In this short podcast, the speaker argues that celebrating success and sharing pride stories is essential for building a strong organisational culture, aligning staff with purpose and strategy, and improving employee retention. He explains three core reasons why pride stories matter: they bring the organisation’s purpose to life, make strategic objectives tangible, and foster a sense of belonging that reduces turnover. He then outlines practical methods for uncovering these stories – proactive interviews with staff, creating feedback channels, and incentivising contributions – and suggests multiple ways to amplify them, such as staff events, internal podcasts, videos, intranet posts, and email newsletters. Finally, he recommends embedding a brief “pride moment” into regular team meetings to keep the practice alive. The episode ends with a promise of more short podcasts and longer culture‑building interviews.
Chapters
Hello there. It's been a while. We've been away on holidays. It's been summer. A whole load of other stuff's been going on, but I am back. And today I want to talk to you a little bit about the power of celebrating success and building pride in organizations. As is often the case with these wee podcasts, the idea came from a A session that I was running with some clients the other day, it's actually a new client, we're running some workshops. And one of the attendees said, "We used to hear stories of the difference that we made, that people made across the organization. And we don't really hear them anymore. It'd be really nice to get that back." Those stories of pride, those stories of feeling as though you've made a difference in the organization, they're absolutely critical. But why? Why are they so important? Well, for me, there are probably 3 big things. Number 1, because they help to celebrate your purpose. They help to really bring to life why you exist. What's your why, to use that Simon Sinek line? Because of course, the difference that you make and people feeling that difference is at the very core of the culture you want to create in your organization. And we all know that if we don't have the right culture in the organization, then actually trying to get stuff done is really, really hard. Of course, culture for us is about the pursuit of strategy, about being able to achieve your strategy and your strategic objectives. The trouble is strategy is really boring, generally. They're not written for staff, they're written for boards, and they're written for regulators, and they're taken generally and put into drawers after they've been launched. What stories of pride and celebrating success can do is to really bring your strategy to life. You've got 5 pillars or 7 pillars or 3 pillars of your strategy. What does it actually look like on the ground when somebody on your team does something in pursuit of one of those strategic pillars? How do you bring it to life? How do you celebrate that success? That's where the real power comes in. And of course, there's then a ripple effect or a halo effect of people seeing those stories and thinking, wow, well, that's what I do already today. So that links me more tightly into the organizational purpose and strategy. Or I'm looking at those stories and I'm thinking, I could do that. That's absolutely something that I could do as well. Or I saw Tim or Sarah or Jemima doing exactly the same thing the other day. So I'm gonna feed that story back. And of course, making sure that those stories are aligned with strategy helps people to see the difference that they make every day in real life. Sense of belonging is really important. We know from research that people will leave a job for a 5 to 10% pay rise. There is a lack of stickiness in organizations today. There's a lack of stickiness in terms of relationships between organizations and their people. So helping your people to see the difference that they make, to feel that sense of pride, brings emotion into that employer-employee relationship and makes them more likely to want to stay, makes it more likely that when they get a call from a recruiter saying, would you like this other 'No, thanks very much, because I know that the job that I'm doing here, it's not perfect, but I do know that I'm making a really, really big difference.' So, the question is, how do you find them? How do you find these stories? Because they're out there all over the place, hundreds of them, probably in every organization. For me, one big way is, of course, to proactively go looking for them, to get your senior leaders, to get your internal comms staff out there to go and actually meet groups of staff or have one-on-ones one-to-ones and simply ask the question, tell me a story about a time where you or somebody on the team made a really big difference for our customers or for the people that we serve. Grab hold of those stories, write them down, record them if they're happy for you to do that, video them with your phone, but just capture them because they're really powerful. The other way then to create some feedback channels. So ways that your frontline staff can feed back the stories that they've seen, that they've heard, that they've been a part of. You might even want to turn that into a recognition program where people are recognizing each other and bringing those stories to bear. Maybe that's through your values, or maybe that's through your strategy or your purpose. You could reward people for bringing stories back. Now, maybe that's not a direct reward. You're paying somebody 50 quid for bringing back a story, but maybe it's a donation to a charity of their choice. Maybe it's a donation to the company charity, or maybe you say, we'll plant 10 trees for every great story that we get back. But you're in some way incentivizing getting those stories back into the organization. Of course, then using them once you have them, you know, bring them to life at staff events, whether that's a senior leader telling the story about something that happened to somebody on the frontline, whether it's that person themselves willing to come on stage at a staff event and tell the story themselves. It could be a round table, it could be a panel discussion, it could be lots and lots of things where people are able to bring those stories to the fore. Turn them into short internal podcasts. Something that we'll be talking in the next one of these short podcasts is the ability to use podcasting internally now. So people, when they're hearing the stories, are actually hearing it told by the person who was at the center of that story. Using video on intranets or even, you know what, as a last resort, email. Here's a great story, a couple of paragraphs, about Sarah, who did this amazing thing on the frontline for one of our clients, and look at the difference that it made. And of course, finally, you know, outside the realms of finding stories in the depths of the organization and bringing them to the whole organization, there's a role for people leaders all the way through every organization to just spend time thinking about and focusing on pride at the beginning. Of a team meeting every week, spending 10 minutes just having a conversation around what's made us really proud this week as a team or as individuals. What difference have we made? Or if you want to, just tell me a story about somebody else on the team that you've seen do something amazing, because they may not be willing to stick their head above the parapet. Anyway, a few thoughts there on celebrating success, on building pride, why it's so absolutely critical. We'll be back with more of these short podcasts soon, and with more long-form Building Better Cultures interviews in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for now. Bye-bye.
