Last week, the hotel which has been my home in Madrid for the last one and a half years closed its doors for refurbishment (where am I going to find a hotel like this?). On my last night there, when I got to my room, the Front Desk team had left a bouquet of tea roses together with a personalised letter thanking me for being a loyal guest. It was such an honest and true acknowledgement that, with a lump in my throat, I went down to the reception to hug the person on the night shift. Now I am just counting the months for my hotel to re-open.
Gratitude is one of the most powerful, inspiring feelings. In most of the people I know (except a few non-honourable exceptions) it awakes commitment and, in return, the will of doing something good for that person. Gratitude and recognition help us rediscover a truly human way to build positive relationships in an inspiring, energizing way, which amplifies our actions and their results.
The fact that nowadays we are still surprised at a sincere gratitude means that we still have a long way to go regarding the acceptance and acquisition of positive feelings into our everyday life. This is not a minor thing, since, as human beings, most recent history tried to standardise a model of emotional asepsis in some companies where, for instance, being a kind, smiling person is understood as being weak or unprofessional. Such organisations are clustered in an old command & control model which represents plenty of disadvantages in today’s world. The inability to attract and keep talent is the worst of them, even if they offer supposedly good compensation -but no benefits. I am convinced that, in the medium-term, many of those companies will disappear, such will be the price of trying to suffocate the best part of being human: the ability to generate and foster positive feelings.
What would happen if an organisation based its whole toolkit and standards on gratitude and recognition? Imagine a company which truly thanks a person who trusts its products or whose tools (from development to C&B) are based on recognition over metrics. What would be the effect on the collective psyche and its impact on the community? It would probably be something similar to what I felt in my hotel room in Madrid that night.
