Everybody Wants To Feel Appreciated
Sometimes it's as simple as saying "thank you"
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I don’t know if it’s my upbringing or my generation (shoutout to my fellow GenX’ers!), but I have a difficult time showing appreciation.
It’s not because I don’t feel it, or even because I have a hard time saying it.
It simply doesn’t cross my mind to do it.
Some leaders are amazing at recognizing their teams—although my experience is that they are surprisingly few and far between, so kudos to those who do it well.
I once had a manager who said some variation of “you’re doing a great job” to me nearly every single time we had a one-on-one.
I never really thought I needed a lot of external validation, but wow … did that feel good.
I have a colleague who makes a practice of thanking their team every Friday—in writing—before signing off for the week, without exception.
And if it was a particularly difficult week, they acknowledge the challenges their team faced and applaud their perseverance.
Who wouldn’t want to work on that team?
When I was a CIO, we built time into our weekly, all-team standup meeting for people to give “shoutouts” to each other for their good work.
When I managed larger teams at Amazon, every week my leadership team and I would identify and recognize one team member for an outstanding contribution in the prior week. We’d write a little blurb on the achievement that I’d then post to the team Slack channel, and more publicly to our internal recognition system.
Creating mechanisms like these has been incredibly helpful for me.
They ensure I do something I wholeheartedly want, but often forget, to do—tell my team members how unbelievably amazing they are and how much I appreciate their ingenuity and hard work.
How do you show appreciation for your team members? Does it come naturally to you, or do you have mechanisms you use to help you? Leave a comment to share what strategies work for you—and for your team!
No matter how we recognize our team members, the most important thing is that we do … because we all want to feel appreciated.