Brag Alerts
Lifelong Learning and Shared Success
Brag alerts are a form of positive gossip that lowers the barrier for sharing hard work and turn the sharing of achievements into a constructive and collective experience. By openly highlighting achievements (especially when the person is not around), these alerts normalize celebration within a team, breaking down the hesitation individuals often feel about sharing their own success. This positive reinforcement demonstrates what success looks like in practice, guiding others toward aligned behaviors and shared goals.
Try it: Send an email to your entire team that “brags” about a colleague. A strong brag alert doesn’t just say “Good job,” but instead highlights a specific action and ties it to a wider value. For example: “Brag alert for John going above and beyond on a recent project; his creative ideas allowed us to develop a whole new approach and showed amazing student-first dedication!” When appropriate, take the extra initiative and tell the individual’s supervisor about the job well done.
Try it: Brag alerts can also be integrated into the first five minutes of recurring meetings (like weekly syncs or stand-ups) where team members are each given the floor to briefly “brag” about a peer’s recent success.
Cultivate Growth
Lifelong Learning and Shared Success
Prioritizing continuous learning and mentorship creates an environment where individuals are actively encouraged to step outside their comfort zones and develop new skills, shifting the focus from merely executing current tasks to unlocking future capabilities. This proactive investment not only expands an individual’s technical and professional toolkits but also builds the confidence needed to grow their potential, transforming latent talents into tangible career advancements, and enhancing organizational value.
Try it: Delegate the planning of a high-stakes initiative to a team member to help them transition into a strategic leadership role. Pairing this stretch assignment with bi-weekly check-ins to review your team member’s frameworks and approach can help guide them through complex decision-making and prepare them for upward growth.
Try it: Identify an employee who has expressed interest in a new area and assign them a real project in that space rather than a hypothetical one. Meet with them regularly, not to check on progress, but to think through obstacles together and help them build the confidenceto make decisions independently. The goal is not task completion; it is building someone who can lead in that area without you in the room.
Leverage Diversity
Collaborating for Impact
Leveraging diverse ideas significantly expands a team’s problem-solving capacity by integrating a wide range of unique perspectives, background experiences, and cognitive styles. Instead of relying on a single linear way of thinking, inviting varied input allows a group to approach obstacles from multiple angles and draw upon different strengths, such as analytical precision, creative storytelling, or systemic planning. This collaborative synthesis ensures that potential blind spots are caught early and alternative pathways are explored, ultimately resulting in more robust, innovative, and successful outcomes.
Try it: During a cross-functional project kickoff, deliberately pair a data-focused analyst with a creative designer to brainstorm solutions for a reoccurring issue. By blending the analyst’s data precision with the designer’s user-experience strengths, the team can tackle the problem from multiple angles and develop a more comprehensive solution.
Try it: In your next team meeting, before opening the floor for general discussion, go around the room and ask each person to share one observation or reaction before the conversation takes off. This simple structure disrupts the pattern of hearing the same voices lead every discussion and surfaces perspectives that might otherwise never enter the room. The colleague who processes quietly, the one who came up through a different professional path, the one newest to the team: each brings a frame of reference that sharpens the group’s thinking and catches blind spots that a more homogeneous conversation would miss.
Value Input
Lifelong Learning and Shared Success
Celebrating ideas and feedback openly signals that every voice matters. When a team intentionally shines a light on diverse insights and constructive critiques, it reinforces a culture where input is valued, encouraging even the quietest team members to share their perspectives without fear of judgment. This collective recognition shifts the perception of feedback from a corrective measure to a collaborative tool, building an environment where learning becomes natural, and improvement is continuous. By elevating these contributions, teams can ensure that innovation isn’t just an occasional event, but a daily habit.
Try it: During a regular meeting, actively invite quieter team members into the conversation by asking, “What’s an obstacle you noticed this week that we haven’t talked about yet?” When someone speaks up, publicly celebrate that input by saying something like, “Thank you for calling that out; sharing that perspective is exactly how we catch blind spots early and continuously improve.”
Positive Passwords
Lifelong Learning and Shared Success
Using positive language or phrases for passwords and other daily tasks serves as a subtle yet powerful mechanism for building intentional mindset habits. Because accessing files and logging into systems are repetitive actions required multiple times a day, embedding affirmative keywords or cultural values into these routines transforms a mundane security requirement into a moment of conscious positive reinforcement. Over time, this constant, micro-level engagement with constructive language subtly shifts individual attitudes, and ensures that foundational principles remain top-of-mind. Collectively, these small individual habits aggregate into a shared organizational norm, ultimately anchoring and shaping a more resilient, supportive team culture.
Try it: Change your password to a phrase that reflects your professional goals or ACC’s Theory of Change, such as “GrowthMindset2026!” or “Collaborate4Impact!” so it can serve as a regular reminder or reinforcement of what you are working toward.
Morning Routines
Lifelong Learning and Shared Success
Establishing consistent positive morning routines provides leaders with a deliberate mental runway before the demands of the day take over. By dedicating the first part of the morning to structured habits, such as reflection, strategic prioritization, or mindfulness, leaders can effectively clear cognitive clutter and anchor their focus. This intentional self-preparation ensures that they show up grounded, present, and prepared to contribute positively to their teams. This habit transforms morning energy into a stable foundation for thoughtful decision-making and calm leadership throughout the day.
Try it: Block the first 30 minutes of your workday for a “no-screen” routine consisting of quiet reflection, reviewing the day’s top three priorities, and deep breathing. By intentionally delaying checking emails or taking meetings, you can help ensure you step into your first team interaction feeling centered, fully present, and ready to support others.
Informal Connections
Collaborating for Impact
Intentionally making time to roam and connect with colleagues and team members breaks down barriers that can form between individuals and different departments. By stepping away from structured agendas and stepping into shared spaces, whether physical or virtual, colleagues invite spontaneous, casual conversations that wouldn’t otherwise happen. These unstructured interactions help build the vital informal connections and mutual trust needed to strengthen collaboration across silos, transforming distant coworkers into accessible partners who are ready to share insights and solve complex problems together.
Try it: Step away from your desk for 20 minutes every Tuesday morning to grab a coffee and stroll through different team seating areas. During these casual walks, you might stop by a coworker’s desk to chat about their weekend, naturally opening the door for an impromptu, cross-functional update on an upcoming project.
Try it: Block out 30 minutes every Friday afternoon to digitally roam by dropping into casual team chat channels or starting a quick, agenda-free video call just to catch up. During these spontaneous chats, you can swap stories about recent student feedback, naturally sparking a new idea to collaborate on a system improvement across departments.
“Go Together”
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Approaching projects and challenges with a collaborative mindset fundamentally shifts a team’s focus from personal validation to shared victory. When individuals look past isolated metrics, they begin to view obstacles not as personal hurdles, but as collective puzzles to solve together. This mindset ensures that resources, insights, and responsibilities are fluidly shared, allowing the team to anchor its efforts around a single unified goal. By prioritizing collective success over individual achievement, teams build an environment where diverse perspectives are synthesized smoothly, ultimately delivering a more robust and cohesive outcome than any single contributor could reach alone.
Try it: Host an open co-design session at the beginning of new projects or initiatives so team members from different disciplines can map out potential roadblocks together. By encouraging everyone to question assumptions early on, you can help ensure that the final strategy reflects the collective intelligence and buy-in of the entire group.
Try it: Establish a practice where team members spend dedicated time embedded in a neighboring department during a joint initiative. This allows them to see the project’s impact from another team’s perspective, breaking down silos and shifting the focus toward shared organizational goals rather than individual departmental wins.