Post No.: 0713
Furrywisepuppy says:
Team togetherness at work can be fostered by regularly reminding ourselves of our shared humanity (or dogity) and common interests. This can be boosted by creating a physical workplace environment that makes informal socialising easy and fun during break times. Curate visuals that highlight collaboration, like maybe a shared photo board with pictures of family members or employee outings, or images and quotes that inspire inclusion and community.
Even though it’s at work – give some random or spontaneous acts of kindness. These may be big or small, and their beneficiaries may not even need to become aware of them. Indeed, if you find some change left in the vending machine – default assume that it’s a deliberately kind ‘pass it forward’ gesture rather than because someone forgot to take it. Kindness boosts happiness for the giver, the receiver, plus any witnesses to the kind event. It can trigger a culture of generosity that ultimately increases cooperation, job performance and job satisfaction.
Give help, give respect (see Post No.: 0701) and give empowerment to others. And whenever you do give, it’s simpler to give favours and other resources you can afford to give to others without thought of return. The feeling that we generate a positive impact on others benefits our own sense of self-esteem. A caveat is that this can lead to burnout if we don’t also look after ourselves and have our own needs met (such as was/is the experience of many frontline healthcare workers during the pandemic – we don’t have to be a hero, at least all of the time). So ask for help when you need it too – this could also deepen your connection with someone.
Expressing gratitude is far more than just showing politeness towards others – it expresses an interest in future collaborations, and it makes us feel more content and happy for being attuned to what’s good in life, which boosts our own resilience. It recognises that no one ever makes it alone. When others express it to us, we feel like our life has a positive impact, which enhances our sense of purpose, which motivates us further to do a good job and even going the extra mile. It leads to further kindness and ‘paying it forward’. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is effectively an institutionalised way of paying it forward in business – and when customers appreciate a company’s CSR efforts, they feel more loyal towards that company’s brand.
Grateful and humble managers encourage their teams to be more open, which can in turn improve group creativity and innovation because of the different ideas and perspectives being shared. People who express gratitude and humility are less defensive and more accepting of their own limitations, more open to being taught, and show more appreciation for the value of other people’s contributions.
So don’t underestimate the power of giving a personal thank you. Regularly appreciate and celebrate the successes of the people in your organisation. The best thank yous specifically describe what the other person has done, it acknowledges their effort, and explains how their actions have benefited you. Do make people feel valued for who they inherently are too, not just for what they do. Different people prefer to be thanked in different ways though (e.g. with words of affirmation, hugs, gifts, quality time, acts of service or public recognition).
Barriers to expressing gratitude and impromptu positive feedback are thinking that the wage, a positive performance review during formal evaluations, and yearly employee awards, will sufficiently say it; and believing that it highlights our dependence on others, acknowledges a debt and thus denotes weakness in the workplace. But believing that anyone makes it alone is an illusion. Others have enabled you to make a difference in the world. We gravitate towards the ‘lone hero myth’ in the oversimplistic causal stories we generate to explain the world, when in reality it means one person is taking far too much of the credit for themselves (e.g. Thomas Edison’s team tested thousands of potential light bulb filaments – yet only his name gets mentioned in the history books. The same idolatry is happening today with any multibillionaire entrepreneur). So make gratitude a part of the daily culture that begins from the top and filters to the bottom (without making it contrived as if it’s only done to improve profitability).
Those at the end of a chain of events often take all of the credit, like the player who taps the ball into the net rather than the player who crossed the ball to someone who then assisted the goal scorer. Attacking starts from the back, and defending starts at the front. The person who closes a sales deal shouldn’t take all of the credit because without a product to sell, there’d logically have been no deal to be made on anything (unless it involved fraud). We shouldn’t be so myopic about everybody’s contributions in an interconnected cause-and-effect world.
If I were a spacedog who had just landed safely on another planet and I was to give a thank you speech to all who had contributed to this very moment – I’d have to thank virtually all of life on Earth in place and history, because if I just looked at my spacesuit alone, I’d have to thank all those who designed and made it, as well as all those who enabled those people to design and make it because no single person alone invented all the fabrics and technologies that went into it, which in turn were built upon the material discoveries and technologies before them that had went into making those events possible, and so forth to the very first animal hides that our ancestors developed, which we’d have to thank those animals for, and what they ate to grow up themselves. (What even made all of the oxygen we breathe?) All those people in that chain of events had to be educated, fed, looked after, funded and so forth too, and the supply chains and chains of inventions that were involved there. Those people in turn had to have been educated, fed, looked after, etc. by others too. So it keeps fanning out to include more and more people in place and history, who did something to enable someone else to do something that enabled someone else to do something, and so on. We are only building upon the inputs and ideas of others, which includes nature. Woof!
Even when just looking down at my furry computer right now – the plastic keys on the keyboard required the injection-moulding tech to be developed, and perfected, by a chain of contributors in history. It required the oil that the plastic is made from, which involved ancient creatures to make. It required millennia of language evolution to get the English alphabet. (There’s a myth that William Shakespeare single-handedly invented thousands of words that are in usage in English today but modern keyword analyses in corpus linguistics now reveal that up to ‘only’ a few hundred were truly original with the rest taken or inspired by other languages, like Italian and French, in the multicultural melting pot of London at the time. He may have deliberately known this or was unwittingly absorbing the words he saw and heard around him at the time – and that’s essentially how we all assimilate and build upon what we’re exposed to around us.) It required the assembly line of workers who put it all together. And much, much more. And these are just relatively simple components.
So any businessperson who uses a computer, or wears clothes, has grown up from food they hadn’t sown and reaped themselves, who didn’t teach themselves arithmetic, invent their own language from scratch, and so on – really has the world and history of people (and other life) to thank. Even as you thank your parents – if they had no one else then they wouldn’t have been in a position to give you what they did. Basically imagine yourself being born, as a baby, in a new yet-touched world with no one else, no accumulated knowledge to be passed onto you, not even any food to raise you – and now try to convince me that you’ll replicate this very world we do live in right now, or the exact life you personally have right now, on your own. Try to convince me that you’ll make even surviving for a few days on your own – even if you were born a trillionaire.
If we struggle to see how some one or some thing contributed to anything, we’re mindful of chaos theory and if they weren’t there. Indeed, the world could’ve been better without some people existing, but it’s hard to say. Well know that if you are doing well in your life then it won’t solely have been down to your own decisions and efforts – on balance you’ll have logically been exposed to more of the beneficial rather than detrimental contributions of others, which makes it fair for those who have the most to give the most back or forwards.
This all makes disproportionately large c-suite executive compensation packages, and tax evasion or aggressive tax avoidance practices, seriously distasteful and unjustifiable.
The more we learn about the world, the more we understand this ‘God’s eye view’ of interconnectivity. How did we get to here? Natural evolution, cultural and technological evolution – unbroken chains of cause and effect (essentially starting from the Big Bang itself). We are not raised and do not live in a vacuum.
Like the roughly ‘six degrees of separation’ of social connections, perhaps there are only up to several degrees of separation between every worker in the world right now when it comes to people answering the question ‘who did I need to get me to this exact point in life right now, even if I didn’t/don’t know them by name or hadn’t/haven’t even personally met them (e.g. the farmers who cultivated the food one eats, the crew who keep the sewers below one’s street unblocked)?’ And then those people answering the same question, and so on.
We often think we just pay our money to whomever we personally made a contract with, and the supply chain will pass a portion of that money down to everyone relevant in that chain and that’s all the thanks we need to give for what we get. But especially as of posting, with the present high energy and rising food prices, we know that it takes far more global collaboration and harmony to keep prices affordable. We know that a war that might be thousands of miles away from us in just one country can drastically affect food prices around the world. We also know that it’s more than just about money (e.g. regarding the environment), and not everyone gets what they deserve.
When it comes to public funding, like for our primary education or basic healthcare (which we obviously didn’t pay for in advance before we were born or when as youngsters to get us to adulthood) – every taxpayer essentially becomes one degree of separation from us here and deserves our acknowledgement. You could never have paid for the roads you drive on, or the roads that the vehicles that your online deliveries use to drive on, alone.
And of course logically in terms of time, each generation alive required the generation before it to give birth to it in a totally unbroken chain of previous generations. There were countless ‘flip a coin’ moments that determined whether or not you’d be alive today to ponder being alive today. There are many more hypothetical souls that didn’t have such an opportunity. It was hardly inevitable that you’d be alive today at all.
Woof!
(This blog, officially, has been created by just one person but has really been built upon the immense wisdom and other direct and indirect contributions of literally billions of others I’d like to give thanks to!)
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