Celebrating Success

beyond the half-hearted, add-on cliché and seeing the power behind celebration

I was at a Special Education conference last spring and one of the speakers from Connecticut took time in his opening remarks to talk about how respected Ontario Special Education is world-wide.  I would have dismissed him as pandering to the crowd if it weren’t for the fact that I’d heard another speaker this past winter say pretty much the same thing.  She was from New York and she was talking about literacy. 

And then there were the two speakers from Western Canada two summers ago; they were talking about assessment and gave Ontario similar kudos.

I think sometimes we need to stop and be reminded of the good work we do.  When an organization – educational or otherwise – makes great progress over a relatively short period of time, it comes from nothing short of monumental investment, effort and intentionality.  True success isn’t smoke and mirrors.  It’s wrought on the backs of visionaries and “ordinary” people within the organization who work very hard and need to be celebrated.  It comes through an honest assessment of what’s going on and an intentional plan for improvement.

The fact of the matter is that for organizations that change and grow and move forward, there is typically a core value that goes something like this: we can do better.  For this mantra to reap success, it needs to be in the context of a strategic plan followed by meticulous observation of the implementation at every stage, and ending with a reflection on successes and failures.  And when I say “ending”, it doesn’t actually ever really end.  It’s a cycle.

The result of companies that operate like this is that its employees are driven to attain excellence and for the most part they get excellence.

What doesn’t often get placed in the above excellence equation, however, is the importance of celebrating good work. It’s interesting, for example, that Tuckman’s Four Stages of Group Development (1965) were:

Forming

Storming

Norming

Performing

Interesting, because in 1977, Tuckman felt the need to add a fifth stage: Adjourning. This is the stage during which a

“group comes together to celebrate the efforts of one another for completing the project. Adhesive groups will always come together at the end of a project and commend each other for their efforts, because each understands that parts of the project could not be completed without the other” (http://fallingkeys.wordpress.com).

I think too often, in too many companies, this is a stage that gets left off or glossed over; but in the long-term health of an organization, I believe it's vitally important.

In my role of Curriculum Consultant, I recently had 20 secondary teachers in a room.  I thought that it would be good to show them this video, “I Will Not Let an Exam Result Decide My Fate”

My thinking was, it’ll kick off the day with something provocative and timely from pop culture.  It could polarize people because the young Hip Hop artist doesn’t really give a balanced picture.  He pretty much just rants about what was wrong with his education, primarily focusing on how it wasn’t relevant or connected to the real world. It’ll make for some pretty solid discussion…

That was my thinking.

For the most part, the video accomplished what I thought it would.  The reactions by and large were positive.  People found the message of the video both provocative and insightful.

There was one outlier reaction, however, that I wasn’t anticipating.  One teacher said, “Rocco, I get why we’re watching this video, but I’m sick of people always telling me that I’m not doing enough.  I know that many of my colleagues and I are doing some very creative, authentic things in our classrooms and I resent always being told otherwise.”

It occurs to me that it seems like I'm contradicting myself here.  Am I saying that we push people in our organizations to do better or am I saying that we need to celebrate.  I'm saying that we need both and that we need to differentiate when the time is for each.

To clarify further, I know that for some people in any given organization, celebrating success is the not the answer.  There are teachers in our system that struggle with change – teachers who don’t get the paradigm shift of the 21^st Century.  For these individuals, there are other answers: coaching, perhaps. 

But that’ll be the topic of my next blog post: “Differentiating Growth and Change Management”… or something like that J