The importance of celebrating the wins

Throughout my career, I’ve observed that people leave jobs for one or more of the following three reasons:

As CEO of a people-first company, I resolved to do everything I could to keep this from happening. After all, people are at the heart of everything in business! 

So when it comes to mitigating employees not feeling valued or respected, we proactively fight that by creating a culture of celebrating wins - both big and small. 

Celebrating wins is important for so many reasons:

Each day, the entire team and I are working hard to make our company more and more successful. So when something good comes from all that hard work, we make sure to pause and relish the moment.

We celebrate these wins in a couple of different ways that have been super fun for the team and the staff…

These wins aren’t always that something was done. Sometimes the wins are that we stopped doing something. In a world where you can do anything – especially in startups! – it’s important to ruthlessly prioritize what needs to be done vs. what is nice to have. The ability to recognize this is something we value and celebrate at NLX.

We also recognize effort, even when something doesn’t pan out because of circumstances outside of the person’s or company’s control. Taking a moment to appreciate someone’s efforts is a good way to pause, reflect on the situation, acknowledge the hard work, learn from the situation, and move forward. 

I think this last point is especially important because there can be a lot of “NOs” in startups. Your business is new to the market and you’re just trying to get things off the ground when something doesn’t pan out the way you thought it might. 

These efforts are also how innovation happens. There are always lessons learned, even when you fail. A lot of inventions and discoveries throughout history started out of sheer curiosity and were outputs of the journey and weren't supposed to be the destination. Thomas Edison’s quote comes to mind, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”

Maybe a team member tried something new – they had a really cool idea, but something about it wasn’t right. They were brave in their actions and work, one of NLX’s core cultural values. Recognizing individuals’ and teams' hard work in these scenarios is especially important because it continues to encourage people to continue to try something new. If they fail, fail fast and learn from it. You’ll be commended for trying, and when the opportunity arises to try something new again, there’s a less adverse reaction to it. 

These “hard work, but no accomplishment” moments can be tough moments to swallow, but I’ve found that celebrating wins - big and small - and acknowledging hard work creates a culture of resilience and helps preserve one’s mental health. 

Everything I’ve shared rolls up under the umbrella of how and why emotional intelligence is important in the workplace. If you’re interested in learning more about emotional intelligence in the workplace, be sure to check out AWS’ video from Re:Invent - Emotional intelligence to supercharge your success with Richard Hua. (It’s worth a watch!)