How often do you reward yourself or your team for accomplishments? Do you take time to acknowledge even the small things achieved, or are you always looking forward to what else you or your team has to do? Celebrating small victories is a crucial part of leading others to a larger goal and keeping them motivated on the way.

Why are small victories important?

Small victories are the positive stepping stones to larger goals. They make the goal seem less overwhelming, and provide a path to that desired result. And they keep you going with hope and the confidence that you can make it to the next part of the journey. It’s easy sometimes to get downtrodden when projects get delayed, team members get annoying, or you get a pay cut due to a lousy economy. Celebrating the smaller things can keep your motivation up and give you a little boost to move forward.

Rewarding the team for incremental successes also fosters teamwork, and helps team members feel supported and encouraged. You never know when a team member might be feeling down, or like they aren’t contributing, or having a low-productivity week. The little celebration could be just the ticket for getting them going again and feeling like a valuable part of a shared effort.

With whom should you celebrate small victories?

The most obvious answer is with your team. But who’s your team? If you’re a manager, that could be your direct reports. It could be your fellow managers (the management team). It could be your project team. With which of these groups is it appropriate to celebrate these victories? All of them! If your project team has a software release, that’s cause for celebration. If your direct reports achieved a goal you set for the team by deadline, that’s cause for celebration. And if your fellow managers finally standardized on that new process, that’s also cause for celebration.

I’d encourage you to think about how you can celebrate with others with whom you might not normally celebrate as well. For example, brag on your direct reports to the VP and let him be a part of the celebration. If you’re in Engineering, invite salespeople to a product team celebration so they can feed off your enthusiasm, and hopefully channel that enthusiasm into selling your product! Not only will these inclusions spread the word about how great your team is, thus building your team morale, it’ll improve future relationship building with people you don’t interact with on a daily basis.

How do you celebrate small victories?

The possibilities for how to celebrate small victories run the gamut in scale (see some examples below). A good general rule of thumb is to keep the celebration in proportion to the size of the victory. For example, if everyone updated a team web page by deadline, it’s probably more appropriate to have a candy prize than an afternoon out bowling. But if you just released a bear of a project, the bowling afternoon would be more reasonable.

Following are some ideas for how to celebrate small victories, based on things I’ve seen or done in the past:

• Send a recognition email to a larger group, recognizing your team members’ efforts.
• Bring in breakfast for the team.
• Buy the team lunch.
• Have a team potluck and play games onsite for a couple hours during the workday.
• Take the team bowling.
• Give candy prizes.
• Give team members a day or two of “comp time” if they’ve worked a ton of extra hours for a project.
• Let people go home early on a Friday afternoon.
• Give team members an inexpensive gift card to iTunes, Starbucks, or a bookstore.
• Make brownies for the team.

What are your ideas for celebrating small victories?