Samantha Jones, Strategy and Innovation Director at V2V, indicated me this article from Harvard Business Review which was very compatible with something I had already wanted to present here at the blog for a while: the competences that, if encouraged within the teams, develop a long-term view, increase the team’s resilience, improve the working conditions and can be very well exercised through volunteering.

These competences not always seem directly related to the business, but they are directly related to people, which are those who move the company forward, and then, the relationship occurs.

Next is a free translation I did, along with some comments, of the text: “How to Cultivate Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride on Your Team”, by David DeSteno. 

Here it is. I hope you like it.

As a Leader, Which Features Should You Encourage in Your Collaborators?

Resilience, being “coarse”, the ability to persevere when there are challenges? Right. The ability and willingness to accept some sacrifices and work hard for a successful future are crucial for the members of any team.

However, I believe that there is another component as important as that: grace.

I do not mean the ability to move in an elegant manner or anything religious. Instead, I mean qualities of decency, respect and generosity, all of which mark a person as being someone with whom the others wish to cooperate.

Consider the results of Google’s Project Oxygen, a research initiative of many years, developed to identify the qualities of a manager that increase the success of a team. What they found out was that yes, leading a team to be productive andresults-oriented was important, but also being balanced, scheduling individual meetings, working together with the team at the frontline to solve emergencies and demonstrating genuine interest in the social life of the employees.

Indeed, those “character” qualities overcame mere motivation and the technical expertise when it came to foresee success.

That makes sense. Innovation often requires a team effort. The experience must be combined to solve problems, which calls for cooperation. And cooperation requires the willingness to share the acknowledgement and support one another, instead of always making an effort to receive credit for oneself.

Gratitude, Compassion and Pride According to the Research

Thus, as a manager, what is the best way to instill both courage and grace in your team? The survey by David DeSteno  shows that it is about cultivating three specific emotions: gratitude, compassion and pride (dignity).

I allow myself a parenthesis here to talk about a very short booklet called “Power and Love: Theory and Practice of Social Change”, by Adam Kahane, which changed my professional life at a time when the balance of those two characteristics was crucial: courage and grace.

“Power and Love describes both the positive and the negative sides inherent to both impulses, explains why choosing only one of them to execute projects is not enough and indicates the best way to conciliate them” (Source).

This is very important for the drive that the volunteering manager carries. In general, the social managers bring a very large background of what is called here “love”, or grace, and they err in the “power” factor.

But back to the subject of David DeSteno’s three emotions, they not only increase patience and perseverance, but they also create social ties.

During most of human evolutionary history, the ability to be successful depended almost entirely on the ability to establish relationships. People needed to be honest, just and diligent — qualities that required a willingness to inhibit the selfish desires to profit at the expense of the others. And it were the moral emotions such as gratitude, compassion and a genuine pride (dignity) that encouraged those actions.

Gratitude

For example, the survey showed that, when people feel grateful, they are more willing to devote efforts to help the others, to be loyal even at a cost, and to share the profits evenly with the partners, instead of getting more money for themselves.

Compassion

When there is compassion, there is more willingness to devote time, effort and money to help the others.

Pride

And when they feel proud — and pride here in the positive sense of the word, of integrity, self-respect and dignity — the people will work more to help the peers to solve problems.

All those behaviors attract the same thing to us. Individuals that express gratitude, compassion and pride are seen in a positive way by those around them.

Consequently, those emotions also generate courage. Therefore, power and love, grace and courage do not exclude one another: they increase the value that the people ascribe to the future goals as compared to the present ones and, thus, they pave the way for perseverance.

David DeSteno reports that the work in his laboratory, for example, shows that the people willing to feel grateful demonstrate twice as much patience when it comes to financial rewards, that is, they are less short-termists and are twice as willing to give up a lower immediate profit in order to invest it in a long-term gain.

Along the same line, people who feel pride or compassion are willing to persevere more than 30% in challenging tasks, as compared to those who even feel other positive emotions, such as happiness, precisely because in that case pride and compassion lead them to value more the future rewards.

And I, Bruno, believe that this is all about what they believe in, feel and for what the professionals of sustainability, social responsibility and volunteering work.

The Corporate Volunteering Programs are inside the companies to recall that both the internal and external relations must be ruled by a long-term view and by the acknowledgement of the participation and of the integration of the stakeholders, exercising empathy and solidarity, with the goal to offer dignity to everyone involved either directly or indirectly with the business.

Connection: The Benefits for Mental Health

In addition to using willingness to work hard, those emotions also help to solve a problem that is ever more common in the professional life: loneliness. Today, loneliness became an epidemic in the USA, with 53% of the American workers reporting that they feel isolated in their public lives — a huge problem, considering how expensive loneliness is regarding both physical and mental health.

Feeling gratitude, compassion and pride on a regular basis creates social connections because those emotions automatically make the individuals behave in a more communitary and solidary way. For example, in order to feel and express gratitude, people designated to engage in simple interventions show intensified feelings of social connection and satisfaction with the relationships as time goes by.

Another pause in the translation of the text is convenient to recall that during pandemics the issue of loneliness may aggravate even more, along with greater pressure on the mental health of the people. At the same time, the volunteering activities are an excellent tool to help in all that: in the loneliness of both volunteers and beneficiaries, in the mental health of institutionalized or of stressed collaborators, in the creation of ties and in the exercise of compassion, gratitude and pride.

The Feelings Generate Results

It is because of the tie among those emotions, of the courage and of the social connection that the managers that cultivate gratitude, compassion and pride on their team will see greater productivity and well-being of their employees.

As an example, Adam Grant and Francesca Gino examined perseverance in an environment full of more rejection than almost any other: fundraising. During a two-week period, they recorded the number of calls made in a drive to ask for donations for the university.

Between the first and the second week, however, half of the fundraisers received the visit of the director of annual donations of the university, during which she expressed her thankfulness for their work. To give an idea of how that expression of gratitude affected the fundraisers, Gino and Grant asked them to report how they felt valued and appreciated by their bosses.

Considering that the average performance of both groups was virtually the same during the first week of the study, those who heard the thank you message increased their fundraising efforts in 50% during the second week. What is especially interesting here is how the benefits of gratitude and pride may feed one another. In another fundraising study, Grant and Amy Wrzesniewski found out that the gratitude that the managers expressed towards their employees fed their pride, who in turn stepped up their efforts.

Compassion also creates devotion. Researching more than 200 people who work in different units within a large long-term care institution, Sigal Barsade and Mandy O’Neil found out that those who worked in units characterized by higher feelings of social tie, confidence, acceptance and support — a compound that could easily be called empathy and compassion — showed not only higher performance and engagement, but also greater satisfaction in the job, less exhaustion and less absenteeism.

Gratitude, compassion e pride turn us more willing to cooperate and invest in the others. And, since they carry out that achievement increasing the value that the mind ascribes to future gains, they also encourage us to invest in our own future.

Thus, both the teams and the individuals that make them up become more successful and resilient.