Celebrating winning with your team is not just a “nice to have"; it is why you hire people and build teams in the first place.

Somebody told me a while back that if a company stops celebrating, then it’s going to start losing people, not because of competition, not because of better pay, but simply because the company hasn’t shown them that the work they’re producing matters enough to celebrate. That stuck with me for a long time, because I've personally experienced it many times inside companies that appeared successful on paper and yet internally seemed very empty. Companies continue to reach new milestones, meet goals, and achieve success. However, something continues to leave that no one seems able to put their finger on until enough people have left.

It makes a lot of sense why people want to rush past celebrating wins in fast-growing companies. There is always another quarter coming, another goal to shoot for, and another problem right behind the last one you solved. Rushing past celebrating feels like a luxury when the next issue is staring you right in the face. Many leaders of high-growth companies tend to view pauses (like celebrations) as friction points as opposed to functional aspects of leadership. This point consistently misses the impact that these pauses have on individuals who worked towards the accomplishment and what is silently communicated to them about the value of their efforts toward the organization they are contributing to.

Celebrations are not a motivation tool; recognition is not either. Both perspectives are far too narrow and transactional regarding what occurs when a team comes together to celebrate a win. What celebrations do at their core is take individual effort and turn it into collective meaning. Celebrations allow a company to acknowledge the disparate contributions of multiple people throughout weeks or months of work and collectively recognize that they all contributed to this achievement in some manner. When a team doesn't celebrate, the effort that occurred remains dispersed, largely unnoticed, and mostly private. In short, the achievement may appear on some sort of digital dashboard somewhere; however, it never truly becomes a part of a team's narrative about themselves, i.e., the only version of an achievement that creates anything enduring.

Gallup conducted a workplace study, which indicated that employees whose contributions are frequently acknowledged are 4.6 times more likely to believe they're capable of producing exceptional work and much less likely to initiate a passive job search within the following year. Unfortunately, the study did not capture the essence of what develops inside teams that celebrate together over time. What is developed includes shared memories of having achieved something. Private knowledge among teammates that others notice the cost associated with achieving something. Collective understanding among teammates that this particular group of people is worthy of putting forth maximum effort because they'll demonstrate respect and care for your efforts when you bring them to fruition.

One of my favorite founders recently spoke about her thirty-person product development team growing over four years without experiencing any turnover in an industry where eighteen-month team cycle periods are common. When I asked her what contributed to such low levels of employee turnover, she didn't reference compensation, flexibility, or any other structural elements typically discussed during retention discussions. Instead, she referenced Friday afternoon meetings. More specifically, she stated she ensured each Friday afternoon ended with fifteen minutes dedicated to stopping work and telling the story of what occurred during the previous week. Not a metrics review meeting nor a post-mortem meeting with assigned tasks. Simply the story from someone who lived through it of what the week was really like and what accomplishments the team accomplished. She stated people remained engaged because they felt as though they were a part of something being observed. Additionally, she believed that the work wasn't vanishing into a product roadmap but instead developing into something with memory, shape, and a sense of its own importance.

This is precisely what celebrations accomplish when done with purpose. Celebrations create a memory for the work. Teams that develop shared memories of achieving something together go into future challenging endeavors knowing two things: 1) That they've previously overcome challenges together and emerged unscathed, and 2) They're glad to be in the same room as their teammates again.

By 2026, remote and hybrid work models have further reduced opportunities for naturally occurring experiences in shared settings and require greater intentional design of shared experiences. Therefore, a leader who intentionally sets aside time for celebratory activities isn't being overly sentimental; they are demonstrating structural intelligence related to maintaining cohesion among team members through prolonged stretches of unglamorous work that occur between milestone achievements. Because it is in those stretches that most of the actual work occurs and teams maintain momentum through those extended stretches due to their ability to recall both individually and collectively what it felt like the last time they won something together.

Wins that don't receive recognition aren't truly "wins" in terms of how teams remember and recount their achievements. Furthermore, the leader who consistently allows their focus on urgent issues to prevent them from taking time to celebrate has unconsciously taught their team that those moments weren't important enough to spend time thinking about or recognizing.

Many leaders underestimate how much this type of "teaching" impacts their team and how long it lingers compared to a single win.

Can you recall when your team last took time away from daily tasks and came together to genuinely celebrate something? Was it a Slack message congratulating someone? A few words of praise during a weekly status update? No. I am asking if you can remember when your team took a true break from work to stop and genuinely recognize something together. If you cannot recall when that last occurred, that gap should certainly receive consideration.