Connecting to Admired Leadership

Why Leaders Celebrate, How Leaders Celebrate, and What Leaders Celebrate Matters

Episode Summary

In this conversation, Admired Leadership Executive Coach Meghan Sharron explores celebration as a strategic leadership tool rather than a ceremonial obligation. With extensive experience coaching senior leaders and teams, Meghan brings practical insight into how leaders can use celebration to signal values, shape behavior, and drive culture—and why what you celebrate matters as much as how you celebrate it.

Episode Notes

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Key Highlights

• Celebration signals what you value - what leaders celebrate, how they celebrate, and why they celebrate communicates their standards of excellence and the behaviors they want replicated across the organization
• Specificity creates authenticity - generic praise like "good job" falls flat; authentic celebration requires naming specific behaviors, staying consistent with stated values, and matching the scale of recognition to the size of the accomplishment
• Celebrate behaviors, not just outcomes - when you only celebrate results, you train people to hide messy processes and cut corners; celebrating how work gets done shapes culture and defines what excellence looks like
• Frequency matters more than scale - small wins deserve immediate recognition to reinforce behavior in the moment; big wins deserve extended celebration with a "long shelf life"; don't save all recognition for year-end events
• Create collective celebration, not transactions - the most powerful celebrations foster "we" moments where teams share ownership of success, rather than one-way acknowledgments from leader to individual that feel performative

Notable Quotes

• "What we celebrate, how we celebrate, and why we celebrate really signals what we value, what our standard of excellence is, what behavior we're looking to promote and have more of or less of."
• "There's a dissonance when what is said we value and what is actually celebrated are two completely different things. That can really create significant tension."
• "Good job—it's very thin. There's not a lot of impact there. But great job and how you opened the energy, how you opened the conversation—there's a specificity to how you approach that. When we bring that, that just signals authenticity."
• "When we only talk about outcomes, then we message, just the bottom line is the only thing that really matters. I'm gonna hide my process. It could be messy, it could be ill-formed, but if it's just about outcomes, you're training people to say that's the only thing that really matters."
• "This is an opportunity for us to celebrate as a we. It's our team. What have we done collectively? We really want to create a collective experience around celebration."
• "If you want to celebrate that cross-functional partnership, that's what we want more of, that's what's going to create excellence. That's what we want to celebrate. One of the key tenets of celebration is how can it shape behavior?"

Featured Speakers

• Meghan Sharron coaches and advises senior leaders and teams in Fortune 500 companies to maximize their impact on performance and organizational success. Her focus is optimizing key leadership areas, such as strategic decision-making, effective relationship management, high-caliber talent development, and delivery of exceptional outcomes.
• Wes Bender serves as a facilitator and thought leadership coordinator at CRA | Admired Leadership, helping to connect practical leadership insights with real-world application through webinars and educational content.

Resources Mentioned

https://admiredleadership.com/field-notes/finding-reasons-to-celebrate/