Soup: A Recipe to Nourish Your Team and Culture

Chapter 40. Success Fridays

Nancy knew it was also essential to continually cultivate optimism and create a collective mind-set that expects great things to happen. To foster this, Nancy had every department, including sales, implement Success Fridays. This meant that every Friday, teams would gather in person or via webcam and share their success stories for that week. Nancy found that by focusing on success each week, her teams looked for, expected, and thus created more success. By sharing success stories, people learned from one another and improved their individual and team performance.

Each week, Nancy and her team would highlight these success stories via e-mails, phone calls, and the intranet. Employees no longer shared stories of failure and despair. They no longer complained to one another about how miserable their jobs were and how awful the company was. They were no longer merely soup producers. Now they had become pot stirrers. Instead of stories of defeat, they told stories of triumph, saving the company, helping a customer, making a huge sale, creating a better process, developing a new solution, or promoting an innovation. As their focus and stories changed, so did the company. Performance and productivity improved. Collaboration and teamwork increased. Engagement scores climbed. And, best of all, sales grew. After 40 days, they were on their way, but they still had a long way to go.