Grateful Leadership: Using the Power of Acknowledgment to Engage All Your People and Achieve Superior Results

Chapter 5WHEN SOMEONE DESERVES ACKNOWLEDGMENT, GIVE GENEROUSLY

Principle #1:Acknowledgment is deserved by many, but received by few.

It will be easier to acknowledge those you lead if you start by practicing your acknowledgment skills on people in your organization you don’t know very well, or even know personally at all. Then you will begin making your organization and all of its stakeholders happier, healthier, more productive.

Each day you encounter workers whose names you don’t know, who go above and beyond, performing their work behind the scenes—the woman ladling soup in the cafeteria, the maintenance worker who arrives with his bucket and broom moments after there’s a mishap, the elderly woman who cleans the bathrooms. Most of these ...