Want to Lead Your Business Into a Successful New Year? Express Yourself With Gratitude!

With Thanksgiving rapidly approaching, many business articles and columns are turning to themes of thankfulness and gratitude in the workplace. In my own personal situation, having just made the leap from leading an independent consulting group to joining the Leadership Team here at Labor Finders, I am finding it really easy to identify lots of items for which I am grateful. To name a few: I’m grateful for the opportunity to work for such a world-class organization that helps change lives by connecting great workers with great opportunities. I’m grateful to have so many talented and dedicated members of my Marketing Department whose great work and positive attitudes have helped make the transition easier. And I’m grateful to my peers and colleagues across the organization, who have welcomed me with open arms into their business family. As it turns out, actively expressing this gratitude not only helps raise the morale and stature of those around me, but it also impacts my own as well. And If we play our cards right as business leaders, you and I might both find that expressing gratitude just be the holiday gift that keeps on giving.

A Harvard Business School study published earlier this year demonstrates that publicly acknowledging a co-worker’s contribution for which you are grateful gives the recipient of the compliment a boost in status within the organization. That’s not too surprising. But perhaps an even more important takeaway, which may be a bit more surprising to some, is that making this type of acknowledgment boosts your own status as well. Why might this be? Well, there are many possible reasons, ranging from creating a desire to reciprocate the kudos to sensitizing others to be mindful of the need to be grateful. In short, your co-workers and employees will be grateful simply that you’re being grateful.

Indeed, the American Psychological Association has long lauded the benefits of a mindset of gratitude, and in a 2021 summary across multiple individual studies, found a great deal of converging evidence that one’s expression of gratitude in turn stimulates others to develop their own feelings of gratitude, which translates directly into even more “helping behavior” as a follow-up. Follow the implication here: It is an inevitable conclusion that this subsequent “helping behavior” has the chance to generate additional feelings of gratitude among those helped. Talk about the proverbial “virtuous cycle”!

So, to bring it back to practical next steps, let me recommend: Adding just a little bit of time to your busy pre-holiday schedule to cultivate some mindfulness about what you’re grateful for will have a number of positive effects, including that you’ll just feel better, and also that your actual performance as a business contributor and leader will improve! But taking it a step further and actually expressing this gratitude verbally throughout your organization will spread those great feelings AND that desire to pay it forward even further. This can create a cascade of positive feelings and actions that will not only help morale but may very well boost the bottom line. So, as leaders, it is imperative that we build in a little bit of time, among ourselves and our teams, to create the opportunity for that dynamo of thankfulness to blossom. This Thanksgiving season, remember all the things you’re thankful for, in your lives and in your businesses. Then, take it one step further, and kick this into gear by verbally expressing that gratitude and letting it inspire helpful behaviors across your team, finishing 2022 in a strong fashion, and setting you up for an even better year in 2023.

Happy Thanksgiving! And as always, I’ll leave you with what had become my signature catchphrase from my consulting days: “Whatever You’re Going to Be. . . Be Outstanding!”