Our office has a Gong. A real-deal Made in China gong that is 22” in diameter that makes a wonderful thunderous gong noise.
Anyone on the team can ring it when they’ve done something remarkable. So anything from developing and launching a new product enhancement to closing a sale to providing amazing customer service.
What is remarkable? It is up to the individual to determine this. If one or several of them think it’s gong worthy, you bang the gong.
When you bang the gong, you’ll quickly explain the accomplishment and this is customarily followed by some mix of clapping and exclamations of “nice!”, “sweet!”, “nice job!” or potentially expletive-infused phrases.
We’re generally a heads down group so the gong has become a way to take a break and celebrate our successes. And more recently, it’s been rung more often which is a nice audible metric that stuff is going well.
Celebrating success is not something we’ve always done well (and still probably don’t do well enough) because as a company, we’ve not arrived.
By arrived, I mean that while we are certainly on our way, we are not a wildly successful company (yet). Don’t get me wrong – we have real customers (who love us), real revenues and profits, and great growth prospects as well as a team that I’d put head-to-head against any other team in terms of their pure ability to get shit done (and done well).
That said, for a while, Jon (co-founder) and I viewed celebrating success before we arrived akin to high-stepping on our way to scoring a touchdown. And so that meant that we’d only begin to celebrate success when we reached “that level” (although we never had a clear articulation of what that “level” actually meant).
Our old view was that we’d continue to just be a heads down group building great stuff and making customers happy and when we hit the “arrival point”, we’d celebrate in a big way.
That was a naïve and entirely too austere a view.
Arriving is a journey made up of series of smaller meaningful accomplishments. And celebrating those is important – very important. And now among other things, we have our gong to celebrate these successes.
Of course, when we do “arrive”, you can be sure there is going to be one big-ass party.