Gratitude matters, and yet, so often we lose sight and/or run out of time to express it with intentionality. Imagine a learning environment where everyone feels appreciated, inspired, and are more productive - and all of this is accomplished by simply building in time and space for students and/or colleagues to express gratitude on the regular. Be it as your welcoming inclusion activity or as a “brain break” during a stressful meeting or class, asking those you are working with to take out their phones and send a text of tangible and specific gratitude to someone in their life can work magic for our mindsets. Want to go a step further? Bring actual thank you notes into class or meetings and ask people to write one to someone in the building.
We do this activity often with our students and those we lead, and sometimes, we even ask them to share if they get a response to the text; without fail, we virtually always hear one specific response back…”are you okay?”
These three simple words hold within them a stark and troubling reality. Simply put, gratitude is not the norm, not commonplace. It catches people off guard, causes worry, and at times, even makes people uncomfortable. But why? What if it were the norm? What if, as leaders, we made it our goal to create an authentic culture of consistent and meaningful gratitude where all of those we lead (and by trickle down, the students we teach) understand and practice gratitude with intentionality?
Recently, studies supporting the positive power of gratitude have made their way into the mainstream as industries wrestle with low morale and burnout among employees. The fact is that educator burnout is on the rise and continues to be highlighted year after year. An article published by the New York Times in March 2023 asked teachers for their “quitting stories.” The striking and troubling stories told by these former educators speak to feeling stressed from work, disrespected as professionals, and devalued by those in leadership.
As educational leaders, we are not powerless to address this reality. In 2019, Naz Beheshti, author of Pause, Breathe, Choose, highlighted research in Forbes that points to gratitude as the key to increasing productivity, growth mindset, and humility among employees and management. Unfortunately, a 2013 survey published in Greater Good Magazine out of Berkley indicated we are less likely to express gratitude at work than at any other place in our lives, but 97% of participants agreed that they saw supervisors who expressed gratitude as having the potential for success. So why aren’t we doing more of it?
The answer may not surprise you. Genuine gratitude must come from a place of vulnerability, and vulnerability requires risk-taking. Leadership articles and publications around gratitude in the workplace, like from the Thoughtful Leader, consistently point out the fact that leaders showing gratitude is not a weakness (even though it can feel as one). As published in Newsweek in June 2022, in order to be a leader who successfully supports a culture of appreciation, one must be careful to avoid toxic positivity and inauthentic praise. This means, as a leader, that you are open with your team about your intentions of supporting a culture of gratitude and are authentic about learning how to best express thankfulness within your learning environment.
How do leaders balance and navigate this tricky juxtaposition of gratitude? Provide too much or inauthentic gratitude, those you lead may get angry, resentful, and feel disrespected. Don’t praise enough or in meaningful (the “right”) ways, and those you lead feel underappreciated and unvalued. To that end, we have attempted to provide leaders with gratitude language based on the varied personalities and praise preferences of those we lead.
The research continues to grow in support of the power of gratitude across industries and institutional groups. Of course, how leaders choose to build structures around gratitude varies greatly based on the team(s) they lead, the setting in which they work, and their personalities. There is no one right way to express gratitude, and it is our hope that you spend some time reflecting on the ways in which you express gratitude to your team. Education leaders like Lainie Rowell have written books about the power of gratitude. In Evolving with Gratitude, Rowell writes about unexpected gratitude, “A principal recently shared with me that she takes a pad of Post-it notes with her as she makes her rounds on campus. As she walks through classrooms, she makes a quick note about something she appreciates the teacher doing and leaves it on their desk. She loved doing it so much that she started leaving them for kids as well, and families have shared that their child's Post-it can be found on a highly visible place in the house, like the refrigerator so all can see. it takes very little time, but this genuine act can have a huge impact.” Culture like this isn’t something that develops overnight, but the intentional and varied use of gratitude sure can help move any organization forward - even the most stressed and challenged of teams.