Stories of APPRECIATION – How One Person or Idea Can Change the Trajectory of an Organization

Story #1

I once facilitated a planning retreat for a 17-person leadership team of a local technology company…

In preparing some of the content, we decided to review the “2022 Milestones.” The CEO was going to prepare the slide and send it to me before the retreat.

I received it one-day prior, and it contained about 20 initiatives, broken out by quarter. Some were simple projects like onboarding key new team members, others were more involved, like developing a new PMO, or standing up a new office in another city, or hitting a “go live” deadline or launching a new program.

My plan was to walk through each Milestone, and have the CEO recognize people who helped contribute to the success of each milestone. Regrettably I budgeted 45 minutes for the slide, figuring 2+ minutes for each initiative was sufficient. NOT SO.

We spent 1 1⁄2 hours on the 2022 milestones, and everyone who touched each project was duly recognized in a meaningful way. If something or someone was left out, members of the group would add their appreciation. It was one of the sweetest 90-minute segments of the retreat. The energy that was brought into the room by virtue of this genuine and heartfelt appreciation was palpable.

 

Story #2

Labor/Management Relations

I was asked to come into a large utility company with the expressed purpose of helping them to improve labor/management relations, which had been seriously eroded after the recent brutal round of negotiations.

My strategy was to develop four labor/management committees charged with working together on process improvement, safety, employee recognition programs, and team-building activities. Each committee focuses on one topic.

During our kick-off meeting, members of labor sat on one side and management on the other. During the session, we filled the walls with ideas for employee recognition programs.

The meeting was about finding ways to show appreciation and invited conversations about who deserved to be appreciated and how.

There was periodic grousing about how the company used to be more like a family, and now we never do this, or that.

During the meeting, one union member said the following. “You know, last year, my wife and I had to put her mother into a home, because she began suffering with dementia. We called all the places we could afford and couldn’t find a place with an immediate opening. I mentioned it to Chris (the company’s COO) and within two days, we had my Mother-in-law accepted at a nursing home. I’ll never forget that. I can complain about a lot of other things, but I’ll never forget that.”

The room went silent. This was an inflection point. The group was now able to begin building trust and letting go of some of the anger present at the outset of the meeting.

 

Story #3

In the aftermath of a merger between two competing companies, the IT departments were reluctant to acquiesce to the “other” group’s way of doing things. They each thought “their way” was the right way and weren’t interested in being told otherwise. To make matters worse, the two groups were from different parts of the country. Two distinctly different cultures with different sets of behaviors.

Productivity was at a standstill, and we knew we had to act quickly, otherwise the merger would be viewed negatively to analysts, and by Wall Street. And IT performance was pivotal to driving performance companywide. A lot was at risk.

We decided that we had to find a way to reach common ground around a shared culture that everyone could embrace.

During an offsite meeting with the IT leadership from each group, we began to de-construct the attributes of each group’s culture. We charted existing norms/behaviors, habits and rituals, beliefs, language, stories, symbols, and the physical environment in which they operated.

We then invited members to individually state the attributes they appreciated about the other group’s culture. So, you’d begin to hear things like “I think it’s cool that they invest in training their employees,” and “I appreciate that they trust their teams enough to allow them to work from home when necessary.”

Each leader was asked to weigh in. When we were through appreciating the “other way,” we then chose the attributes we wanted to carry over in creating the “New Culture.” And we wrote a new narrative defining the “New Culture.” It was something everyone contributed to, and everyone shared. It was a true break-through session, and set the stage for appreciating smaller, more detailed ways of working and communicating as one team.

 

While meaningful moments may occur regularly in your organization, those meaningful moments rooted in appreciation can have significantly greater and lasting impact.