Have You Expressed Gratitude in Your Business Recently?
There is an ad nauseam amount of research on the positive effects gratitude can have on your mental state. So why do most of us fail to express it within our businesses?
Positive psychology has come a long way since it was first made an official branch of psychology in 1998. Initially started as simply a method of studying well-being, it has since expanded dramatically into a full-on investigation into the science of human flourishing. Yet, over and over again, one of the most-replicated findings in positive psychology research is the dramatic effect that gratitude has on our mental state.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that gratitude “is strongly and consistently associated with greater happiness.” After ten weeks of writing a few sentences each week, participants whose writing focused on gratitude were more optimistic and felt better about their lives. And gratitude is linked to increased levels of oxytocin, known colloquially as the “cuddle hormone”, which reduces stress and increases relaxation.
People express their gratitude in their lives differently depending on the timeframe. They can do so about the past by being grateful for specific memories, experiences, or people that used to be in their lives. They can do so about the present by having gratitude for good fortune that they are currently experiencing. And they can be grateful about the future by having hope and optimism when looking forward. Regardless of how someone chooses to utilize gratitude, they can cultivate their own way of doing so.
But while about half of people report expressing gratitude to their family members, only 15 percent say they do so at work. Both of those numbers are equally troubling to me. The latter for the obvious reason, but more shockingly, only half of people claim to express gratitude to those they love? First, that number is likely even lower, since people tend to overestimate their “goodness,” especially in a self-report survey. But also, how difficult is it to express gratitude to a partner, a child, or a parent?
More than likely it’s because expressing gratitude, as we define it psychologically, is much different than “saying thank you.” Think of how many times you say “thanks” in a given day: maybe to the barista in the morning. A colleague who grabbed a file for you. The gas station attendant. A waiter at a restaurant. We throw around “thanks” all the time. But that’s not gratitude. Gratitude is having a conscious, committed moment where you show appreciation – appreciation for someone, something, or even just a brief moment in your day. So many of us, especially business owners, are running around putting out fires, just trying to get to the end of each day, that taking five minutes to practice some gratitude is almost laughable. “I have 30 emails to answer, I don’t have time to stop.” Sound familiar?
We also tend to avoid honest gratitude because subconsciously, some of us believe that thanking someone can be linked with believing that you rely on others to do things. Many people, especially those without confidence or sense of self-worth, are unwilling to make that internal acknowledgement. Thanking someone could suggest that you couldn’t do it all on your own, which some people erroneously associate with weakness.
The problem is, nobody can do everything on their own. And expressing your gratitude is incredibly powerful, no more so than when you’re a leader in a business. Think about this: a lack of recognition or appreciation is the third-most common reason that people leave their jobs, according to Inc. And the publication reports that when people do feel appreciated, they “are 73 percent less likely to burn out and five times more likely to feel connected to the company culture.”
And gratitude is essentially a gateway drug. Gratitude is contagious. People pay it forward, whether they realize it or not. If you express your appreciation to one of your managers or supervisors, they are more likely to then express their appreciation to those that they oversee. Gratitude has to start at the top of a company. The person at the top sets the culture by how they act toward others. If you run a company and refuse to ever show your appreciation for those that work for you, how will they ever do the same to their own colleagues?
The idea of leaders showing gratitude has taken hold even in corporate America. Southwest Airlines, for years, has sent pins to employees that hit a milestone (e.g. five, ten, 15 years working for the company). It used to show up in a beautiful box, with a note from the company’s leadership. But after a while, they realized that it was not having the effect they wanted. They pivoted and decided to send those pins to the employee’s direct report, that way the manager could personally present it to them and thank them for their service. Immediately, these pins became a moment of pride, both for the employee and their manager, allowing both of them to show gratitude to one another. That tiny change helped build part of the company’s culture.
A Wharton School study found that showing gratitude also makes employees work harder. The study separated fundraisers into two groups. The first group made phone calls as they always did, while the second group received a gratitude-filled pep talk from their director, before they embarked on the same calls. Through the following week, those in the “gratitude” group made 50 percent more fundraising calls than those who did not.
Moreover, you need to be grateful for people, not for performance. You shouldn’t tell someone how much you appreciate them because they got a report done on time. You should express your appreciation for them in general. It is also crucially important to express gratitude for the smaller contributions, the little things. It’s easy to say “we just landed this giant customer, thank you everyone for your hard work.” What’s more difficult, but more effective, is telling someone, “I know you’re going through a really rough time personally, so I can’t tell you how much it means to me that you’ve shown up every day and continued to support everyone around you.”
The key to all of this is that you must first feel gratitude internally before you can express it. Gratitude is one of the easiest ways to demonstrate authenticity to those you work with in business. But crucially, you absolutely cannot fake gratitude. People can smell a fraud a mile away. If you say “thank you” to someone, but they can tell you don’t really mean it, it actually hurts you more than if you said nothing at all. There are a variety of ways to cultivate gratitude within yourself: the most obvious one is to keep a gratitude journal. Either on paper, or in a cloud-based document (so you can access it from anywhere), just spend a couple minutes each week jotting down what you were grateful for the previous week. For me, it could be something my wife did, either at home or at work, to help me out or show support. It could be something an employee did that pleasantly surprised me. It could be something a supplier said to me that made me smile. Perhaps an act of kindness from a customer. By focusing on these little things that ultimately make a big difference, it makes it much easier to express those feelings of appreciation to those around you in a legitimate way.
At its core, most of business is about relationships: relationships with employees, relationships with suppliers and vendors, relationships with customers. Expressing gratitude to people strengthens that relationship. It makes people feel heard, it makes them feel valued. Throw away all of those pricey consultants, management books, and training programs. Nothing will get you farther in business than sharing your honest, earned gratitude with those that keep your business running.