Recognize This! – Focus on the big goals, but don’t forget to celebrate the smaller achievements along the way.

Do you have any BHAGs – you know, Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals? I do. My primary BHAG is to change the way the world recognizes and appreciates employees, changing company cultures for the better in the process.

That’s a daunting goal, indeed! And if that’s all I focused on, I might become overwhelmed by it. Instead, I always have that goal in mind while I work to shorter-term goals such as helping just one company, even just one HR pro at a time change their culture for the better. And I see success in this smaller goals nearly every day.

These shorter term achievements are critical to BHAG success, as recently described in the Financial Times article “Tiny Bursts of Joy Pave the Way to BHAGs.” Discussing Teresa Amabile’s research on the importance of honoring progress, the article points out:

Quotation

“If companies hit big goals infrequently, and the incentives for reaching them have toxic side-effects, it would be better for them to find other ways to encourage worker engagement. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and her husband Steven Kramer, a developmental psychologist, believe an obvious, but often overlooked, approach is for managers to remove barriers to day-to-day progress at work. …

“Even quite small steps forward at work generated a burst of joy (yes, it sounds hokey – but they maintain it’s the correct word for what they discovered) that inspired creative work over a period of days.”

I’m looking forward to many personal “bursts of joy” in my upcoming workshop series: Build YOUR Winning Culture of Recognition. The entire purpose of the workshop is to bring together HR pros from across industries and help them create the strategic business case for how to change their company cultures.

I hope you can join us in any of the cities below:

* Atlanta, GA: Thursday, Oct 27, 2011
* New York, NY: Friday, Oct 28, 2011
* Chicago, IL: Monday, Nov 14, 2011
* San Francisco, CA: Thursday, Nov 17, 2011

Find out more information and register here. Blog readers should enter discount code: RECOGNIZETHIS for half-off the registration fee.