Each month, the four KWSM offices gather via Zoom for “Celebrations” – a special meeting where we honor the birthdays, workiversaries, and new team members who joined our agency that month. This month, we had the pleasure of commemorating both January and February Celebrations in one ultimate showdown!
We celebrated my birthday as well as the birthday of VP of Finance & Operations Stephen Wagner, the 2-year workiversaries for Senior Digital Marketing Strategist Brianna Zambrano and Digital Marketing Strategist Dalia Grelin, and the addition of 3 new team members: Director of Strategy Richard Goff, Junior Copywriter Ashlee Bagnell, and Junior Digital Marketing Specialist Lauryn Jackson.
Our Celebrations Committee decided that, since so many of our honorees love Harry Potter, the best way to celebrate them would be hosting a Hogwarts House Cup-style trivia game.
Here’s how it went down.
The Sorting Hat
As any Potterhead knows, the first step in participating in the House Cup is being sorted into one of the four houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin.
Matt Cancilla, February’s Celebrations Committee leader and honorary Sorting Hat, evenly divided the KWSM team into the four houses and appointed four of the honorees to be their house’s Head Boy or Head Girl: Ashlee for Gryffindor, Bri for Hufflepuff, Stephen for Slytherin, and me for Ravenclaw. I was especially excited about this since, according to many online quizzes, Ravenclaw is my true house.
The Game
Prior to the House Cup showdown, Matt required all honorees to anonymously submit 5+ fun facts about themselves. He then created a “How Well Do You Know Your Teammates” trivia game where each member of the KWSM team had to guess which honoree each fact belonged to.
Here are some of the things we learned about each other…
- Angie is considered “Wazer Royalty” (the highest level one can receive on the Waze app) for being in the top 1% of all users based on usage. She also went cliff jumping once off a 40 ft. cliff, though she says, “It was terrifying and I will never do it again.”
- Brianna’s secret “guilty pleasure” movie series is Twilight, and she is distant cousins with Karen Carpenter from the Carpenter’s band.
- It turns out Stephen has always been a numbers guy, since he won Gold at the ‘Mathlympics’ when he was 10. Another fun fact about Stephen that many of our team members already knew is that he proposed to our President (and his wife) Katie in French. Ooh la la!
- We all know Ashlee is good with words in the writing sense, but it turns out she’s also a speed-reader who can read an 800-page book in a day! When she doesn’t have her nose in a book, you can catch her listening to true crime podcasts.
- Dalia is known for being a TV show connoisseur, which now makes a lot of sense since she admitted to binge-watching at 2x speed! What’s her favorite thing to watch, you ask? Twin Peaks!
- As for me, the team learned that I took a hip-hop dance class when I was 10 (and I still remember parts of the routine), and that I was once personally scowled at by Kanye West.
This was one of my personal favorite Celebration activities to date. Not just because it was Harry Potter-themed or because of how much we laughed, but because it was an awesome team-bonding moment for us to learn more about each other.
I’m a firm believer that having authentic relationships and friendships with team members is essential when working as collaboratively as we do at KWSM. One of our team’s superpowers is that we all genuinely really like and respect each other, and a lot of that can be attributed to intentional moments like these that bring us all together to celebrate and learn more about each other beyond the walls of our offices. We work well together because we enjoy working together, which benefits our team and our clients as a result.
The KWSM House Cup Goes To…
Each house played valiantly, using every bit of knowledge they had about their team members. But, in the end, it was Hufflepuff who walked away with the House Cup in hand.
Congratulations to our Hufflepuffs: Bri, Casey, Jason, Taylor, Savana, and Madeleine!
Bonus KWSM Celebrations!
After the House Cup was awarded, the team stayed on for an extra cause for celebration: Bri and Dalia got promoted! Katie bestowed the promotional crown and scepter twice: first to Bri to announce her new role of Senior Digital Marketing Strategist with an emphasis in Public Relations (promoted from Digital Marketing Strategist), and then to Dalia to officially drop the “Junior” title and welcome her into her new role as a Digital Marketing Strategist with clients of her own. Congratulations, ladies!
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