Celebration Is A Skill

I’m not great at reading financial statements.

I can do it when I need to, but it takes me more time and effort than it does for lots of other people and I prefer to avoid it when I can.

But that doesn’t mean I can ignore the economic reality of my business or the charities where I serve as a director. I still have to do my job, which means I need to develop the skill of understanding finances.

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For years now I’ve been urging leaders to celebrate.

I’ve tried to provide encouragement, evidence, and approaches to help understand the importance and the powerful leverage of celebrating to reinforce values, increase results, and improve organizational culture.

And some have gone the message. But some missed it, and I think I know one of the reasons why.

I was treating celebration as a tactic, as a strategy, even as a calling…

But I now see that, more accurately, celebration is a skill.

No less so than reading financial statements, delivering a performance review, making an ask to a major donor, or putting together a compelling slide deck. It’s something every leader needs to be able to do, and it’s something that can be learned and developed.

Healthy leaders make a point of developing the skills they lack, at least well enough to not hold them, or their organizations, back from their potential. That doesn’t mean becoming a genius-level expert. But it does require us to make an effort to not be fundamentally deficient.

And when we recognize celebration as another skill it allows us to use the same approaches we’ve used to develop in other areas to make sure we’re not limiting ourselves by being inadequate in this one.

So, if celebration doesn’t seem to come naturally for you (and this is true for many leaders), commit yourself to getting better. Ask other people who do it well to help you. Do some reading, set some goals, find a celebration mentor, or just commit to doing it often enough to be a little more skilled next month than this month, and go from there.

As much as I am in awe of those who comprehend complex financial formulas intuitively, you may be mystified by those who have a knack for celebrating the right things, the right ways, with the right people, to get powerful results. But we can both get better.

Let me know if I can help.