Gratitude At Work

Posted by Toby Jenkins

Our goal as a business is to provide an exhilarating, challenging and supportive environment for our team to get the absolute best from each other and for themselves. By doing so, our clients will be the beneficiaries of highly motivated, passionate and focussed people.

Gratitude has a huge part to play in creating this kind of environment.

With reminders in the media about the US tradition of Thanks-giving coming up, it’s timely to share how we’ve tried to embed gratitude at Bluewire Media.

Daily:
We use a fantastic web tool called Wooboard (developed by Pollenizer) to say thanks and recognise others’ efforts. Wooboard allows us to tie our thanks and praise back to core values and then track those core values and activity over time. It’s a great way for all of us to encourage one another whether it’s in great work done, bottlenecks overcome, difficult situations handled well, the list goes on. We have also created some Bluewire Media themed thank you cards and look for any excuse to send these to clients, suppliers, our team, their partners, anyone!

As the US sales guru Jack Daly says: “I’ve never heard of anyone who has left their job saying they were over-recognised”. Or over-thanked.

Weekly:
Verne Harnish‘s Rockefeller Habits weekly agenda includes hearing from each of your team members 1 piece of personal news and 1 piece of business news. We picked up an idea to add a “Thank You” column to the agenda (I’m really sorry but I can’t remember where this came from – if it was you, please let me know!). We ask our team every Monday to thank a person or number of people for their help or effort from the previous week. It could be a personal contact or professional, just someone who really helped out.

Monthly:
At our most recent monthly meeting, having read Marshall Goldsmith‘s book “What got you here, won’t get you there”, I outlined Marshall’s 20 habits that hold us back. Gratitude was a part of the solution to clearing these habits. I loved that he challenged Dale Carnegie’s wisdom that the 2 words people most like to hear are their own name. Marshall believes the 2 words might actually be “thank you”. I agree with him.

Quarterly:
We kick off our quarterly meetings with an exercise I copied directly from a seminar by a master of gratitude: Marcus Child.

“Nourishing, Draining, Looking Forward To” Exercise:

We ask the 3 questions of each of our team:

In the last 3 months…

1. What has nourished you?
2. What has drained you?
   And finally,
3. What are you looking forward to most in the next 3 months?

In the nourishing segment, you might be amazed to realise all the things you’ve enjoyed and are thankful for. Equally what you’re looking forward to in the next 3 months can give some great focus to what your goals and drive might be over the next quarter.

[A quick point on the "What has drained you?" question. More often than not, "drainers" are items that don't align with the passions and "native genius" of the individual. "Drainers" are hugely demotivating, they are symptoms of underlying issues and are a great diagnostic tool for getting "the right person in the right seat" and an opportunity to remove the obstacles for that person in order to magnify their strengths.]

Finally, whether it’s business or personal, if I’m having a “bad day” then listing all the things I am grateful for in my life is the quickest, simplest and most effective antidote I’ve ever found to change my attitude.

These videos might also help:

Barrett Ersek – presentation to EO (thanks to Verne again for introducing Barrett to the speaker line up at the Fortune Growth Summit in Atlanta this year)

 

Louie Schwartzberg – TED talk

Thanks again to Pollenizer, Wooboard, Jack Daly, Verne Harnish, Marshall Goldsmith, Marcus Child, Liz Wiseman, Jim Collins, Barrett Ersek and Louie Schwartzberg for their influence on this post.