Written by Tom Barry, Co-Founder of Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?
I have the great privilege of working with an Olympic Gold medallist in the human form of Ben Hunt-Davis. Being an Olympic rower, he still eats three bowls of cereal in the office each day. Being an Olympic rower, he constantly disrupts and challenges our thinking about what’s possible. But the most powerful attribute for me of him being an Olympic rower is his rigid attachment to developing milestones on the road to success – and celebrating these to build belief and enthusiasm in our culture.
Being an Olympic rower, Ben still eats three bowls of cereal in the office each day. Being an Olympic rower, he constantly disrupts and challenges our thinking about what’s possible.
Why do I pick this powerful attribute? I clearly remember working as a team performance coach in a French bank some 15 years ago. The team leader was tasked with an 18-month project, critical to the Bank’s future, to audit over 20 million personal and 1 million corporate accounts. The global team worked its socks off in the early stages and presented progress updates to the leader in Paris each month. At one particularly fraught meeting, the boss refused to celebrate the obvious progress that had been made. Why? “Because we haven’t achieved our result!”
As you can imagine, the team left the meeting deflated and disappointed that their efforts weren’t acknowledged.
That meeting taught me that Ben’s Olympic approach to celebrating the milestones – rather than waiting for the results – is so vital. Individuals and teams gain energy from celebrating the milestones along the way. They build confidence, especially needed in the early stages of a project, to continue the journey ahead.


So given that you are only 1/12th of the way through achieving your results for 2025, what milestones have you passed and celebrated with your team? Purposefully calling out key milestones can give you all confidence that your boat is going in the right direction and at the right speed.
Don’t just pick the bigger company milestones, such as revenue or number of clients. Point out your team’s weekly or even daily activities as well – and celebrate the effort that has gone into them. It might be the 20th LinkedIn blog posted by your marketing team, the 5th new hire successfully onboarded this year or the early top Net Promoter Scores from your clients. What activities, behaviours or actions can you call out as ingredients you want to champion in your team? Doing so can help signal what you really value in your team’s performance and what you would like them to emulate.
So be deliberate as a leader each month. Recognise and celebrate the milestones that demonstrate you are on your way to your distant results. And by doing so, you’ll soon build a culture with teams that truly believe they will win their year-end Olympic Gold medals.
What’s your first action? Take 10 minutes now. Write down two or three milestones that represent progress towards your year-end goal. And book time in your diary for the end of this month to recognise and celebrate the achievements the team have made.
If you’d like to learn more about our approach on how leaders can help build their team’s confidence, please do Get in Touch and we would be happy to help.