One might have thought that the expression of gratitude was for the benefit of the recipient, to feel acknowledged and affirmed in their generous act: possibly so. However the experience of gratitude also brings great benefit to the donor, and some of those benefits can be seen to act as an inoculation against the dangerous seductions of privilege, power and position.
Why We Should Make Decisions In Our Organizations Like Brains Not Computers
Thank You Makes A Difference
We are all taught that it is polite to be grateful, but does it make any other difference? Recent research suggests yes, including in the workplace.
Most people feel gratitude a lot and it makes them feel good to feel grateful
Gratitude motivates reciprocal aid giving
It can be considered as an emotion, a behaviour and a personality trait
How To Improve Compliance In Organizations
When people don’t comply with legal requirements organizations can face penalties and fines running into the thousands. To take just a few recent examples
In November last year a Greater London pizza manufacturer was fined £15,000 after failing to respond to warnings about an unsafe doorway.
Also in November Hertfordshire County Council accidentally faxed details of two cases it was dealing with to a member of the public and was fined £100,000 for breaching the Data Protection Act.
The Hidden Costs Of Rudeness
We all know rudeness is an unpleasant aspect of life, did you also know it has a cost attached? Two researchers, Porath and Erez, have spent years exploring the effect of rudeness on people at work, this is what they have found:
Between 1998 and 2005 the percentage of employees who reported experiencing rudeness once or more in a week doubled from almost 25% to almost 50%. Indeed in 2005 25% of employees reported experiencing rudeness at least once a day.
How ‘Change Management’ Can Be A Hindrance To Achieving Organizational Change
Given this is it surprising the extent to which organizations struggle with the concept of change in organizations. Myths abound. Working with organizations I constantly hear the refrain ‘people don’t like change’ and ‘change is hard’. Neither of these statements are necessarily true, as we see below. What is true is that the way we understand organizations, understand change, and go about achieving change can make the job much harder than it need be.
Forget Carrot Or Stick – Try Nudging
In any organisation there is always a variety of tools available to managers to influence staff towards desired behaviour. This has traditionally been seen as a choice between two general approaches: incentives and coercion, or, the carrot or stick approach.
Now there is a new alternative
This third method utilises the natural inertia of most people when confronted with the choice of accepting the status quo or changing things
‘Houston, we have a problem’ – What Does It Mean To Have A Problem?
At the 2012 World Appreciative Inquiry conference I fell into conversation with Stefan Cantore. Stefan was busy thinking about ‘our love affair with problems’ in preparation for writing a chapter for a forthcoming publication (details at end). We had a great discussion about this that stayed with me and caused me further thought.
How do we know when we encounter a problem?
Does Happiness Contribute To Success? Reasons To Be Cheerful
While much research confirms that successful outcomes can foster happiness, it has tended to be seen as a one-way linear relationship: you have to be successful to be happy. But might it be more of a circular relationship? A virtuous circle where being happy makes it more likely you will succeed? In 2005 Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ed Diener and Laura King pulled together all the research they could find that addressed the question: does happiness contribute to success?
Ten Classic New Broom Mistakes
The pressure on new leaders or senior appointments to make an impact, and quickly, is tremendous. The organization has spent time and money attracting, selecting and securing the chosen candidate, now they want to see the value they have bought. It’s a brave person who can hold fire while they take time to look and learn; take time to find out what works here, and how it does; to find out who the people are who really ensure the work gets done; to find out who is brave enough to deliver bad news. This knowledge is often hidden, while, to new eyes, what doesn’t work, who doesn’t look or behave like management behaviour, and who too often isn’t at the end of their phone or at their desk, is all too obvious. In their attempts both to improve things and make a mark quickly, New Brooms frequently commit one or all of these mistakes:
Charming Devils And The Mischief They Make
It is increasingly apparent that sometimes people with severe personality disorders (narcissistic, psychopathic, paranoid and schizoid) slip through the organizational selection net. The problem is they don’t appear in our midst with ‘trouble’ tattooed on their foreheads, instead they are often rather charming devils who do very well until they fall (and bring everyone else down with them).
Many Hands Make Light Work: Crowd-Sourcing Organizational Change Using Appreciative Inquiry
Barack Obama famously crowd-sourced the finance for his election campaign, a powerful example of the ability of new technology to create a great aggregate result out of lots of small voluntary actions. But this process is not as new as it seems: Sir James Murray used a similar approach to creating the Oxford English Dictionary back in 1897.
So while crowd-sourcing is a new and sexy concept, it really refers to the age-old process of recruiting groups to complete tasks that it would be difficult if not impossible for one person to complete alone.
Ten Top Tips For Weathering The Storm With Strengths Enhancing Appreciative Leadership
When disaster strikes, under the intense pressure to do something fast, it is very easy for leaders to make quick, isolated obvious decisions i.e. to have a round of redundancies. Very few people like to have to do this, but often feel they have no alternative. However alternatives are available, what they demand is a willingness to go beyond simple and obvious solutions and to call upon the wisdom and goodwill of the workforce. A leader who is willing to work appreciatively with his or her workforce in finding ways to survive and thrive in these challenging trading times will reap the benefit now and later.
Ten Top Tips For Courageous Conversations At Work
Many people at some point in their working lives have to have a difficult conversation with someone. It might be about a performance issues or something more personal. It can be with a peer, a subordinate or indeed a boss. Very often people are highly anxious, understandably so, about having this conversation. They then either avoid it for so long that when they do tackle it it comes as a complete shock to the other party, or they rush at it like a bull in a china shop just to get it over with. Here are some tips to help produce a good result
Ten Reasons Why Now Is The Time For Appreciative Inquiry
1. Change is changing
Traditional, top-down, designed then implemented change takes too long and is too hard to push through an organization. The plan is out of date almost as soon as it’s made. People resist. Change needs to be fast, flexible and proactive and focused on maximising tomorrow’s possibilities rather than rehashing yesterday’s mistakes. Change needs to take everyone with it. Appreciative Inquiry is a change methodology for our changing times.
Five Tips For Getting Started With Positive Psychology At Work
Five ways to foster innovation using Appreciative Inquiry
What Does It Mean To Talk About 'An Economy Of Strengths?'
These ideas were first presented at a World Appreciative Inquiry Conference in Ghent in 2013.
For the workshop we attempted first to explore the key concept of efficiency to economies, and then how markets work, and then to ask the question, ‘ So, what does it mean to talk about an economy of strengths?’
Using Positive Psychology to Produce High Performing Teams
What is positive psychology?
Coined as a phrase by Martin Seligman as President of the American Psychological Association in 1998, positive psychology is the psychology of exceptionally good living. It embraces areas of study such as happiness; human flourishing; exceptional wellbeing; energy and vitality, meaningfulness and achievement. The switch in focus from psychology’s traditional concern with when things go wrong for people (mental or physical ill-health, poor educational performance etc.) to when things go right for people has resulted in a burst of new streams of research and new knowledge about the psychology of high performance in people.
Ten Top Tips For Creating Positive And Flourishing Organisations
Having recently extensively studied the literature, Appreciating Change can exclusively reveal the ten things that you can do that can make your organisation an even more inspiring and positive workplace.
1. Play to everyone’s strengths
People playing to their strengths are effective, successful, engaged and energised. Their productivity is at its best. Those dutifully struggling with weaknesses are slow, ineffective and demoralised. Their productivity is poor.