28 Jan 2026 · 1 min
Bill Gallagher argues that leaders should start meetings by celebrating wins instead of jumping straight to problems. Ring a cowbell, gong, or air horn and explicitly congratulate people. Making celebration a habit improves morale and meeting effectiveness.
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Hey, hey, hey, hey. I think we all need more cowbell here. More cowbell? You need more cowbell in your meetings? Why? Look, working in many companies really sucks. It's an endless slog of breakdowns and work. Like in the baddest sense of the word. It just feels like you're chasing issues and working on gaps and shortages and challenges all the time. And that can be really frustrating and depressing. If you launch right into meetings and what's not working in all of your meetings, right into issues and what's not working in your meetings, it's going to suck to work around there because it's always going to feel like you're not winning at anything. So open all meetings. Daily huddles, weekly meetings, quarterly planning, annual all hands. Like all of your meetings open with some good news. That's the cowbell round. And then practice. Develop a muscle for acknowledging it. Don't rush through your good news and move on. Like really congratulate people. Celebrate. Buy a cowbell, put a cowbell in your meeting. Be silly, Put an air horn in, get nuts with it. One of our teams put a gong in and they would hit the gong in their meeting room for all the critical things. There's lots of different ways to do this. Have some fun with it. Bring the celebration up of the wins. And remember, there's always good news to be shared. Sometimes it's just that you're still there, that you haven't quit, that you're not dead yet, right? And if that's the best news you got, celebrate the hell out of that because you must be going through a lot right now and you are a champion not to quit and give up. So more cowbell in all your meetings can make a massive difference. And I really think it's something to deal with now. If you struggle with it, you don't put it in the agenda. You struggle to celebrate things. You're always focused on what's wrong. That's a personal problem. Take a look in the mirror and figure out who you are that is so joyless, right? And deal with that. Get some therapy. Get a coach. Figure out why it is that you always have to put a yeah, but like whatever. If you have to kvetch about things all the time, think about how you could bring real, full, full throated, enthusiastic cowbell to all of your moments. Celebrating Wins the good news at the beginning of everything. Can you find that there's plenty of time to dive into the challenges that comes next in most meetings. So we we get the cowbell out of the way. We really enjoy that. We talk about the facts of things. Then we we tackle a couple issues. But now we're in a totally different we don't just feel like losers or or overworked slaves. We have celebrated. We recognize the good news in our world and our accomplishments. And that is the whole point of cowbell. Make more cowbell a mantra in your world and it'll pay big dividends. I'm Bill Gallagher. I hope that was helpful for you. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep Scaling Are you ready to turn.
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