PRACTICE 3 SET UP YOUR TEAM TO GET RESULTS

I once worked at a luxury hotel in Paris that prided itself on extraordinary customer service. Whenever a VIP would visit, the staff took extra care to set the dinner tables perfectly. They had years of experience and knew their jobs inside and out. But invariably, after the waiters had set a VIP’s table, the supervisor would stop by. She would study everything, then reposition a champagne flute. A minute later, the assistant manager would show up and refold a linen napkin. The staff members would glance at each other as management corrected their work. But it wasn’t over. The general manager would then stroll from his top-floor office to the VIP table. After a moment of reflection, he would rearrange the centerpiece!

After a while, the staff learned not to bother with getting the placements perfect—they knew management would do it themselves. By taking over and doing the work, these hotel leaders unwittingly sabotaged their long-term success (unless their goal was to have several layers of management adjust forks every night). Their team members grew indifferent and even resentful. They had little incentive to bring their best ideas and skills when management would simply override them anyway.

—VICTORIA

I’m always surprised how many people come to work every day and have no idea why they’re doing what they’re doing. If people are doing their jobs solely because their boss told them to, it sucks engagement right out of a team.

You often get promoted because of your stellar results. As the new manager, you start to build trust and rapport with your new team when, suddenly, you hit a snag. That’s when the common mindset above kicks in: telling people what to do and often even more deadly, resorting to your comfort zone to do it yourself—after all, you know how to produce results. It seems faster, more controllable, and guaranteed to succeed.

But the common mindset shuts down team creativity and ownership (think of the hotel staff in Victoria’s story), places a huge burden on the manager, and destroys trust. In this scenario, the boss has to know all the answers, oversee every detail, and crack the whip to make sure it gets done. I would know—I spent quite a few years with this mindset and had to consciously break myself of it. It just doesn’t work long term (and in my case, even short term!). As chief marketing officer, I caught myself peering over my employees’ shoulders to help choose which type of ribbon to use on a mail piece (satin, obviously). At one point, I was so focused on ribbons that one afternoon a newer employee walked up to me and asked if I had more ribbon. I sarcastically responded, “Sure. A whole roll, right here in my pocket.” To my horror, he believed me. I had set the expectation that the CMO of a global professional-services company would personally manage ribbon inventory. It became a ludicrous lesson in micromanagement.

If leaders tell their teams exactly how to debug the code, write the grant application, or issue ribbon—they’ll be doing the same thing a year from now. It’s not scalable. If you’re not delegating (which also involves teaching, coaching, and advising), you’re an individual producer masquerading as a leader. You may think nobody knows. In fact, they do… everyone knows.

In contrast, the effective mindset helps your team become invested in decisions and understand the big picture behind the daily grind. But it does require an ongoing investment of time, patience, and maturity. Great leaders plan goals with their teams rather than for them, and delegate tasks without abandoning or micromanaging. They shift from telling team members what to do, to aligning their work to greater purposes and supporting their efforts.

Let me share a somewhat humbling story of how my successor transformed the level of engagement in the Marketing division after me through adherence to this principle. For nearly a decade, I decided the budget and goals for our Marketing team somewhat unilaterally. Every year, I would sit with my own boss, door closed, discuss the team goals, develop a budget, then dole out resources to the team as I saw fit. This worked quite well… because no one knew the difference. I centralized power and decision making at my level and above, and although I discussed tactics with my team, I ultimately decided what would be approved and at what funding level.

When my successor took on the role, he—like all new bosses—set out to create his own cultural standards and processes. One of the first things he did was open up the budget to his direct reports. He set the priorities with his boss, and then, unlike my process, he sat down with his team, discussed the goals of the division, asked for their input, and then built the budget transparently with them, which developed a much higher level of engagement and empowerment around that process.

Then he took it a step further. Once he knew the budget allocated for their projects, he turned over portions of the budget to them, and they decided how to invest it for the highest return. Now the social media manager had his own budget and decided how to spend it. So did the marketing automation manager, the creative services director, and so on.

As I reflect on my approach versus his, I’ve been inspired to trust my team members more and hoard information less. If I had a redo, I would have been less fearful about turning over some control and more interested in the team’s insights, because they were closer to the actual work that needed to get done to achieve the goals. My successor’s process was high involvement, high commitment—versus my process, which was no involvement, compulsory commitment.

A few years ago, I was working with a franchisee of an international fast-food chain who faced a difficult decision after Sweden passed tax reforms. He either had to increase revenues, or cut costs by letting people go. At first, he tried to motivate his people to do more with extrinsic motivators like performance bonuses. But that didn’t have much of an effect, and it looked like he would have to reduce his workforce across ten stores.

After an in-depth discussion, we brought the entire staff together, and he shared the “why” behind what was going on: the tax calculation had changed, and stores needed to be more profitable to save jobs. Together, the teams collaborated on the goals they needed to achieve and the specific behaviors they would adopt to meet those goals. The owner made himself available to support the staff in the “how.”

Almost immediately, things changed. Crew members made improvements and reduced costs. Management removed obstacles that got in the way or rearranged resources to fit current needs. And the results skyrocketed! Soon these ten stores were outperforming others and met the goals they’d set, saving many jobs. But it only happened once the owner and his management team changed their thinking first, then shared what was going on and stepped back.

—VICTORIA

SETTING UP YOUR TEAM SO YOU CAN WORK ON THE SYSTEM

Dr. Stephen R. Covey taught a related concept that inspires and haunts me daily. He described two types of leadership responsibilities, both valuable: working “in the system” (doing things right) and working “on the system” (doing the right things). Working in the system is the daily job, tasks, meetings, and projects to keep the business going. Working on the system includes higher-level strategic direction, visioning, and systems alignment. Effective leaders balance their focus.

Working in the system isn’t a bad thing. It’s necessary: rolling up your sleeves and getting the work done with your colleagues. But too often, leaders still acting as individual producers are solely working in the system. Interestingly, some leaders stay working in the system to find validation and see tangible results from their efforts. This sometimes happens when their own leaders aren’t engaged or providing them with any feedback.

If you want to develop empowerment, buy-in, and skills for the future, you have to work on the system. That means focusing on long-term strategy, ensuring the right people are in the right roles, and clarifying the vision for the future.

Again, we work both ways; but asking yourself when can be invaluable for both you and your team. It’s a delicate balance, and great leaders constantly assess where they’re spending their time.

This mental check has helped me move out of my do-it-for-them micromanagement tendencies. I ask myself continually, “Am I in, or am I on?” Sometimes I’m in: focusing on quality, immediate results. Working on the system is tougher. It forces me to think longer term. Am I delegating strategically so that I have enough time to build capacity for the future? What does six, twelve, eighteen months look like for the team and me? Am I developing strengths and confidences in myself and my team so we can all move up?

This practice will help you resist landing short-term gains at the expense of building long-term capability. By clarifying goals and delegating effectively, your team will know exactly what they need to do to win—and you should feel some much-needed relief from having to shoulder the burden on your own.

I always tried to have the approach that everyone on my team should be able to have my job in the future. Maybe they don’t want to or choose to, but that’s my goal: I’m growing future directors of learning and development.

Some managers might feel threatened by that mindset. I’m always training my team to succeed in their current roles, while also preparing them to take on the next one, and using delegation as a tool to do so.

You have a lot of big goals as a leader, and that can be a little bit scary. You might feel it’s all on your shoulders, but you can train everyone on your team to carry increasing weight.

—VICTORIA

SKILL 1: ALIGN GOALS TO ORGANIZATIONAL PRIORITIES

By focusing on the right priorities, you can achieve amazing results; but with the wrong focus, you can take the ship down.

Can you answer these questions?

1. What are your team’s top three priorities?
2. What are your boss’s top three priorities?
3. How does your team contribute to your organization’s priorities?

   … and can everyone (anyone?) on your team answer these questions too?

Some leaders struggle to narrow their focus to a few key priorities. They try to do everything. Others, like me, have no problem focusing—but not always on the right thing. As a marketing leader, I was occasionally more invested in a strategy than my own boss was, and my intense focus became a source of frustration for him. No one ever accused me of lacking focus—but was I focused on the highest-leverage activities for the company?

Through this and other experiences, I learned to check if my priorities were aligned with my leader’s. That’s where my credibility really came from. When he saw me using my hard-earned influence to achieve his top priorities, I was unstoppable; but when I was off—by guessing, following a personal preference, or leading out without permission—I found myself at odds with him. That wasn’t where I wanted to be.

Don’t guess what your team should focus on. You can run with your strengths, take on projects you’re passionate about, and dream up interesting initiatives—as long as they align with the organization’s priorities. Make sure that your team is focused on what your boss wants to accomplish.

If you haven’t discussed your team’s goals with your leader, request a meeting: “Would you be willing to spend twenty minutes going over our team goals for the upcoming month/quarter/year?”

Make sure you understand the why behind the goals too. If you’re not bought in, your team certainly won’t be.

—TODD

If you can’t meet with your manager, don’t use that as an excuse to not align your work with their priorities. I’m not able to meet with my boss as often as we’d like. So I’ve gotten into the habit of emailing him once a week with something like “Five things you may need to know.” I make it clear and to the point, always bulleted. Included are highlights of my team’s focus and decisions I’ve made that I need him to know about. Unless he responds otherwise, I charge forward. Nine times out of ten, he simply writes back, “Thanks.” That’s enough to make sure we’re aligned.

This process may work in your culture too. It allows you to stay connected to extremely busy leaders and keep them abreast of the most important things going on. This email update isn’t intended to replace a 1-on-1, but you might be surprised how it keeps you oriented toward your leader’s true north.

CHOOSE A FEW MEASURABLE GOALS

Limit your goals to the most important. If you have discretion about setting your goals (versus receiving them from your leader), involve your team in formulating them. Not only will they be doing the work, they’ll often have a perspective you (and other leaders) don’t.

You will likely have more great ideas than your team has the capacity to execute. A lot of leaders overestimate how many goals their team can pack into any given period, insisting everything is important. But humans are hardwired to do only a few things at a time with excellence. Ideally, your team should focus on no more than three important goals at a time.

Of course, this is easier said than done. You can’t walk around saying, “We’re only doing three things, sorry.” There’s a careful balance between keeping your boss happy with your team’s performance and keeping your team from burning out. When discussing your team’s priorities, consider having a transparent conversation with your manager about this balance. Any mature leader will understand this challenge, because they’ve been there as well.

If your boss hands down unrealistic or too many goals, push back on them respectfully. Consider saying, “I’m sorry, but I know that having so many competing goals is going to crush my people. We will work hard, but this isn’t setting our team up for success in the long term, and I’m concerned it might cause some to burn out and leave.” That’s a bold statement, and it may take a lot of courage to say it. You have to earn your way into that, with a reputation of saying yes to a lot of things in the past, stretching, and using your resourcefulness and initiative.

If your leader insists on keeping a dozen goals, ask if you can stagger them in a hierarchy of importance. Prioritize them so you can focus on two or three at a time.

Your goals must be specific and measurable. They usually contain a starting line, a finish line, and a deadline, which we express as: From X to Y by When.

For example:

• Increase customer-satisfaction scores from 88 percent to 90 percent by January 31.
• Reduce project timelines from 48 to 38 days by the end of the fiscal year.
• Cut costs from $1.4 million to $1.2 million by the end of the quarter.

USE A SCOREBOARD

Chris McChesney, lead author of FranklinCovey’s bestselling book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, says, “People play differently when they’re keeping score.”

A scoreboard can help people see where they are against their goals, relative to where they should be. It can be a fun way to motivate people—and keep your goals top of mind. Without it, you risk falling into business as usual.

Here are four key traits of an effective scoreboard:

• Simple. While you may track a lot of data as a leader, the team only needs to see the goal and the few metrics they chose that drive it. You should be able to tell in a glance if you’re winning or losing: green/yellow/red bars, emojis, speedometers, etc. Depending on your situation, you might be tracking the team’s overall performance toward the goal or breaking it down by individual.
• Visible. Out of sight, out of mind. No one will care about winning if the scoreboard is stuck in a drawer. Post it in a high-traffic place. Make it everyone’s screensaver or desktop image.
• Updated frequently. Nothing is more demotivating than announcing new goals with fanfare and designing a scoreboard that gets everyone’s attention… and then not keeping it updated. You must install systems to continually update the data in real time as much as possible (especially if you’re tracking individual performance).
• As engaging as your culture allows. You don’t want your team scoreboard to get lost in a sea of emails, files, or even other goal scoreboards. Make your scoreboard attention-grabbing. Capitalize on inside jokes in your company’s culture. We once hired a cartoonist to produce a comic strip every day of an especially important campaign. Another scoreboard featured our leaders slowly sinking into quicksand unless our metrics improved. If at all possible, make it fun.

Remember that scoreboards can be inspiring—or shaming. If you’re measuring individual performance, be thoughtful, careful, and aware about how the people on the bottom of the list react. Do they feel motivated to rise up the scoreboard—or are they just getting pummeled at the bottom? Know your culture. Tracking individual performance publicly could be demotivating when people didn’t sign up for a role that suddenly has a competitive or comparative aspect to it. Use good judgment.

HOLD TEAM ACCOUNTABILITY MEETINGS

Without accountability, teams will lose focus on what’s important—it’s just human nature. The urgencies of daily activity will soon take over, while the scoreboard collects dust.

Accountability should have a rhythm to it. Bring the team together regularly for brief team accountability meetings, dedicated to moving the needle on the scoreboard.

Take note: These are not staff meetings, where you share updates, make announcements, or introduce new hires. They’re also not 1-on-1 meetings, as discussed in Practice 2. During accountability meetings (which are very short and even done while standing), the agenda is simple: team members review the scoreboard, account for the commitments they made last week, and make new commitments for the coming week.

Here are some best practices:

• Don’t discuss anything unrelated to your goals, the scoreboard, or your commitments. This takes some discipline—conversation has a tendency to spin out, so limit the discussion to the commitments as they relate to the scoreboard.
• Keep the meeting as short as possible, ten to twenty minutes max. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think people hate meetings—but they do hate unproductive, unfocused, agendaless meetings that waste time. They like meetings where stuff gets done, that start and end on time, and that have a clear purpose.
• Have a consistent agenda. The purpose of an accountability meeting is always the same: moving the metrics on the scoreboard. Each person reports on their commitments from the previous week and then commits to one or two actions in the next week that will bring the team closer to the goal. These commitments must represent a specific deliverable supporting the agreed-upon goals and be achievable within the person’s ability and authority.
• Clear the path. Too few leaders recognize that an important part of their role is to make their team members’ jobs easier. That doesn’t mean you’re doing their job for them; rather, you’re clearing obstacles that only your title, stature, tenure, or experience can tackle. What might take you ten minutes could take them two weeks. Sometimes less mature leaders are unwilling or unable to use their influence. With time, you’ll learn when to do it (and, just as important, when not to). Clearing the path isn’t always fun; sometimes you have to bulldoze through bureaucracy and handle uncomfortable conversations, but you’ll earn the respect of your team.
• In advance, consider assigning a member of the group to facilitate each meeting. You may need to show them how to run it, but this further moves accountability to the team.

As simple as these meetings seem, they build powerful momentum toward achieving your goals, keeping everyone on the same page, and working toward the same big goals together. But your team will only take them as seriously as you do. If you cancel them frequently or stay glued to your phone during them, the team will check out as well. Hold them regularly, keep them focused, and model their importance. Instead of a vague outcome they can’t influence, your team will feel personally accountable for a winning result that’s within their power.

Short. Fast-paced. Standing. Go get ’em.

SKILL 2: DELEGATE

When I was twenty years old, I worked at the Florida headquarters of a U.S. presidential campaign. (Fill in the candidate of your choice so we can stay friends.) Before a big rally in Tampa, the campaign manager tasked me with creating a balloon arch for the stage backdrop, an image that would be broadcast on the evening news to millions of people. I had no idea how to create a balloon arch—surely there was a science to it!—so I chased down the campaign manager to ask some follow-up questions. He said, “I don’t know, Scott, you figure it out. I trust you.”

I remember thinking, “Why would you possibly trust me to do this alone? I don’t know what I’m doing!” To him, the balloon arch was one of a thousand tasks in his purview. To me, it was the most important project I’d ever had.

I ended up putting together a balloon arch that wasn’t too shabby, but I’ve thought about this incident many times since then: Was the campaign manager empowering me or abandoning me? Was he showing confidence in me? Or was the whole thing super trivial and I didn’t realize it?

Ultimately, it was a combination of things. I was overthinking it, and he knew me well enough to show confidence in me that I didn’t have in myself. Interestingly, I’m employing his same tactic thirty years later. When a competent employee asks me for something that I know they can do themself, I’ll usually push it right back to them, because the growth that moment builds in them is lifelong.

I’ve come to see delegating like taking a road trip. The abandoning leader wants to be driven to the destination with as little involvement as possible. This leader delegates as a way of off-loading work onto someone else. With a blanket, pillow, and headphones, this leader is curled up in the passenger’s seat asleep, not offering to help with navigation or passing the time with conversation—and certainly not paying for gasoline. The driver feels overworked, unmotivated, and deeply resentful.

The micromanager delegates as a way of controlling things from the passenger’s seat. They expect the driver to do everything the way they would and dictate the smallest details: “Watch out for that car in the next lane! Use your turn signal now!” The driver feels irritated and distracted. The micromanager knows (or has been told) that they should let the other person drive, but wishes they were actually driving.

The empowering leader delegates by willingly inviting the team member to take the wheel. They find ways to help the driver, like troubleshooting the GPS, finding a radio station, and putting gas in the car. This leader focuses on supporting the driver, not directing their every move. At the end of the trip, the driver asks, “Where are we going next?”

HOW TO DELEGATE EFFECTIVELY

In the previous scenario, we can imagine the empowering leader’s driver as being committed and even excited about the trip; the abandoning leader’s driver as indifferent or even resentful; and the micromanager’s driver as ready to rebel or quit at the earliest opportunity.

How you handle delegation affects your team’s growth, engagement, and motivation. Consider using the following process to delegate effectively:

Define the project. If you don’t understand a project, you can’t delegate it properly. What are the objectives and deadlines? What skills will someone need to complete the task? How much time will it take? Have you defined what success looks like and identified key metrics to pursue? If you’re not clear on what success looks like, you can be sure no one else is either.

This is such an easy step to skip. Even the most seasoned business leaders benefit from asking themselves how they’ll measure success. Sometimes all of us are tempted to launch right into the “what” and skip the “why,” which is important not just to our teams but to ourselves.

Decide if the project should be delegated. Especially with first-time managers, delegating can be a slippery slope. You might be tempted to hoard things, because you want to own them and get them done according to your standards. On the other hand, if you overdelegate, you can get a reputation of not doing any of the work. Be deliberate about delegating authentically.

Some leadership responsibilities should never be delegated, and this depends heavily on the cultural norms of your organization. Typically, as a leader, if it’s overly complicated or requires great sensitivity, you should own it. Don’t delegate the hard stuff and keep the easy, fun stuff—the opposite, in fact. You need to be willing to take on the tough people, strategies, and systems issues, because in all likelihood, you’re responsible for those problems as the leader. You also have to build a reputation of rolling up your sleeves with your employees. If your team sees that you’re occasionally willing to sit on the floor packing boxes, they won’t accuse you of delegating through neglect or delegating to get out of work.

I try to delegate to make the best use of my time, not to pawn things off on my team. However, occasionally I will dip into lower-level tasks to remind my team that I’m not above that work and we’re in this together. It’s a culture-building moment. As a leader, I shouldn’t do everything… and I am willing to do anything. I make sure that of all the complaints people have about me, no one will say, “Scott can’t handle the tough issue” or “He delegated the crappy stuff to us.”

Decide whom to delegate the project to. For each team member you are considering delegating a task to, think through this quick checklist:

• Do they have the time?
• Is this something they’ve expressed interest in?
• Do they have the skills needed? How much coaching will be required?
• Do they typically meet deadlines?
• Will they benefit from working on this task by learning a new skill or improving an existing one?
• Will they work well with the other stakeholders?
• Is there any chance that giving this person this task will be seen as unfair by the team?
• Will they see it as a compliment and reward, or as a burden?

Scope the project with the team member. Even if you have a vision for a project in your head, you can’t assume it’s clear in other people’s minds.

People often are afraid to ask questions of their manager for fear it will make them look incapable. Then they lack clarity, leading to procrastination, or worse, failure to deliver the true end in mind.

Blaine Lee, a renowned executive coach and author of The Power Principle, said that nearly all, if not all, conflict results from mismatched, unfulfilled, or violated expectations—whether it’s negotiating rates with your childcare provider or setting vacation schedules with your team. Think about your last discussions where some conflict arose: If you had been clearer about your needs and wants, and listened more closely to others’, could you have prevented the snowball of confusion and resulting conflict?

You must clarify expectations, sometimes even to the point of absurdity. It’s your job to say things like, “This would be a great time to ask any clarifying questions. Everything is on the table. Nothing is undiscussable—even uncomfortable questions.”

Clarifying expectations is a leadership competency. It may take extra effort, diplomacy, and a stretch beyond your comfort level. When a leader delegates and gets back a poor result, it is usually the leader’s responsibility. I’ve learned to minimize confusion up front by setting clear expectations. The clearer you describe the purpose, vision, and expected results, the less you have to manage the process itself. In other words, explain the “why” and let the team determine the “how.”

The main obstacle is often taking the time to clarify expectations. But if you don’t do this, you will find yourself in the perpetual cycle of constantly fixing, cleaning up, and doing it yourself.

Here’s a framework to delegate work in a way that reveals the “why” and creates clarity.

• State the why. Clarify why this project is important.
• State the what. Clarify what success looks like and how success will be measured.
• Discuss the how.
  • Guidelines: the standards and conditions that must be met, including the deadline.
  • Resources: people, budget, tools, etc.
  • Accountability: how to track progress and be accountable. You might want to meet in person, get a status report over email, etc.
  • Impact: define the benefits if the project is completed (and the consequences if the work is not).

Don’t be tempted to rely on your memory alone. Prevent misunderstandings and lost accountability through clear note-taking and a record of assignments.

Support. You’ve delegated the assignment. Now you can put your feet up on your desk and relax. Just kidding. Apart from all your other work, you’ll need to support your team member in their new assignment, calibrated to their experience and confidence. They might have to go through rough patches that might stretch their competencies. Remember, it’s healthy for your team to make some mistakes—that’s how people learn. Even when you’ve been enormously clear, there are going to be less-than-perfect results as people level up their skillsets and knowledge.

One of my first leaders had a cultural imperative: we were pre-forgiven for mistakes. This encouraged brainstorming and appropriate risk-taking. We knew that if we made a mistake, we weren’t going to get in trouble. Our responsibility was not to take overly risky measures and tell him as soon as things went sideways.

To further support us, he empowered us frontline employees to make customer-service decisions up to $500 on the spot, and he would never second-guess our decision. More than $500, and we had to involve him. That empowerment unleashed people’s creativity. Because it was such a precious gift, people rarely used it. We didn’t want to disappoint him. He gave so much latitude that we took less than we otherwise would have. We were so appreciative of the trust that we never wanted to violate it.

Establishing a pre-forgiveness culture means trusting your team with a level of empowerment. They’re going to make some mistakes, and they’re pre-forgiven. In exchange, they can’t be cavalier. They don’t work outside established bounds. You widened the lane, so there’s no reason for them to go off-road. They have to report if something is failing so you can help them get back on track.

Pre-forgiveness lightens the air. This level of trust is rare, especially with new leaders who are usually focused on buttoning up and tightening down, which leaves little room for growth.

Pre-forgiveness in your culture might look different. And if someone violates it, you might pull back. But most people will respond the way we did: gratitude drove respect, which drove judicious thinking, which drove better client results and sales growth.

If your team member is struggling with the assigned task, check in during your 1-on-1s. Look to Practice 4 for insights on how to give feedback. If they come back with an underwhelming result, take the time to repaint a clear vision of success. To prevent a repeat, agree to check in more frequently this time.

A FINAL NOTE: WORK HARD, CELEBRATE BIG

Like most sales organizations, FranklinCovey has an annual kickoff meeting at the beginning of the fiscal year. This is a time to celebrate successes, lick any wounds, share lessons learned, and set goals for the coming year. As you might expect, these conferences can devolve into a litany of speeches, career posturing, and death by PowerPoint. Lots of useful information, but it can feel like overload and less celebratory than was intended.

One year in particular, we were on the cusp of launching a global refresh of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People work session, a live multiday program for professionals to learn and implement the contents of the book. In the coming months, we would simultaneously launch the product in multiple languages across 170 cities worldwide. A massive undertaking that required unprecedented effort, focus, and discipline.

In preparation for unveiling the product to our internal associates, the Marketing division calculated how many people worldwide had experienced the 7 Habits in total through live work sessions, online learning, blended learning, podcasts, webinars, print and ebooks, and keynote speeches, in what was for many a life-changing experience. Our research showed it was more than thirty-seven million people, at the time. Think about that: we had directly, positively, sustainably impacted the lives of thirty-seven million people for the better. It was both humbling and validating.

We couldn’t just slap that number on a slide and call it a day. It needed to be visual and visceral.

As an executive vice president, I’d been afforded a thirty-minute keynote presentation in front of the entire company during the conference. So on the morning of my speech, after planning and trial runs, our team stealthily wheeled fourteen confetti cannons (the size of riding lawn mowers) into the hotel ballroom and hid them under tablecloths, ready to be deployed at a precisely agreed-upon time. This required intense coordination with the hotel management. The fire marshal had to inspect the pressurized air tanks, and the cleanup crew was standing by.

These fourteen cannons were loaded with thirty-seven million pieces of crepe-paper confetti in the shape of 3 inch-size mini people. We weren’t just going to report our impact. We were going to show it in a way no one would ever forget. When was the last time you experienced thirty-seven million of anything?

Interestingly, up until moments before my speech, another executive who knew the confetti plan implored me not to do it. He felt the silliness was going to diminish my credibility, and the other executives would not appreciate it the way I envisioned. This particular colleague asked that I reconsider my plan, even as I was preparing to walk onstage. He had my best interests in mind, but I had calibrated the upside and downsides and wasn’t turning back. I felt so compelled about the value of the visual to paint a magnificent vision not just of what we had achieved, but of what was possible in the future, that I was willing to take the risk to my own brand. (Plus it’s hard to return loaded confetti cannons.)

It was me. I told him not to do it.

—TODD

I thanked him for his counsel, walked onstage, and unleashed the most spectacular indoor confetti downpour anyone has seen short of winning a World Series. It was a twelve-minute nonstop barrage of confetti. You could bury a body in it. Otherwise buttoned-up people were on the floor making snow angels and throwing handfuls of confetti in the air.

This demonstration wasn’t merely confetti for confetti’s sake. It was a carefully orchestrated visual and emotional strategy to ingrain in everyone’s mind the power and reach our brand had across thirty-seven million people. Imagine what it would have looked like if we had demonstrated the next thirty-seven million with confetti. (No, we didn’t do this—we do have an environmental conscience. And yes, it was recycled. No paper dolls were harmed in this display.) Frankly, not everyone reacted the same way. I’m guessing some people thought it was frivolous, and others truly thought it was life-affirming, with hundreds in the middle.

When the last confetti had fallen, I calmly and deliberately explained the “why” behind the “what.” I challenged everybody to visualize a client who they knew had been impacted by the 7 Habits—to picture the person, the leader, the line worker, the teacher, the receptionist. For every person they could visualize in their mind, I asked them to pick up a piece of confetti and put it in their wallet, purse, briefcase, or planner—whatever they carried with them day to day. And every time they came across it, I wanted it to serve as a reminder of our mission and impact.

For weeks post-conference, FranklinCovey colleagues from around the world were texting and emailing me photos of confetti falling out of their pockets. People were finding confetti in their bathrooms, in their underwear. Bits and pieces of confetti had stuck around, which was amazing because it unintentionally reinforced the visualization of our impact. I couldn’t have planned a longer shelf life for any presentation had I tried.

I found confetti in my shoe after traveling back to Stockholm!

—VICTORIA

And nearly a decade on, whenever I visit our offices in Japan, China, Brazil, Portugal, or Mexico, someone will inevitably take out their wallet, pull out a barely identified piece of confetti, and tell me what the message meant to them. They’re choosing to keep these reminders through their own initiatives; I’ve done nothing to follow up with it since the conference.

Not everybody can shoot confetti cannons, but that’s okay: Big celebrations don’t necessarily need big budgets. What’s your scalable equivalent to celebrate your successes? Thoughtful recognition and creative surprises can make a decades-long impact.

Often in focused, hardworking companies, we get in ruts. It’s a mistake to think if we celebrate, we’re gloating or losing our edge. Of course, don’t celebrate everything, because then it doesn’t mean anything. But when you’ve done the hard work of this practice—focusing on your most critical important goals, aligning your work to achieve them, and accomplishing this as a team—I truly believe that you cannot celebrate enough.

People want to have fun in their jobs. They want to feel appreciated. They want to look forward to coming to work. So after you’ve worked your heart out to achieve a goal, take some time to celebrate.