader who only talks about what needs to improve.
Celebrate your wins as much as you learn from your losses.
Arturo Gomez, Episode 50
What are some employee recognition ideas?
Every idea here costs nothing.
- Celebrate wins big and small. Make it part of the culture to mark both.
- Study the win. Ask the team what you actually did that allowed you to win.
- Share three wins a day. End each day by naming three wins, and invite your team to do the same.
- Keep a running tally. Arturo suggests an accounting system: does the sum of the wins outweigh the losses?
- Measure the gain together. Show the team how far it has come from where it started.
- Celebrate, then move on. Applaud the win and get ready for the next opportunity.
Praise lands best in the moment, which is also the heart of giving feedback as a leader.
Why should you study your wins?
Learning happens in wins too. Arturo points out that winning sometimes happens by chance. A little luck or a sequence of events played a part, and it may be something your current culture doesn't do on purpose yet.
When you stop to understand the exact pieces behind a winning month, you can do it again. Teams that only analyze losses leave that lesson on the table.
How do you build a culture of winning by design?
I learned this one the hard way. As an entrepreneur, I went all in on big dreams. I pictured a mountaintop, and getting there felt heavy. When I finally planted my flag, I looked over and saw another mountain right next to it.
There is always another mountain.
Winning, it turns out, is an appreciation for the day-to-day journey. So I work on both the micro and the macro. I start each morning with gratitude for what I have already done. At night, I name three wins from the day. Every day has its hard parts, and there are still wins in it. Plant those seeds in your mind and in your team every day, and the big wins have somewhere to land.
What is blissful dissatisfaction?
Blissful dissatisfaction was a game changer for me as a leader. You can love where you are right now and still know you have so much potential ahead.
- Blissful Loving where you and your team are in this moment.
- Dissatisfied Knowing there is more growth and potential inside you.
The key is the ratio. Ninety percent blissful and ten percent dissatisfied, in the name of growth, is fantastic. Teams run into trouble when the dissatisfied side takes over and every conversation is about what's wrong. You see it in sports with coaches who only talk about the negative.
My own dissatisfied self-talk is louder, and I know it. So I organize the bliss in my life by design. Most of the world lives in the dissatisfied side too, with fear, judgment and comparison. That includes the people on your team.
How do you avoid the gap when your team is always chasing more?
High performers can wear dissatisfaction as a badge of honor. A book that changed this for me is The Gap and the Gain by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan.
| Living in the gap | Living in the gain | |
|---|---|---|
| What you measure | Where you are now against where you want to be | Where you started against where you are now |
| The story you tell | "I'm not there yet." | "Look at all the progress we've made." |
| The mindset | Scarcity and not enough | Appreciation for progress |
Living in the gain leaves plenty of room for ambition. It changes the story you tell yourself, and the story your team hears. It pairs naturally with a growth mindset.
Can you celebrate too much?
Arturo calls it managing the sugar high. Celebrate the win, then move on to the next challenge. Some teams get so caught up in a success that they lose their footing. When you study both your shortcomings and your successes, the team learns that both get examined, and that creates a better environment for everyone. It also feeds a positive company culture.
Do this today
- Name three wins tonight. At the end of every day this week, write down or say three wins. They can be small.
- Invite your team in. Ask everyone on your team to end their day with three wins too, and share a few each week.
Listen to the episode
Importance of Celebrating Your Team's Successes
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Questions people ask
What is blissful dissatisfaction?
It is loving where you are while knowing you have more potential. Rob Cressy describes 90 percent blissful and 10 percent dissatisfied as a healthy balance.
What is The Gap and the Gain?
A book by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. The gap measures you against where you want to be. The gain measures you from where you started, which highlights your progress.
Why should leaders study wins as well as losses?
Some wins come partly from luck or a sequence of events. Understanding exactly what worked lets the team repeat it on purpose.
What is a simple daily recognition habit?
Three wins a day. At the end of each day, write down or say three things that went well, and encourage your team to do the same.
Full transcript
Episode 50: Importance of Celebrating Your Team's Successes
Welcome to Leadership DNA, a podcast for those who aspire to be a better leader. Alongside Arturo Gomez, I'm Rob Cressy. Today's topic, the importance of celebrating your team's success. And Arturo, it is oh so important to create a culture where you celebrate the wins both as big and small. Yeah, I mean, listen, I think it's, we tend to get into this situation, I think as, I think it's just by design. I mean, by design, we, you know, things that when we have success, it tends to be understood as that's the norm. That's what should be happening. This is what we train for. This is what we do.
The results should be success. And we tend to focus in on the failures and really kind of drill down on those things. And I, you know, for me, I think, you know, in one of our podcasts and in the very early part of this, of Leadership DNA, I think we did discuss and focus on, you know, celebrate your wins as much as you learn from your losses.
I mean, you have to study both the wins and the losses. And I think, you know, oftentimes, I think that there's more opportunity to be able to actually study and analyze the wins because sometimes winning is by chance. Sometimes winning happened and we don't really evaluate it because it was a win. It was like, we don't really take a step back and say, well, what actually occurred there? What did we, what did we do that allowed us to win? And what we did, you know, we checked a bunch of boxes, but, you know, sometimes there's a little bit of, a little bit of luck involved. And sometimes there's this sequence of events that, that occurred that may not be part of the current day culture of the organization.
And I think it's really important to be able to celebrate that. The also, the other thing is that it gives, I think, cultural balance in the organization. It's, it's, it goes back to, you know, not just saying or bringing to people's attention that we've, we've, we've not succeeded or that we've failed. It's also being able to have an opportunity to celebrate, you know, the successes that the organization or the team is happening. I think it also manages and brings the energy level up. You know, morale, we talk about, you know, morale, we talk about energy and enthusiasm within the organization and certainly at the leadership level.
And I think, you know, and I think, you know, being able to, you know, have those celebrations and talk about the successes, I think gives a real serotonin boost to the team. And I think that that's, that's a critical part. The other thing is that learning isn't only facilitated and done when you lose. It's, you have to, again, be able to understand that if we can recreate, if we can do this again, if we can understand the exact pieces that allowed us to actually have a winning month, a winning situation, whatever the case is, it's, it's tremendous, tremendous.
Tremendous learning that can be done. And it speaks to that balance where you're not a leader. That's only exclusively talking about things that need to be improved. Yeah, I love it. And there's so many good things that you talked about from a DNA perspective, the culture of winning and then winning by design. These are things that are part of the DNA of both leaders as well as winning organizations.
And I think one of the nuances that I learned the extremely hard way in my entrepreneurial journey is all around the achievement of a dream or a big goal. Because so often in entrepreneurship, at least in my perspective, I'm all in on my dreams. And you think of this as this proverbial mountaintop that you're looking to climb.
So oftentimes we use the word like grinding and hustle culture and paying your dues and these hard things to get you to where you want to go. And in the process of it can feel heavy because you're working on this big goal or this big achievement. And you think that once you get to the top of the mountain and you plant your flag there, you're like, yeah, I did it. I'm finally complete. And then you look and you're like, wait a second. There's another mountain right over here.
And it was a challenge for me to learn that winning in being the best version of myself is actually an appreciation for the day to day journey. Not only focusing on getting to the top of the mountain, because you understand that there is always going to be more mountains. So as it relates to creating a culture of winning in doing so by design, I like to think about both the micro, the day to day, as well as the macro. Because as someone who coaches people on personal growth and development, among other things, I start my days with gratitude and things that I have done in my past to build myself up from a winning perspective.
And then at the end of the day, I also say to myself, what are three wins from today? Because not every day is puppy dogs and rainbows. But at the same time, you realize there are winning things that you have done. And if we can continually be planting the seeds of winning in our mind, in our team and in our culture. Yes, when we do get to the top of that mountain, we can certainly celebrate. But we do know that there's going to be more mountains there.
So it's our ability to both by design, live in the micro wins, as well as appreciate when we get that macro win. Yeah. I mean, listen, to that point and kind of in this idea of creating balance, it also helps manage the sugar high, right? It's like, you know, don't get – we are going to celebrate them. This isn't – we're not partying like it's 1999.
I mean, it's just like, hey, let's celebrate it and then move on and get ready for the next opportunity, the next challenge. And I think there's always going to be room to applaud. But I think the people that, you know, go down the rabbit hole or get caught off guard is when, you know, they don't allow those successes to unfold and they get too caught up in them, so to speak.
So I think, you know, studying them, allowing them to exist creates balance, creates some energy, and it creates, I think, an environment where people understand that, you know, we are going to examine the things that we do, our shortcomings and our successes. And it, you know, just paves the way for just, I think, a better overall team environment.
There's a term that I learned that was a game changer for me as a leader called blissful dissatisfaction. And as a high performer and as a leader, we can both be blissful, loving where we are in this moment, as well as be dissatisfied with knowing that we have so much potential and growth inside of us. The key, of course, to yes, and what you were talking about is what is your percentage of blissful versus dissatisfied?
If you're sitting there saying, listen, I'm 90% blissful for my team, 10% dissatisfied, but that dissatisfied is in the name of growth and potential. Fantastic. But where a lot of teams and leaders run into a problem is when the dissatisfied starts to outweigh the blissful side of things to where all we're talking about is where we can improve in the negative side of what we're doing.
And we see this oftentimes in sports with coaches who are seen as overly tough or all they talk about are the negative side of things. And I would like to think that I'm certainly someone who lives a lot in the blissful side, but candidly, my self-talk of the dissatisfied is louder. And I'm aware of that. So I have to be very intentional by design to organize the bliss in my life, to make sure that I'm staying on that anchor. Because I believe for the majority of the world, they live a lot in the dissatisfied. That can be fear, judgment, comparison, self-limiting belief. And rest of the world means our team members, the people that we're working with here in the hunger of these goals.
So beware, be very aware of where you are on that blissful dissatisfaction spectrum. And by design, organize things in your life to make sure you keep feeding the blissful side, knowing that the dissatisfied side is likely to be very loud. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. And it's like, you know, sometimes the sky is falling when in reality, it's like, wait, what are you talking about? It's actually, it's sunny and clear. And there's been so much goodness that you should be celebrating this week or today or whatever.
And so it's okay to be, you know, tough on yourself and it's okay to want to drive, you know, drive production and performance and all that other stuff. But these little wins, you know, I think there needs to be some type of accounting system. You know, you have to be able to do. You know, you have to be able to look at does the sum of the wins supersede this, you know, the sum of the losses.
And so if the answer is yes, then, you know, that mathematical formula means you're winning. So can you win more? Maybe. Could you lose harder? Probably, you know, so, you know, I think there's a good opportunity to create some balance. And I like that. And Arturo, here's one of the challenges. We as high performers can sometimes wear our dissatisfaction as a badge of honor.
I'm never satisfied. I'm always grinding. I'm always trying to get to the top of this mountain to where that can be seen as a narrative at the absence of flow and peace. And there's a book about this, which I highly recommend called The Gap and the Gain by Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan. And it is an absolute game changer. And side note, I highly recommend all of the books by Benjamin Hardy.
Right now, I'm reading one called 10x is Easier Than 2x. And The Gap and the Gain is a very simple concept. The majority of the world lives in the gap, meaning where they are now versus the potential of where they want to be in their vision. They sit there and they see, oh, my God, I'm not there yet. So it's living in a scarcity mindset or a fixed mindset or a not enoughness.
Whereas when you're living in the gain, you measure yourself from where you started to where you are right now. And this is something that I need a constant reminder on an everyday basis to remind myself of where I was 13 years ago when I started this entrepreneurial journey at zero versus who I am today doing this podcast with you and running multiple businesses and coaching people.
And when you use that framing, you go, wow, look at all the progress that I've made. It doesn't mean I'm resting on my laurels, but it changes the narrative of the story that you're telling yourself of, wow, I'm living in the gain for all that I've gained versus I'm living in a gap for all of the things that I have not yet created in my life. So we ran into some technical difficulties. So I'm going to take this episode home. It is time for the action item or the takeaway.
And what I would love for you to do this week at the end of every single day, I want you just to write down or say to yourself three wins from the day. Let's make sure that when we end our day, we anchor in where we won. It doesn't have to be the biggest things in the world, but this is how you plant the seeds of winning, how you create a winning culture by design in yourself.
And this is a practice that I've been doing for years, both for myself as well as encourage everyone on my teams to do the same. Every single day as part of my evening routine, boom, what are three wins for the day? Rinse and repeat, and I promise you great things will happen. And we want to hear from you. How do you create a winning culture by design in your organization?
You can hit up Arturo on LinkedIn at Arturo Gomez, and you can hit me up on LinkedIn or Instagram at Rob Cressy.
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