Many years ago, we were working with a large e-commerce client who had a significant Instagram following. One of our colleagues was working around the clock planning, posting, and shooting great content in a bid to move the needle and attract more followers. The social channel was a core pillar of the brand and a significant part of our engagement, but the reality of the account meant it wasn’t being monitored daily. There was simply too much happening elsewhere: warehouse shipping issues backing up, digital ad performance to optimize, campaign creative in constant revision. The channel was valued, but in the blur of everything else, it was easy to miss what was quietly building there.
One day, that person quietly hit an internal milestone in followers. Not the 20% growth we’d been mandated to achieve (a target I felt was more arbitrary than measured, stripped of context, and frankly disconnected from the grind it required) but a real hump we had been working hard to overcome. It wasn’t announced on our daily client call. It didn’t get blasted across @channel on Slack. It came up in passing, in a hallway.
And it gave me pause.
I didn’t want to spray champagne around the room. But maybe pop a bottle, cheers, and acknowledge the moment. That day, I made a decision: we were going to carve out space for everyone on our team to share these kinds of moments. Big ones and small ones alike. To make sure that victories, regardless of their size, got their moment.
We called it Victory Laps. And we made it a standing meeting on Friday afternoons.
Inspired by a retrospective format used by a software client, I started going around the room asking each person three things: something that challenged them that week, something that went well, and something they were looking forward to. Over time, contributors put their own spin on it. Not every entry is strictly work-related. Most winters, my challenge is failing to brave the Vermont cold for a morning run before sunrise.
As it turns out, I’m not as original as I thought. The rest of the world has been calling this “Rose, Bud, Thorn” for years. But the name we chose matters. Victory Laps is a reminder that even during the long, grinding weeks, there’s something worth celebrating. Pushing a deliverable through client approval. Cracking a thorny strategic problem. Finally getting this blog post drafted and out the door.
The research backs this up. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and researcher Steven Kramer spent years studying what actually drives motivation at work. After analyzing nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from employees across seven organizations, they identified what they called the Progress Principle: the single most important factor in a positive inner work life is making progress in meaningful work. Even small steps forward had an outsized effect on people’s emotions, motivation, and creativity. The implication for managers is significant: recognizing incremental progress isn’t a nicety. It’s infrastructure.
One of the quieter benefits of Victory Laps isn’t the celebration itself. It’s the window it opens into how your colleagues actually experience their work.
When a designer shares that it took three rounds of revisions and a late-night session to land on a solution everyone loved, the account manager sitting across from her understands something she didn’t before. When a strategist mentions that he’s been wrestling with a particular client’s feedback all week, it recalibrates assumptions about timelines and temperament. We build empathy by seeing each other’s days clearly, not just the outputs.
This matters even more across silos. In organizations where departments operate in parallel without much lateral communication, wins and struggles can become invisible to anyone outside a given team. Sales doesn’t know what Marketing just pulled off. Operations doesn’t know that the product team just cleared a months-long blocker. That invisibility breeds the kind of disconnection where people start to feel like their work doesn’t land anywhere meaningful.
Cross-functional visibility, even when practiced informally, closes that gap. It’s not just morale. It’s alignment.
As one of our colleagues put it:
“Victory Laps is one of my favorite ways to connect with the team. It’s a peek inside other people’s mentalities and how they’re approaching their week. It makes you remember that you’re not the only one with struggles and wins. Plus it’s always fun to hear what people are looking forward to.”
The format is flexible. The commitment is what matters. Here’s how to integrate this kind of check-in into your own team:
Start small and keep it consistent. You don’t need a standing meeting with a name and a dedicated timeslot from day one. Even a five-minute end-of-week share in Slack can seed the habit. The key is regularity. Once people know the space exists and that it’s safe, they use it.
Make it opt-in to be personal. The more a contributor brings their whole self to a check-in, the richer the connection. But don’t mandate it. Someone who shares that their challenge was getting their kid to school on time during a tough week is building a different kind of trust than someone who shares only project metrics. Both are valid. Neither should be required.
Rotate the format across departments. If you lead a larger organization, consider bringing Victory Laps-style check-ins to cross-departmental touchpoints. A brief “what did your team move forward this week?” from each group in a leadership sync builds exactly the kind of lateral awareness that keeps silos from calcifying.
Acknowledge the setbacks as seriously as the wins. Rose, Bud, Thorn works because it asks for all three. If your check-in format only creates space for successes, it starts to feel hollow. The challenges and the forward-looking moments are what give the wins context and meaning.
Give it a name your team can own. We called ours Victory Laps because it fit our culture and our vocabulary. Whatever you call it, the name signals the intention. Make it yours.
We are a team that talks about strategy and execution all week. We think in systems, in channels, in deliverables. Victory Laps is the meeting where we zoom out from all of that and acknowledge the people doing the work. That’s not soft. That’s smart.