“Finding gratitude and appreciation is key to resilience. People who take the time to list things they are grateful for are happier and healthier.” – Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg said those words at a commencement speech in 2016, at the University of California, Berkeley, just over a year after losing her husband Dave.

Her attitude exemplifies what we should all take to heart: that in the worst of circumstances, you can learn so much.

Gratitude comes with awareness

A major element of gratitude is awareness: of self and of the world around you. And it’s not just in talking about the world around you or thinking about why you should be grateful but in actually noticing it. 

Do any gratitude exercise and you’ll likely end up sitting and thinking about reasons to be grateful. You’ll doubtless come up with many: your family, your health and so on. What you’re experiencing at that point isn’t gratitude or awareness but simply a reminder that, when things aren’t going well in business or life, things could in fact be a lot worse. Your brain is thinking that it should be grateful, but are you in fact feeling it?

Instead, what if you sat down and really looked around at your life, the people in it and what they are going through, how they are living day to day, right now in the present? Something as small as feeling warm by the fire while it’s blizzarding outside can give you an immense feeling of gratitude. You need to be aware of those feelings in order to feel grateful for them and ultimately, share them with others.

Learning to experience life with a sense of gratitude is how you keep that feeling alive. It’s not about a cerebral assessment of your actions or those of others; it’s about being mindful and noticing what is right in front of you.

Here’s an example: think of how you feel when you talk to someone you know and they give you good news. It’s satisfying and a nice feeling, right? Try this: the next time someone calls you with good news, really be in the moment and feel the rush of emotion that comes with the happy occasion. That emotion is, at least in part, gratitude.

Gratitude goes hand in hand with learning

“If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.” – Beyoncé

The ability to learn is key to growth. People who don’t learn from their experiences, their failures, and the valuable feedback given by others will not be able to grow. 

When you work from a place of gratitude, you are more open to the opportunities and more prepared to deal with the obstacles that come your way.

Sheryl Sandberg, in the same speech quoted above, also had this to say: “And when the challenges come, I hope you remember that anchored deep within you is the ability to learn and grow. You are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. Like a muscle, you can build it up, draw on it when you need it. In that process you will figure out who you really are — and you just might become the very best version of yourself.”

Learning and growing from a place of gratitude for what you already have, know and can share with others is the ideal. That’s how you build resilience and the ability to take on whatever challenges come your way, in business and in life.

Give gratitude to receive it

“When you give appreciation in order to get something it’s manipulation and people can sense it. Appreciate genuinely.” – Marilyn Suttle

Appearing grateful in order to secure a desired outcome is, as the quote says, disingenuous at best, and people will pick up on that. Instead, you need to cultivate a mindset that includes gratitude. 

When you genuinely praise someone for their efforts, you are sharing your gratitude with them. Sharing in that way will always come back to you in a positive way. So many people don’t take the time to genuinely thank others, but if you do, you are making a positive impression that will go far.

“When someone goes out of their way to acknowledge that something you did really had an impact, time stops–even if just for that moment while you take in someone’s gratitude.” (Source)

Ideally, if you make the effort to keep a Grounded in Gratitude Journal, you can be both mindful in the present, as well as have a resource to look back on when the chips are down, to bring you back to a place of gratitude, no matter what is going on around you.

“Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.” ~ Oprah Winfrey

Here’s an alarming statistic: according to Gallup research, only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their employment. That means that 85% don’t like their work, their workplace, and they’re going to do as little as possible to get through the day and pick up their pay.

In the US, the number of engaged employees is on the rise, topping out at 34% but that still means that almost 2/3rds of employees are not feeling motivated or connected to their workplace.

Losing an employee, beyond the forfeiture of their knowledge and experience, costs thousands of dollars per person. Absenteeism, low productivity, bad customer service… These are all results of low engagement.

On the flip side, companies with engaged employees are 22% more profitable and 21% more productive with 41% less absenteeism.

So what’s the key to driving higher employee engagement, which will result in greater productivity?

Gratitude.

Companies need to lead with gratitude

Companies are ultimately about profitability but mixing human emotions with the ‘bottom line’ is a difficult and complex equation. Profitability comes down to creating the highest productivity at the lowest possible cost, but the reality is that until robots take over the world, human nature has to be factored into those costs. It’s human to want to be appreciated. It’s human to want to be respected. The ability of an employee to feel engaged is founded in their feeling safe and appreciated in their roles.

Increasing productivity through an employee’s willingness to provide that extra effort that is within their discretion to exercise or not, is best accomplished with gratitude. Not more money, not a trip to Disneyland… simple gratitude.

The productivity improvements when workers feel gratitude and are more engaged is the ability to work together to find solutions to issues within the organization, to be collaborative and empathetic, rather than being focused on a single silo of protected knowledge.

How to lead with gratitude, with a view to improving productivity?

Like all cultural shifts in an organization, the change must begin at the top and filter down through all levels.

• New habits — if you want gratitude to be a part of the culture of your organization, you have to practice it often and consistently. Plus, engaging in gratitude amps up the ‘feel good’ hormones serotonin and dopamine. Like anything that you enjoy, it won’t be long before you’re craving to share some gratitude with others! And the beauty is, if it becomes part of the fabric of the company’s culture, others will share it too.

• Show appreciation — this can’t be a scheduled meeting to tell everyone how awesome they are, an activity that is disingenuous at best! You have to notice productivity and show the people involved, on an individual level, that you see them and their efforts, and that you appreciate it. When employees feel ‘seen’, they feel safer in the knowledge that their contributions matter. Your gratitude makes them feel grateful in turn and that is a feeling they can share with others. It’s a self-perpetuating attitude, if it’s done correctly!

• Bring respect and politeness back — sometimes we forget the basic niceties. We’re taught as children to say please and thank you, but somehow, within the corporate structure, those basics are often ignored in the aim of streamlining activities to increase productivity. However, these very simple tools are essential to increasing engagement and, by consequence, productivity. Bringing them back is good for business.

• Don’t just pay attention to the noisemakers — sure, there are always those team members who stand out. They do more and they make sure you know it! Look behind the scenes for the quiet doers, the ones who do a lot but escape notice whether by design or by mistake, and be sure to include them in your gratitude.

When you come from a place of gratitude, you can handle whatever comes your way in terms of issues or problems, far more positively and productively. If you’re happy with what you already have in your organization, it becomes easier to handle problems from a positive perspective. Mistakes will happen but gratitude makes it possible for people to see the good, for the short and the long term.

 

Whether you’re a CEO or a team leader, these hacks are tried and tested by people in leadership roles.

There are only 24 hours in a day and some of those hours have to be devoted to sleep, no matter how big your company is or what projects and developments are occurring at any given moment.

Since you can’t add to the available hours, you have to make better use of the ones you’ve got. While every leader will work in different ways—some are up at the crack of dawn and others are up well into the night—finding what productivity hacks suit your style will help you gain some time and perhaps help you focus as well.

Here are a few productivity hacks that work for others. Maybe they can help you find more time in your day too!

Avoid meetings

Meetings take up a lot of time and often don’t end with any tangible results. You want meetings to be as short as possible, with only one topic on the agenda, and the strict minimum of attendees. If someone isn’t directly related to the topic, they shouldn’t be there.

Plan your day, the day before

Even if you walk in the door with a ready plan, you can almost always be assured that it will go off the rails before noon. The point, however, is that you don’t get to your office and spend time looking at lists and trying to decide what to do, which can be overwhelming. Do that planning the day before and you’ll walk in ready to hit the ground running during what are typically the most productive hours of the day: the morning.

Tip: if you like to exercise, make sure your plan includes it and if you can, get it in before work. Why? It will give you the adrenaline and dopamine rush your brain will use to get going with more zing!

However you plan your day, make sure you include some downtime. There is little creative thinking that happens when you’re constantly on the move, being interrupted or in meetings. Good thinking and great ideas happen when you can shut down for a little while, and really relax. Whether massage, a hot shower, a nap, or a sauna gets you there, find a way to fit in time to think.

Prioritize your to do list and set deadlines

This seems obvious but it’s surprising how often people don’t bother to do this. It takes five minutes to prioritize a to do list but it will focus your thinking with regards to how to move forward with what needs to get done. By doing that, instead of getting overwhelmed with the whole list, you will be more efficient.

“Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, starts each morning with his twist on the standard to-do list. “Make a list of everything you want to accomplish that day. Be as exhaustive as possible,” he told Hoffman during an episode of Masters of Scale. “Group a few similar tasks together. Ask yourself for each group: What one action takes care of all of these? “It’s like a game of leverage.” (Source)

In the same style, setting deadlines for yourself, a task, a project or your team is the best way to make sure that things get done. If there are no milestone dates and hard deadlines, it’s easy to get caught up in putting out fires and attending to all and sundry instead of remaining focused on the end result.

One thing at a time

Multitasking is the least productive way to get anything done. You do all of the tasks poorly instead of doing one thing right. While it might seem counterintuitive for a busy person to limit themselves to one thing at a time, it’s the most effective use of human brain capacity. We just aren’t wired to do multiple things at once; doing so splits your brain, which won’t help in the long run!

And for the really committed…

The average person spends 11 hours a day on, in part, social media. That’s almost half of every day! Of course, CEOs probably don’t figure into that group, but it’s a pretty awesome statistic and one worth remembering the next time you’re just about to go down the rabbit hole of a Twitter thread that has nothing to do with what you do.

With these hacks in play, you can find more time in your day for the things that matter to you most. It requires a little forethought on your part, but you’ll be glad you spent the time in the end.

Brand—both personal and company—are difficult to form but positioning yourself and your organization as thought leaders in your particular industry can go a long way to creating the brand that you want.

With a strong brand and recognized position as a leader in the industry, you and your company can welcome a breadth of opportunities, including relationships with others who are influential in their own arenas, and a consistent audience of potential clients who will not only know but understand the influence that you wield.

What is a thought leader, exactly?

Essentially, a thought leader is someone whose expertise in a specific niche makes them an authority on the subject, able to influence others in understanding it, embracing change and sometimes disrupting ‘standard’ thinking on the subject.

Examples of thought leaders of yesterday and today include people like:

• John F. Kennedy — he challenged a generation in 1960  when he stated that America would make it to the moon within the decade. His leadership influenced the entire country to shift focus and achieve the goal.

• Steve Jobs — as much as he created hardware, he created a vision for how the world would work, and how we would all work together. His influence in that arena will be felt for a long time to come.

• Seth Godin — considered by many to be the ‘father of modern day marketing’, Seth has authored multiple books and can speak intelligently and passionately on marketing in a way that influences people to grow their thinking.

“Keep making a ruckus, it matters.” — Seth Godin

How do I become a thought leader?

Define your expertise and love it

Waking up one morning and deciding you are going to be a thought leader is not the way it goes. Instead, think hard on your experience, knowledge, and passion. Being a thought leader is hard work: you have to love the topic you’re communicating about, feel passionate about sharing on it, or you’ll find it difficult to muster the necessary enthusiasm to get the job done!

Create content that reflects this expertise

A thought leader shares their knowledge in ways that are compelling to the audience they are trying to reach. Ted Talks are a great example of how this works. But whether you prefer the written word, video, live events or however you choose to share your knowledge, it must always and consistently reflect your particular area of expertise.

The key—whatever medium you use—is to give your audience something new that they can take away, even if it is only a different perspective on a long-discussed topic. Stirring the pot and disrupting current thinking is an essential part of being a thought leader. Being ahead of the curve is what will make your thoughts influence others.

Be authentic

In order to influence others, you have to be authentic, have gravitas, and reflect the authority that you claim to have on the topic you say you love. This comes down to experience. If you don’t really have the knowledge that you claim to, your thought leadership will be hollow and inauthentic; it won’t resonate with your audience. This isn’t about self-promotion: it’s about sharing knowledge.

Do you want to share your knowledge and forward-thinking in your area of expertise with others, passionately, authentically and consistently? You have the makings of a thought leader. A solid team can help you get there, so consider what you want to say and how you want to get it ‘out there’. It will be worth it for your brand, and your company’s position.

Many of us equate loud, brash and even aggressive with success. But in fact, the quiet qualities of a classic introvert can be just the ticket, in a leadership role.

Of the many things a leader does every day, interacting with people is top of the list. If you’re an introvert by nature, many will assume that you won’t want to lead because of the interaction with others that is required.

Those people couldn’t be more wrong. It’s not that introverts don’t like people, it’s that they need to manage their time to get away from constant interaction and recharge. But this is precisely what makes an introvert a good leader: they will actively seek the time to recharge and when they do, a lot of thinking and planning goes on.

By nature, introverts tend to be better thinkers, listeners and they also tend to be more empathetic towards others. All qualities that are essential to good leaders.

Let’s unpack these traits a little more:

A good leader listens

Active listening isn’t something most of us do automatically. We have to consciously work at making sure that we’re really listening to people, not just going through the motions all the while preparing our next statement in our heads!

Introverts are natural listeners because it’s what they’d rather be doing, instead of speaking. That allows them to dive deeper into any issue. After all, there is almost more than what meets the eye (or ear!) when it comes to issues in the workplace. An active listener will pick up on body language and other cues that will give them a more complete view of a situation than someone who is not adept at listening.

For example, if a team member is consistently late, a person who isn’t an active listener might just brush off the issue and demand that the person get their act together ‘or else’. An introvert is more likely to realize that there could be more to the story and look to discover what the problem underlying the chronic tardiness is, if there is a valid one.

This behavior, and the willingness to listen and only speak when they have thoroughly considered their words, reflects a higher tendency towards empathy.

A good leader is empathetic

Hand in hand with active listening is the ability to react appropriately to situations, with a humble, low-key attitude that leads to more meaningful connections with others. While some leaders will develop a tendency to react to problems at face value, introverts are more likely to take a deeper dive into an issue to see if there is more to it and resolution can be found in ways that better serve everyone involved.

This type of problem-solving comes from a place of empathy, which is essential for a happy work environment. The more knee-jerk reaction of a leader who doesn’t assess a situation with a layer of empathy can often find themselves being described as unkind, impatient and, in general, ineffective at influencing change. Of course, one doesn’t have to be an introvert to lead with empathy, but it is a more natural tendency for people who look beyond the surface as part of the way they think.

A good leader thinks

Introverts have a tendency to think before acting or speaking. It’s in the nature of the way they operate on a day to day basis. This can be confused with being passive and not taking a stand or action. But really, it’s about taking a more measured stand.

With a tendency towards analysis, as they listen and take in a situation, rather than jumping in with both feet, an introverted leader can establish themselves as a person who responds thoughtfully, not reactively.

With measured thought and the resulting actions, an introvert can easily become a very natural influencer, someone whom others willingly follow rather than following out of fear.

All in all, anyone can leverage the natural traits of an introvert in their leadership roles, if they do so with purpose. The lucky ones who come by these traits naturally however, should consider how well placed they are to influence others, achieve productivity and in general lead with purpose.