0:00:00 A: I’ve been trying and, you know, I’ve been tested. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast with your hosts, Ben Wright and Jemimah Ashleigh. Ben, known as the sales strategist, and Jemimah, our resident visibility expert, are here to share their wealth of knowledge and experience with a little fun along the way. Whether you’re a leader, entrepreneur, or aspiring business owner, this is the podcast where we share everything we know about business to help you succeed.
0:00:31 A: Let’s get started. Welcome to the Friends in Business podcast.
0:00:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: Hey, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Friends in Business. I’ve just been saying, Ben, that I think I need to grab this jumper off. It is getting really quite warm up here at the moment.
0:00:52 Ben Wright: Yes.
0:00:53 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I said, I’m gonna go put a dress on.
0:00:54 Ben Wright: Yes, you do.
0:00:55 Jemimah Ashleigh: And you said, I don’t want to do that.
0:00:56 Ben Wright: Yes, I did.
0:00:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I said, you. You don’t have to wear one of my dresses.
0:01:00 Ben Wright: And you took it away to other chewy.
0:01:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Do you want to have we happy to borrow, like, do you want to borrow one for the next maybe The Christmas episode’s coming up shortly.
0:01:08 Ben Wright: Do I look like someone that’s going to look good in a dress?
0:01:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: You know what? Yeah, kind of.
0:01:12 Ben Wright: If my wife was here, she’d be having a field day right now, but. So the answer is no, I’m not going to wear a dress. Yes. It’s getting hot. The sun’s starting to get warm, but I love it. That’s what I like about up here at this time of year. Those chilly mornings and it starts to get warm. Anyway, today I’d like to celebrate that you made a good. But you didn’t. But what I do want to do is talk about celebrations and the importance of them in your teams.
0:01:39 Jemimah Ashleigh: For sure.
0:01:39 Ben Wright: For sure. So before we do so, just to give some context around this. So I work with predominantly sales leaders and their teams, but also I do work with very senior leaders of larger businesses and business owners. And one thing that consistently comes up from any leader is that they don’t feel like they celebrate enough. They’re the leaders that I work with. What you see from the literature and the statistics is that most leaders actually think they’re pretty good at coaching, pretty good at celebrations, and pretty good at everything that comes with it. But the reality is most of us aren’t. And the numbers don’t lie here. 78%. Lots of sources for surveys. I’ve got some really, really reliable ones. 78% of employees say they will work harder if they feel appreciated. And 70% of employees respect their managers more when they help them celebrate.
0:02:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And we’re not just talking about, like the office pizza party. Right. We’re talking about some really good metrics around really good genuine connection. Not the, you know. Yes. Sally had her birthday. Happy birthday, Sally. But this is around that we’ve done a big thing.
0:02:50 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:02:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Let’s celebrate that.
0:02:51 Ben Wright: Yeah. Now, that is one of the types of celebrations. But there’s more to it than her. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to put my hand up here. We’re mirrored. Right. So I’ve got my right hand up. Looks like left on the screen. Historically, I have been poor at this.
0:03:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, okay.
0:03:05 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I received some regular feedback in my 30s. Yes. I’m in my 40s now. That I didn’t celebrate the success of our team enough. And I waited for just the big moments to celebrate and I took that feedback on pretty heavily and actually think now that I’ve gone through probably not celebrating enough. The times I celebrate too much, sometimes I celebrate progress.
0:03:28 Jemimah Ashleigh: Sarah’s at work.
0:03:29 Ben Wright: Yeah. Yeah. Well done. You’ve turned up. But sometimes I’ll celebrate. Sometimes I will celebrate progress rather than acknowledge it.
0:03:36 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:03:36 Ben Wright: Sometimes we do just need to acknowledge progress rather than celebrating everything that’s happened. So, point is, I’ve spent lots of time on this over the last decade, so I’m going to share some things that work really well down into a framework of three.
0:03:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: Three.
0:03:49 Ben Wright: I’m back to trees. Yeah. It’s not going to fit well with my personality to do that, Jemimah. And it’s going to shorten now, what is becoming a good relationship very, very quickly. So these are the celebrations we do within our team. The way that these work really effectively is that we know exactly what we’re celebrating.
0:04:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:04:10 Ben Wright: And we do it in regular cadences.
0:04:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Would you recommend this is like a milestone thing or is this like a 12 working? We’ve done 12 months ago. We’ve signed this project.
0:04:18 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:04:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: This has been done. We’ve done this for 12 months. What’s the kind of. What does this look like?
0:04:22 Ben Wright: Yeah. So I recommend this around our key goals.
0:04:25 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah. Great.
0:04:26 Ben Wright: So as leaders, we should be each year sitting down doing our strategic planning. We set three key goals, we then break them down into action items. Who’s responsible? And they flood out nicely into a beautiful piece of strategy. Right. Which unfortunately, things get in the way of our best late plans. But the more we can stick to on those strategies, generally the better.
0:04:44 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:04:44 Ben Wright: Whole Another podcast episode. But when we can have our celebrations within our team centered around our goals, Ace number one ticked off. The second piece is when we can center them around our behaviors. So every team will have a set of goals. This is generally easier for leaders to comprehend. And I’ve worked with a terrific team in the finance industry recently and they’ve had no problems at all working through the hard black and white targets that we set around goals. But where it got harder was behaviors. And these behaviors, we can call them north stars, we can call them ways of working, we can call them how we operate together, what you can expect from us. There’s lots of different things, lots of different ways we can call them. But the behaviours is where it gets difficult because they’re softer skills and they’re things that take longer to build.
0:05:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: So what’s a couple of examples of that? Because behaviours can be good, bad, indifferent behaviour. What’s some examples of that?
0:05:44 Ben Wright: An example might be we look for gaps in our process and fix them. So the behavior is that we’re actually trying to find gaps in what we’re doing that we can systemize or build a process around that’s going to lead to a better customer experience. So an instance here where you celebrate might be that someone in your team was dealing with a customer. There was a process fail across the journey. They’d mapped out that customer journey, it.
0:06:10 Jemimah Ashleigh: Was identified, it’s been solved now and we have an ongoing, like patch, slash, fix further.
0:06:16 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah. And look, you might even celebrate in the early days of behavioural growth that they’ve identified it. But certainly we want to be celebrating more the milestone. Another piece might be that we train as a habit. Excellent.
0:06:30 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love that.
0:06:30 Ben Wright: So that we look for learning opportunities every time we can. And we had a team member who was out in front of a customer, they learned something about a competitor, they learned something about our offer, they learned a way that we could be better. And what they did was they found the solution or the learning outcome and then they shared it with the wider team.
0:06:50 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love it.
0:06:50 Ben Wright: So they built competency across the team as a result of an issue that they found themselves.
0:06:57 Jemimah Ashleigh: So it’s almost rewarding, this stepping into almost a managerial style role.
0:07:04 Ben Wright: Yeah. It’s leadership by default. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So those types of celebrations, they’re your internal team celebrations that I think are really, really impactful when you know what you celebrate.
0:07:16 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:07:16 Ben Wright: Right. And there’s lots of different ways we can celebrate. I love celebrating in a variety of manners. You can have cash, you can have incentives, you can have lunches, you can have shout outs, you can have emails, you can do videos. Right. Varying the way we celebrate is really important because if we just celebrate via money, teams expect to get money, they get desensitized to it and it’s not the driver for everyone. Everyone in your team is driven by different things. Some are by money, some are by recognition, some are by learning, some are by a sense of community. Right, so we’re going to tap into that.
0:07:49 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:07:50 Ben Wright: And celebrate an audit from race.
0:07:51 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:07:52 Ben Wright: Celebration number one. Done.
0:07:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Love it.
0:07:54 Ben Wright: Celebration number two is when we go from our team out. So this is when we’re looking to not just celebrate within our core group of people within our team, but we want others in the business to know what we’re doing. Where this is really impactful is during change management, about 70% of change. So two thirds of change management activities don’t work. Lots of literature out there around change management. I actually run my own unique program that I’ve built myself from the sum of a whole lot of data around change management. But one of those pieces is knowing when we need to bring others, other functions into what we’re trying to achieve and when we can do that. The fastest way to win people’s arts is storytelling. Episode 14. The storytelling is the fastest way there. But if we can do that through celebrations, ie, our team has just had a terrific result with X customer and it was because of operations, customer service, legal sales, and everyone pulled their bit. We want to celebrate it. Bang, out goes a video and everyone gets to get involved in it.
0:09:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I love that.
0:09:02 Ben Wright: So there’s celebrations out that are generally driven by your team. And I think a really impactful example is when we’re trying to win more share of the minds of other people within our business because we have external customers and we have internal customers. When we’re trying to win their share of mind, we need to do more. So than just through. Here’s our program, here’s our goals, here’s what we need to achieve. Sometimes we need to win their hearts as well. And through celebrating, we actually make people feel part of the story, they feel part of something special that we’re trying to achieve. And then from that you get. You’re in their hearts.
0:09:37 Jemimah Ashleigh: Well, and I think this is how many times, you know, you and I both worked in corporate jobs before. You go in and do your job and you go above and beyond and everyone’s just like, oh, thanks for that. And then as soon as you start celebrating, suddenly you have an ally in that workplace. You have people who are going to bend over backwards for that. And that celebration part and that ritual part is really, really important.
0:09:57 Ben Wright: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Agree. Cool. So number two. Done Three. Number three. This is the hardest one for leadership. This is when you get celebrations in funnel into your team and this generally needs to be done by senior leaders of the business or senior departmental leaders. Where this is really impactful is when you have a team that struggled to get results and just needs motivation. They might be sales results, they might be non sales results, they might be simply areas with customers where they’ve been struggling to build traction. But when recognition comes from outside of the team, that’s when it gets really powerful because your team members start to say, you know what, all this struggle, it’s all worth it. And all this extra time I’m putting in because I’m being recognised from outside of my team. The reason these are hard is because often senior leaders are really busy and they just don’t have the time to do this.
0:10:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, it’s just finding that time where you’ve got people who are, can I get someone who is really taking a lot of phone calls, a lot of flights or a lot of trips or whatever, a lot of getting in front of those people who have so many competing priorities, just about getting that one person’s recognition. And that’s where I think you really got to start looking for, obviously building in those processes of like, hey, team leaders, who is the number one person that’s killed it this week? Who’s the number one person that’s helped us out? Who’s that person going to be pitching up?
0:11:21 Ben Wright: That’s right. Now the pitching outfits are, because they’re so busy that there’s a really easy way around this. It’s so simple. But not enough leaders do it. And that is you brief your ultimate leader with what you want.
0:11:32 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:11:33 Ben Wright: So you send the email, hey, here’s what’s happened. I’d really appreciate it if you could write it to them. And you obviously pre clear this as a rolling way of engaging with your leaders first. He said, I’ll actually write the celebration for you. Here’s your email. He’s written a dude copy paste. Done. Or before you walk into a meeting, they’re going to be in a meeting. Quick corridor conversation. Hey, have you heard that Jemimah got out of bed on time today? Yay. Tomorrow, well done. Right? And then, bang, the senior leader can walk in and celebrate that. So we’re giving the information to them. So it’s Just in time. Ready?
0:12:01 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:12:02 Ben Wright: As they need it, it’s there, it’s ready, and away they go. That works super effectively when we pre brief our leaders and bring them to the party.
0:12:11 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And it’s just such an easy fix to such a complex problem, which seems like it’s actually a complex problem. We’ve got to get from here to here. No, we don’t. You have to get one person in here. It’s almost like how to get it to the EA. I used to have a joke about it. You never, ever try to interrupt the boss. You get the EA on board, and then everything else becomes easier.
0:12:33 Ben Wright: Yeah. Such a.
0:12:35 Jemimah Ashleigh: In law enforcement, we used to have really big bosses. And I used to buy her a chocolate frog every Thursday. And I’d deliver it to her desk.
0:12:42 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:12:43 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I’d walk past her and throw it and say, happy Thursday. This was a running joke we had. And she’d say, j, I’m not eating this. You can’t make me. And she’d open it and eat it to her desk. I never sent one letter of correspondence. I never had to ever chase anything ever again. And if I ever need to talk to the boss, the door was open. It cost me $1 a week.
0:13:03 Ben Wright: Such a great example. You’ve seen. Have you seen Ted Lasso?
0:13:06 Jemimah Ashleigh: No, I haven’t.
0:13:07 Ben Wright: Great. American coach goes over to the UK to coach a team in a sport that he has no experience with.
0:13:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:13:13 Ben Wright: Great. Every single morning, he brings the boss of the football club. I think it’s a brownie he makes.
0:13:18 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, great.
0:13:18 Ben Wright: I can’t actually remember what he makes. All I remember is every single day, he brings her this brownie, and it’s the same thing. You can’t give me this. You’re gonna make me fat. Right. But she really gets to appreciate it. And there’s a point in time where he doesn’t bring them. And she’s like, oh, my God, what’s going on? So this is where we talk about building rituals. Right. I’ll come back and I’ll summarize the three celebrations in a moment. We’re having a rare podcast. We have the sun starting to beam.
0:13:42 Jemimah Ashleigh: On me. I’m gonna have to go get that dress on shortly. I’m just gonna rearrange myself a little bit. There we go.
0:13:47 Ben Wright: So those that’s watching your video, you can see me shifting around as I try and get closer. Yeah. I was wondering. But it’s not because I’m trying to get closer to you, Jemimah. So we’ll summarize those three celebrations in a moment. But from a rituals point of view, this is the way we actually get celebrations to stick.
0:14:02 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:14:03 Ben Wright: When we learn how to build rituals. And I have three tips for you as leaders. Number one, get really clear that it takes time to build this out.
0:14:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:14:14 Ben Wright: Generally speaking, 21 times to memorize something and then three, lots of 21 to make it a habit.
0:14:19 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes.
0:14:20 Ben Wright: 63 times. We’ve got to do something that’s a lot of celebrations right before we get there. You’re not going to have to do the heavy lifting on all of those because we’re going to build momentum as we go. But you’ve got to be prepared to do things more than once to get them done. So it takes repetition to build this. Number two is bookend your days to remind you what you need to be doing here. Simple things like calendar entries, written diaries. I still use a combination of written and tech when it comes to notes because I find when I write things, I remember them and they’re also there and present, whereas when I use tech, they’re often filed away. Find the ways that work for you to remind yourself about how to do this. I typically will do it at a time when my brain powers greatest because I don’t forget or I’ll bookend. Start and end of the day.
0:15:09 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:15:09 Ben Wright: So key things. So number one, you said, remember, it takes time. Number two is.
0:15:14 Jemimah Ashleigh: I love that.
0:15:15 Ben Wright: Yeah. Build it into your kindness. Number three is I love Kobe’s model. Urgent versus important tasks. Right. The early bird gets the worm. But Sam McKenna. Great Sam Sales, I know her a little bit and they’ve followed some of their stuff. They run. The urgent bird gets the worm. On this one, I don’t necessarily agree. From a sales point of view, they’re spot on. Urgent bird gets the worm. But here we don’t want urgent tasks to be getting in the way of our strategically important tasks. So from a rituals and a celebrations point of view is we’ve got to decide how important they are to us and treat them as such. So if we’ve decided that our team, that the 78% of team members who stay longer, if they’re adequately celebrated within a business and recognize that if that’s really important to us, that we prioritize it as such, and that’s more than just putting bookends into our day, that’s about making sure we see it through. That’s about making sure the celebrations are meaningful and we’re engaging our people. So we could talk about Rituals all day. But I wanted to just have a little shortened chart. Yeah.
0:16:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: A little podcast about that.
0:16:14 Ben Wright: Punchy alignment, accelerations.
0:16:15 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah, I really love that. What’s the silver bullet for today?
0:16:19 Ben Wright: Oh, okay. Well, as I do that, I’ll summarize our three silver bullets.
0:16:21 Jemimah Ashleigh: Oh, yeah.
0:16:21 Ben Wright: Please, please. Internal team celebrations, that’s when you celebrate within your team. External team celebrations, that’s when you celebrate out. And then celebrations from leaders in is when we have other parties celebrating for us. So they’re the three pieces. And then your rituals are. It takes time. We bookend our days and we need to decide how important it is.
0:16:40 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yeah.
0:16:41 Ben Wright: My silver bullet from today is that this is important.
0:16:45 Jemimah Ashleigh: Yes. Just mind.
0:16:46 Ben Wright: Your employees want to feel celebrated. So my advice coming out of today is to take one of the three celebrations and roll it into your repertoire, into your cadence. And then when you get that right, you can go from there. But get one going. Because whilst many of us think we celebrate enough, except for the rare few who often end up working with. Often work with the people that are wanting to get really good at what they do. They’re already good. They want to get really good. You know, you often will recognize, but you’ve actually now got to do something about it. So it’s very important to go and do something about it. Your silver bullet.
0:17:22 Jemimah Ashleigh: Mine would be something you said around, just a bit off the cuff. And you said, don’t let the operationally important get out get in the way of being strategically important.
0:17:33 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:17:34 Jemimah Ashleigh: And I just thought, how many times this stuff takes a back seat because there is a small fire happening. The problem is, then there is always more that is happening. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing. And this is even more important for the longevity of your companies, for your leaders, for your team, the people that are coming through.
0:17:53 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:17:54 Jemimah Ashleigh: All you need to do is have that kindness to them and say to them, oh, we’re. We’re excited. Thank you so much. You did this great thing. Here’s the recognition. And you’ve got an employee potentially for life.
0:18:03 Ben Wright: Yeah.
0:18:04 Jemimah Ashleigh: Sitting there who’s going to be your biggest advocate moving forward.
0:18:07 Ben Wright: Right. Excellent. Well, I think that has actually been really, really punchy today.
0:18:12 Jemimah Ashleigh: It has.
0:18:13 Ben Wright: We’ve gone through a lot around celebrations. We’ve gone through a lot around rituals. You told me at some point I need to be a better friend. And I said to you, no, we’re not friends. We’re friends in business. It’s been a great podcast.
0:18:26 Jemimah Ashleigh: I’m going to go and get a dress for you to try on.
0:18:28 Ben Wright: Fantastic. We’ll see you next week. Bye for now.
