#41 - Do You Really Know How to Say Thank You?
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” - Marcus Aurelius
Hello,
What was the first thought you woke up to this morning? Were you fixing on a problem, or feeling grateful for all the good things & relationships you have?
In business or in life, we often tend to focus on what is missing or broken. Nothing wrong with it - unless it's the ONLY thing we focus on. So what about the things done right, or even with excellence? Well, we often take them for granted and forget to show appreciation. One of the heroes of this newsletter, Doug Conant, said that even in the most broken companies he went into, 8 out of 10 things being done were right. But no one was talking about it.
The result of such imbalance? People feel underappreciated. Companies lose billions due to turnover and lost productivity. Relationships suffer or get broken.
This newsletter is about appreciation & recognition: taking a fresh look at the people around you and starting to notice and recognize what works. The wonderful thing about recognition is its transformational effect at virtually no cost.
This week, I have curated a few ideas on HOW to make appreciation frequent, specific, and personal - in a way that the recipient does feel recognized.
Use the Bright Spot Strategy: for each problem statement, consider if there are any bright spots. Have you (or someone) already solved the problem at least once? (Thomas Weddell-Weddelsborg)
Don't Give Feedback. Give Recognition: People do not need feedback. They need attention to what they do the best. Recognition is an ongoing effort to learn who the person is when she is at her best. (Marcus Buckingham)
Resist the Eulogy Delay: don't wait till the end to praise people that had impact on you (Dan Cable)
Pay Gratitude Visits: remember someone who did something important for you who you've never properly thanked. (Martin Seligman)
Write an Effective Thank You Letter: Praise works best the more specific it can be (Alain de Botton)
Do It Often: the more you celebrate contributions of significance, the more contributions of significance you get (Doug Conant)
Write Public Fan Letters: show your appreciation without expecting anything in return (Austin Kleon)
Keep a Praise File: have it around when you need a lift (Austin Kleon)
Remember Life is Worth Being Grateful For (Oliver Sacks)
Examine the Bright Spots
"When it comes to people problems, we often default to seeking deep, historical explanations: "It has to be something in our childhoods"... Such a framing may well be true, but it's also difficult to do anything about. The same goes for "values" framing: "We just have different values, honey".
What can be more helpful?
The Bright Spot Strategy. Revisit your own problem statements. For each problem, consider if there are any bright spots. Ask a different question: "When do we NOT have the problem? Are there any bright spots?".
"Have you already solved the problem at least once? Was there ever a time - even just once: when you didn’t have a problem; when the problem was less severe; or when the problem happened, yet the usual negative impact didn’t occur.
Is there anything you can learn from these bright spots? If not, can you potentially recreate the behaviors or circumstances that led to the bright spot - basically, doing more of what works?"
Don't Give Feedback. Give Recognition
"People don't need feedback. They need attention, and, moreover, attention to what they do the best. And they become more engaged and therefore more productive when we give it to them (...)
The best team leaders reject the idea that the most important focus of their time is people's shortcomings, realizing instead that, in the real world, each person's strengths are in fact her areas of greatest opportunity for learning and growth; and that consequently, time and attention devoted to contributing to these strengths intelligently will yield exponential return now and in the future.
Nowadays, recognition has become a synonym for praise, but in doing so has moved some way from its origins. It comes to us from the Latin word 'cognoscere', meaning 'to know' which in turn stems from the Greek word 'gnosis', meaning 'knowledge' or 'learning'. Thus to re-cognize a person, in essence, means to come to know him anew. Recognition, in its deepest sense, is to spot something valuable in a person and then to ask her about it, in an ongoing effort to learn who she is when she is at her best.
The trick to doing this is not just to tell the person how well she's performed, or how good she is. While simple praise is by no means a bad thing, it captures a moment in the past rather than creating a possibility of more such moments in the future. Instead, what you'll want to do it tell the person what YOU experienced when the moment of excellence caught your attention - your instantaneous reaction to what worked. For a team members, nothing is more believable, and thus more powerful, than your sharing what you saw from her and how it made you feel. Or what it made you think. Or what it caused you to realize. Or how and where you will now rely on her. These are YOUR reactions, and when you share them with specificity and detail, you aren't judging her or trying to fix her (...) and because it isn't judgement or rating, but is instead a simple reaction, it is authoritative and beyond question. It's also humble (...)
Each replaying of these small moments of excellence, relayed through the lens of your experience, (...) is the best recognition she could ever receive. You are learning about her, and relaying that learning to her, and, as on the best teams, she knows that tomorrow you will be doing so again. On such rituals is great performance built."
Resist the Eulogy Delay
"Humans are so strange with the timing of our gratitude and appreciation of one another. So often we said until the end of someone's life to praise them for the impact they've had on us. This means most of us never hear, or understand, the positive and profound influence we have on people. Why do we wait until it's too late? ...
The first force is the eulogy delay - the cultural resistance to appreciating people's unique strengths until they've passed away. Much of the time we don't tell people what we appreciate most about them, and we don't ask other people what they appreciate most about us. The eulogy delay is frustrating because it deters us from deepening our relationships, making us feel awkward when we help others understand what we value most about them."
Exceptional: Build Your Personal Highlight Reel and Unlock Your Potential, by Dan Cable
Pay Gratitude Visits
"A gratitude visit, or a gratitude letter is an exercise in which you remember someone who did something important for you when you were younger who you've never properly thanked. It relieves depression and increases happiness, by building gratitude towards the world and increasing, solidifying relationships."
The Gratitude Visit, by Martin Seligman
"Participants wrote a detailed letter to someone who made a significant impact on their lives, explaining what that person did and why they were grateful. Gratitude visits increase the quality of life for both the writer and the recipient. The giver and the recipient felt closer to each other. And people who were thanked often started thanking others."
Exceptional: Build Your Personal Highlight Reel and Unlock Your Potential, by Dan Cable
Write an Effective Thank You Letter
"Life continually requires that we write down a few words of thanks: for holidays, meals, presents or people’s place in our hearts. However, too often, our messages end up flat or somewhat unconvincing; we say that the dinner was ‘wonderful’, the present ‘brilliant’ and the holiday ‘the best ever’, all of which may be true while failing to get at what truly touched or moved us.
To render our messages more effective, we might take a lesson from an unexpected quarter: the history of art. Many paintings and poems are in effect a series of thank you notes to parts of the world. They are thank yous for the sunset in springtime, a river valley at dawn, the last days of autumn or the face of a loved one. What distinguishes great from mediocre art is in large measure the level of detail with which the world has been studied. A talented artist is, first and foremost, someone who takes us into the specifics of the reasons why an experience or place felt valuable. They don’t merely tell us that spring is ‘nice’, they zero in on the particular contributing factors to this niceness: leaves that have the softness of a newborn’s hands, the contrast between a warm sun and a sharp breeze, the plaintive cry of baby blackbirds. The more the poet moves from generalities to specifics, the more the scene comes alive in our minds. The same holds true in painting....
...Praise works best the more specific it can be. We know this in love; the more a partner can say what it is they appreciate about us, the more real their affection can feel. It is when they’ve studied the shape of our fingers, when they’ve recognised and appreciated the quirks of our character, when they’ve clocked the words we like or the way we end a phone call that the praise starts to count. The person who has given a dinner party or sent us a present is no different. They too hunger for praise in its specific rather than general forms. We don’t have to be great artists to send effective thank you notes: we just need to locate and hold on tightly to two or three highly detailed reasons for our gratitude.
The School of Life: How to Write an Effective Thank You Note
Do It Often: the CEO who wrote 30,000 Thank You Notes
"When I was fired from my job and I was shy, my outplacement counselor said, "You're never going to get a job. You're too shy. You only answer the questions that you're being asked. You're not selling yourself... You've got to figure out a way to make your job search distinctive.
So I said, "I got to do something here." So what I did was, if I was interviewing for a job, I'd meet say six people and I meet the receptionist who opened the door for me at the building. I would get all their names. When I was done, I would walk next door to the coffee shop. And I would handwrite each one a note. And I would walk it back over to the receptionist, before I left, and ask them to deliver it that day to the people I had just met. And I would make sure to thank them for something specific, maybe two or three sentences that they did for me as a way of being distinctive.
It was transformational. The next time I came to the building (...) everybody was helping me. It was mind-boggling. And I was just writing a thank you note because I really did appreciate what they were doing. I wasn't trying to manipulate the situation. But I was trying to communicate that I appreciated it.
So I started doing that one. But eventually, I got to Nabisco, and then I got to Campbell, all corporations, for the most part, are huge, critical thinking machines. We are built to find what's wrong and fix it. So everybody at the corporate level is looking at what's wrong and fixing it. That's sort of the nature of the beast. And even in the most broken companies I went into, 8 out of 10 things being done were right. But nobody was talking about it.
And I thought, I got to bring the balance to this. So, I started handwriting notes at Campbell. I saw all this good stuff going on, even when we were a disaster. We had a portal and stuff was published every day about what was going on. My assistant would print it all out for me. I had a two and a half hour commute home, and I had a driver, and I would read it on the way home. And then, on the way in the next morning, I would hand-write notes thanking people for contributions of real significance.
Contributions of real significance that reinforced our values and our plans and there were tons of things to pick from. I would pick 10 to 20 a day on the way, and I would write that. I did it six days a week... If you do 10 notes, times 250 days, over 10 years, you end up with around 30,000 notes. And we only had 20,000 employees. Wherever you went in the world, you saw one of my handwritten notes stuck up in a cubicle with a thumbtack. And the other part of that was, I wanted them to be timely notes. I didn't want them to be late. So the stuff that was on the portal one day should be in the mail to the employee the next day. And if it was something really significant, I would FedEx in Australia, to their home. I wanted them to open it with their family, when they saw how much I appreciated the contribution.
I was celebrating the contribution of significance. I was doing more than just trying to build a culture of appreciation. I was reinforcing the standards we had.
... in my experience, the more you celebrate contributions of significance, the more contributions of significance you get."
Doug Conant - Leadership with Integrity, The Knowledge Project podcast by Farnam Street Blog
Write Public Fan Letters
"When I was younger, I wrote a lot of fan letters and had the good fortune to hear back from several of my heroes. But I've realized that the trouble with fan letters is that there's built-in pressure for the recipient to respond. A lot of times when we write fan letters we're looking for a blessing of an affirmation. As my friend Hugh MacLeod says, "The best way to get approval is to not need it."
If you truly love somebody's work, you shouldn't need a response from them (and if the person you want to write to has been dead for a hundred years, you're really out of luck.) So, I recommend public fan letters. The Internet is really good for this. Write a blog post about someone's work that you admire and link to their website. Make something and dedicate it to your hero. Answer a question they've asked, solve a problem for them, or improve on their work and share it online.
Maybe your hero will see your work, maybe he or she won't. Maybe they'll respond to you, maybe not. The important thing is that you show your appreciation without expecting anything in return, and you get new work out of the appreciation."
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, by Austin KLEON
Keep a Praise File
"Life is a lonely business, often filled with discouragement and rejection. yes, validation is for parking, but it's still a tremendous boost when people say nice things about our work.
Occasionally, I have the good fortune to have something take off online, and for a week or two, I'll be swimming in Tweets and nice emails from people discovering my work. It's pretty wonderful. And disorienting. And a major high. But I always know that high will taper off, and a few weeks down the road I will have a dark day when I want to quit, when I wonder why the heck I even bother with this stuff.
That's why I put every really nice email I get in a special folder. (Nasty emails get deleted immediately.) When those dark days roll around and I need a boost, I open that folder and read through a couple emails. Then I get back to work. Try it: Instead of keeping a rejection file, keep a praise file. Use it sparingly - don't get lost in the past glory - but keep it around for when you need the lift."
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, by Austin KLEON
Life is Worth Being Grateful For
"When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate - the genetic and neural fate - of every human being to be a unique individual. to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
I cannot pretend that I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."
THANK YOU for having read this newsletter. It matters a lot to me if you found it useful.
Arina
Picture: Matheus Ferrero https://unsplash.com/photos/yAAjoBIKUcA