“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

All people have the innate desire to feel appreciated and valued by others. Research on gratitude and appreciation demonstrates that when employees feel valued, they have high job satisfaction, have productive relationships, and are motivated to do their best. Our research identified that feelings of dignity and belongingness at work, when aligned with one’s purpose, led to the highest levels of engagement and lowest levels of intention to leave an organization.

Gratitude can be the gateway to strengthening other leadership skills such as better emotional regulation and authentic relationships leading to emotionally intelligent and empathetic workplaces, where employees practice compassion and forgiveness.

So why is it so hard to create a culture of gratitude?

Business cultures, pressures, and distractions can erect barriers to the practice of gratitude. As humans, we tend to be hard-wired to focus on the negative and slide our attention past the positive. In his book Hardwiring Happiness, Rick Hanson suggests that “The mind is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.” As leaders, we tend to focus on what’s not working, what’s wrong with processes, poor results, and performance versus what’s right. We have developed industries around the root cause of failure, process improvement, 6-sigma, which are important but perhaps not as much as our understanding of the root causes of success and greater well-being!

Many managers find communicating appreciation complicated. Some have trouble balancing it with developmental feedback and fear sending mixed messages to employees.

How can we appreciate the people, process, and leadership elements that lead to excellence and success more?

Often managers use recognition and appreciation interchangeably. Recognition is often used as a surrogate for gratitude, and leaders feel they may be appreciating their teams through their use of recognition. Research also shows a large difference between how much managers appreciated employees and how appreciated employees felt. While they’re both important, there’s a big difference between them. It’s important for leaders to understand this difference to support teams that thrive in cultures of engagement, loyalty, and high performance.

In simple terms, recognition is about what people do; appreciation is about who they are.

Appreciation is about acknowledging a person’s inherent value, and the point isn’t to highlight their work accomplishments but their worth as a colleague and human being. And Gratitude goes a step further; it recognizes how the positive things in our lives — like success at work — are often due to forces outside of ourselves, particularly other people’s efforts.