5 Reasons to Track Team Accomplishments and Focus For Success

What did we accomplish today? As a leader of a team, I want to take 5 minutes and recap this every day. Personally, I used to try to track things I was grateful for. And I have also struggled with to do lists (and lists of lists) or tasks or tickets.

Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg talked about tracking accomplishments in Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. Adam recommended Sheryl track her personal accomplishments daily as she was dealing with a tragic loss. But the idea seems to have merit when applied to teams, too.

I’ve come up with 5 reasons why tracking our accomplishments will focus our future.

1. Accomplishments propel us

They give team members confidence and energy. Especially if we write them down and celebrate them occasionally, our results help us remember what we did. And that memory encourages us to believe we can do the next thing, too. Accomplishments provide momentum for tomorrow.

2. Accomplishments prove our experiences

When we apply for a job or when we’re trying to sell an idea, our experiences back up our ideas and our achievements prove our experiences and they make our ideas credible. Our team develops shared appreciation of their contribution to the overall organization.

3. Accomplishments program our brains for action

We train ourselves to focus on things we can control. We actively participated in the accomplishment. Our actions mattered. We cement the connection between our action and our desired outcome.

4. Accomplishments become a habit

We get what we measure. Our team’s successes prove our value to the organization, and they also prove the value of each individual’s contribution. What we do, what we accomplish, serves as a tangible measure of the value we created. These achievements assist each team member as they develop their individual careers, too.

5. Accomplishments inspire confident humility

Humility is an accurate understanding of our place in the world. We don’t need to create any false humility or inflate anything because of our awareness of the truth. As a team, our confidence shouldn’t move into arrogance; but rather, it should help us relax. Like a basketball player who must sink 2 free-throws in a hostile tournament game, our historical ability gives us the peace and confidence to produce the same outcome. That’s confident humility.

So, there are my 5 reasons. Did you think of any others? Are you willing to try and track your team’s accomplishments for the next few weeks and see how things go? Your team will become more confident and more productive.