Winning Small
When you’re working in the social good sector, there is a lot of pressure to “win big” – whether it’s landing big gifts, getting big outcomes from a program, or maximizing the donations given for the largest possible reach. After all, when you’re working to make the world a better place, there are so many areas in which big wins can make a really big difference.
Here’s the tricky thing about big wins, though – when we focus all our energy and celebration only on the really big wins, we may actually lose ground in the small, sustainable wins that add up to bigger results.
Small wins improve our present and our future.
In his book Atomic Habits, author James Clear explores the importance of “marginal gains” in helping us reach large milestones and better performance. Clear notes that “most of the significant things in life aren't stand-alone events, but rather the sum of all the moments when we chose to do things 1 percent better or 1 percent worse. Aggregating these marginal gains makes a difference.”
Just like compound interest in investing, the power of marginal gains is that they grow your growth – making them repeatable, reliable, and productive in a way that enables more big wins in the long-term.
Marginal gains keep us focused on getting better and better, on improving in manageable increments, and on having a clear understanding of what it takes to get better on purpose rather than expecting all our advancement to come through moonshots.
Small wins supercharge the skills and mindset we need to win big.
When was the last time you celebrated a small win? Last week? Last month? Last year? We’re not conditioned to value our small accomplishments as much as a big end result, and that can have a detrimental impact on our ability and desire to keep pursuing the mindset, behaviors, and approaches needed to produce wins of any size.
Dr. BJ Fogg, head of Stanford’s Behavior Design Lab, emphasizes the power of celebrating small wins as essential to developing the skills it takes to create positive change. He has a name for the feeling of accomplishment we get when we allow ourselves to celebrate – shine – and he explains that by practicing celebration and feeling shine in response to small wins, we are fostering the mindset, skills, and resilience needed to build on those successes toward a greater result.
Practicing and celebrating small wins with your team matters.
I want to be clear that big wins do warrant celebration. However, if you’re only celebrating big wins and ignoring smaller steps in the right direction, then you’re missing the chance to make your organization better now and in the future.
Making time to celebrate small wins with your team will improve team dynamics, organizational culture, and overall performance. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Set and share small wins regularly. Make small wins part of the normal conversation on your team. Depending on the cadence of your team meetings or how you use online collaboration tools, try asking everyone (leaders included) to choose a small win they want to accomplish that week and to report back at the end of the week. You can also make small wins a standing meeting icebreaker or closeout, or include it in a regular team email – the key is to make it a quick and ongoing practice.
Make a "wins" or “shine” board in a shared team location or digital collaboration space. No win is too small. All improvements lead to improvements that the whole team can build on. Make reviewing the wins board a regular ritual in team meetings and properly celebrate them so everyone gets to feel the shine of these contributions.
Throw a going away party for goodbyes to old systems and processes. Wins aren’t just about doing something new; they can also be about what you’ll stop doing. That program that no longer fits with the modern expression of your mission? That process that someone on the team re-tooled to remove a bunch of unnecessary steps? That form that took 25 minutes to fill out and no one ever really looked at the results? Throw them a proper send-off that enables the team to really celebrate how important it was to stop doing things that take time and energy away from the things you really want to focus on.
My small win for the day was typing the first two sentences of this blog post. What was yours?