It costs you nothing to celebrate the success of other people.

It doesn’t diminish the work you do. It doesn’t negate your own accomplishments. The world won’t end if you give kudos to someone else.

In fact, celebrating the success of others is one of the easiest ways to make allies in an organization or community. The person you’re celebrating will be glad that somebody is recognizing them and the people around you will generally see you as someone who wants to share the success rather than make everything about yourself.

This makes those people more likely to want to cooperate with you because they see that you will share the credit and that you play well with others.

People like to do well. They also like to be acknowledged for doing well. Go out of your way to celebrate the wins that other people have. It can pay dividends years later because those people will remember you and what you did for them (at literally not cost to yourself).

Years worth of upside for something that takes less than five minutes to do. And that’s not an exaggeration.

The greatest piece of personal marketing that you can have is people who speak well of you when you’re not in the room. The most likely people to say positive things about you in these situations fall into a couple of categories:

• People you’ve worked your butt off to make happy.
• People who you’ve helped put the spotlight on when they do something well.

One of these is a heck of a lot easier to pull off than the other. Both are worth doing at times, but making people feel good is much lower effort and much simpler to scale.

The irony is that the second group is, in my experience, actually more likely to say positive things about you. It seems weird, but in a lot of cases, feelings really do trump effort.

That’s not to say that you need to fawn over people (that creates its own problems). Just give credit where it’s due and do it publicly – especially in front of the people in the chain of command of the person or group that you’re praising.

If you do it consistently, you’ll all probably come out ahead.  Plus, it’s just the right thing to do.