Sponsored by IBM and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)
Brought to you by the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit (www.reinventingeducation.org) project.
Brought to you by the Reinventing Education Change Toolkit (www.reinventingeducation.org) project.
Celebrating Accomplishments - New Perspectives on the 'Gold Star'
By Hunter Moorman, Director, Education Policy Fellowship Program, Institute for Education Leadership
A former colleague of mine, who had moved to another organization, recently reflected on our practice at the Institute for Education Leadership of giving a simple star-shaped cardboard cut-out wrapped in gold foil to reward top performers. "You know," she said, "I used to think the 'Gold Star' was hokey. But in this place, they don't celebrate our accomplishments, and now I know how important that star was."
Our organization awards the Gold Star each month to an employee or group who have accomplished something to be proud of. Some accomplishments are large, and sometimes beyond the call of duty, others are small and to be expected. But each one deserves some celebration.
Celebrations connect deeply to our individual psyches and organizational culture, affirming and developing identity, quality, value, and meaning. Each factor is an essential element of a successful organization. In celebrating accomplishment, organizations are taking care to nourish individuals and groups by:
- Affirming identity, giving essential recognition affirming a sense of self and group;
- Giving meaning to their work, bracketing significant experience and naming it as an accomplishment to bring out meaning that might be lost or under-appreciated in the flow of events;
- Benchmarking quality, telling the entire organization that "this" is what we mean by "good" or "excellent," "this" is how we judge quality in this organization; and
- Assigning value to their accomplishments, saying that these accomplishments are worthy, we value them, they are to be emulated.
According to Karl Weick, we do not work in organizations so much as organize, constantly interacting with co-workers to interpret and give meaning to ambiguous events. We do this in an environment that is itself or volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. (VUCA is the acronym coined by the Industrial College of the Armed Forces). Most of us do daily combat with VUCA in both organization and environment, and for that we must be armed with a sure sense of identity, meaning, quality, and value.
The leader's medium is the organization's physical structure and its culture, the employees' work routines and their psyches. Some celebrations are most effective at the psychological and cultural levels (end-of-year awards ceremonies or retirement parties come to mind). But, as Kent Peterson and Terry Deal note, leaders should be skilled at communicating instrumental and expressive messages concurrently. Encounters in the hallway, faculty meetings, and classroom observations are opportunities both to do and to celebrate work.
Beyond that, good leaders celebrate accomplishments strategically, carefully calibrating means to ends:
- In the early stages of major change, celebrate quick wins. As Director of New York City's Department of Juvenile Justice in a time of turbulent change, dean of NYU's Wagner School of Public Service Ellen Schall got big returns from celebrating quick wins, giving employees a morale boost while the ultimate goal still seemed far off and overwhelming.
- Motivate staff by celebrating accomplishments that reinforce key values. Former Vice President Al Gore communicated his value of "reinventing government" with the "Hammer Award" for innovations that made the government "work better and cost less."
- Share responsibility for celebrations with the celebrants. When Institute for Education Leadership President Betty Hale established the "Gold Star" award, she asked each current award recipient to choose the next recipient. This served as a demonstration of the commitment to make all staff feel more a part of the common culture.
- Get the right people involved. At the Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools annual retirement ceremony for some 400 teachers and administrators, the entire school board personally congratulates each honoree, powerfully endorsing the value of these employees' years of service.
- Use celebration to illuminate deeper meaning in work and accomplishments. The chair of a government research review panel did not simply congratulate members on having approved slates of first-rate research proposals. He asserted, to far greater effect, that the panel's work had markedly contributed to the base of scientific knowledge, fostered young investigators' careers, and signaled the field about important topics, designs, and methods.
--About the Institute for Education Leadership: The Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) envisions a society that uses its resources effectively to achieve better futures for all children and youth. For almost forty years, IEL's mission continues to be to build the capacity of individuals and organizations in education and related fields to work together - across policies, programs and sectors. IEL is a is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization based in Washington, DC.
