Naming Wins and Changing Your Organizational Culture

Celebrating wins at Learning Forte started out as a way to name what had been accomplished, instead of just being focused on what still needed to be done. While this practice has helped us become less obsessed with our to-do lists, it has also had the unintended consequences of teaching our team how to publicly recognize the contributions of colleagues, acknowledge and accept failures, and find a balance between an “everyone's a winner” and “resilience in the face of loss” culture.

After a few months of generically sharing wins at the beginning of meetings, I realized that we were in a rut and consistently sharing the same types of observations. A breakthrough came during a meeting when I asked our team members to share a win they had observed in a colleague’s work. The insights we had about each other were profound and many articulated not just the success they had observed, but also the challenges that had to be overcome in the process. As we became more comfortable with sharing these observations about others, we also became more able to articulate challenges and wins for ourselves.

One week, a very brave member of our team shared that there were no wins for her that week and that everything had been really difficult. Her naming this reality led to deep discussions about how even allowing ourselves to name the lack of wins was an achievement. It helped the team gain a deeper level of communal trust because we released ourselves from the expectation that we could always reframe something into a win. We learned that to access our resilience, we first needed to acknowledge it was needed.

Celebrating wins by allowing for the naming of challenges is shifting our organizational culture into one that recognizes both the importance of naming accomplishments and honoring the reality that failure is real. Creating space for this practice during team meetings allows us to be attentive to challenges that might become unworkable without acknowledgement, and to celebrate even the smallest of victories.

written by Stacy Williams-Duncan
May 2024