Why Gratitude is a Leadership Superpower

Neil Pasricha, BCom ’02, knows he has plenty to be thankful for.

Yes, there’s the highlight-reel career stuff. He has 11 wildly popular books, including 2010’s smash The Book of Awesome, last year’s Our Book of Awesome and, most recently, Canada is Awesome—which have collectively sold more than two million copies and spent more than 200 weeks on bestseller lists. He also has a thriving speaking business that takes him around the world, firing up audiences to live happier, more fulfilling and more resilient professional and personal lives. And then there’s his podcast, which gets him talking to fascinating people (ranging from Seth Godin and Brené Brown to Temple Grandin and Quentin Tarantino) about the books that formed their sense of self.

Pasricha appreciates all of it. But in a phone interview on a sunny fall day, work accomplishments are not what first come to mind when asked what he’s grateful for. Instead, he shares a laundry list of tiny, beautiful wins that have lit up his day: That his seven-year-old woke him up with snuggles. That his wife is finally recovering from a concussion. That he has a square of dark chocolate waiting for him in his backpack. That he is able to have the conversation while going for a walk, which doubles his daily step count, and that the weather is fine enough to allow him to go jacket-free.

Taking note of little things like these might seem frivolous, but in Pasricha’s view, it’s anything but. That’s because he’s studied the science and therefore knows that people who make gratitude a regular, everyday practice are proven to be happier and healthier individuals. They’re also better leaders, prone to building more engaged, resilient and innovative teams.

Indeed, gratitude can be a competitive advantage, even in the cutthroat realm of commerce. That’s why—as Pasricha explains to Smith Business Insight contributor Deborah Aarts—it’s a practice leaders should actively cultivate.

Let’s start by going back in time. What first got you into gratitude?

Neil Pasricha: It was 2008. I was going through the end of my first marriage, around the same time that my best friend—who had attempted suicide once before—ended up taking his own life. I was living in Mississauga, managing leadership development in Walmart’s HR department, and I remember driving home from work one day and thinking, “I need a way to focus on something positive.”

I had always liked to write, and I thought that might be a way in. So I got home, Googled how to start a blog and, about 10 minutes later, set up a little website called 1000awesomethings.com and set a goal to writing about one awesome thing every weekday for 1,000 days.

In the beginning it wasn’t overly positive. I was writing about things like when the cashier opens a new checkout lane for you at the grocery store. But I tapped into something: How great it feels when a little moment of victory happens, even amidst a negative situation. That’s how I started. It’s been nearly 18 years and I still make a point to write one new awesome thing every single day.

How has your understanding of gratitude changed since, as you’ve amassed more and more success?

When the blog finished in 2012, I’d been doing it every day for four years. It had become far more popular than I ever expected and had led to three books. I kind of thought, “mission accomplished.”

But it turns out that you can’t really turn off gratitude once it’s a practice.

The reason is biological. We each have an amygdala in our brains—it’s the oldest part of the brain, preceding our species. It’s about the size of a walnut, and it secretes fight-or-flight hormones all day. The amygdala is a vital part of species survival: It’s why we look at the questions we got wrong when we get a math test back, why we seek out one-star reviews of the item we want to buy on Amazon. Instinctively, we are wired to seek out the negative.

I’ve learned that we really do have to battle this biological, root part of our psyche all the time. It really does have to be a daily practice. You can’t stop. You don’t ever get to a place of being “done” with gratitude. 

How does the practice of gratitude square with the world of business and the tendency to constantly seek new, better and bigger ways of doing things? Is gratitude always at odds with modern capitalism? Or can it be complementary?

I don’t disagree that late-stage capitalism can have all kinds of negative externalities. We’re seeing wealth becoming extremely concentrated. We’re seeing so much of our ability to enjoy things become contingent on 10 different sign-ups, 12 different accounts and endless subscription fees. We’re seeing our streets filled with delivery vans. We’re seeing a lot of people whose default mode is “Go, go, go.”

We’re also all exposed to extremely sophisticated, billion-dollar research algorithms that are far smarter than we all are. It’s hard to scroll anything online without coming across anger-producing drips meant to make us upset. It’s happening at a rate that’s faster than what we can process and at a level that is beyond our understanding.

So yes, many parts of modern life make gratitude harder to practice than ever before, but I’d argue that we also have a greater need for it. Furthermore, gratitude is not something that slows you down or gets in the way of accomplishment. In my experience, it can only help you. Even in business.

How so?

Leaders right now have a very challenging set of circumstances. Markets are uncertain, which makes employment feel uncertain for a lot of people. Yet as a leader, your role is to inspire and motivate a team by setting a direction and helping support people towards their goals. You need a workforce that is engaged in their work, and trusting of one another, and that can be hard to create when things feel so uncertain.

But there are real benefits to be reaped if you can show up with positivity at work, even when things feel stressful and overwhelming.

We know from research that when you can help your employees feel grateful for both the work that they’re doing and for the team that they’re part of, the benefits are myriad. Engagement improves. Productivity goes up. People are more likely to feel that what they do is important. Trust goes up among teams, absenteeism goes down, and fewer people look for other jobs. This is all exactly what you want as a leader.

So, is it the job of the leader to model appreciative behaviour?

I think so. I worked at Walmart for 10 years and one of the projects I led was trying to understand how two similarly sized, structured and situated stores had such varying degrees of standards. One store had a completely clean parking lot. The floors were spotless. Everything on the shelves was tidy. The standards were really high. The other store often had garbage in the parking lot, gum on the carpet, shelves that were askew. We did an analysis. Guess what? At the first store, the store manager would often put the carts away, pick up garbage and straighten shelves as they walked by, so everybody else did too. At the other, the manager wouldn’t do those things, so no one else did. 

Your work as a leader is observed, mimicked and reflected in the workforce at all times. So if you can be brave and say, “I want to start or finish a meeting with a gratitude exercise,” that behaviour gets reflected throughout the organization. And when people recognize and see one another and show gratitude towards each other, everything gets easier and better for the person leading them.

What are some practices leaders can employ to stoke gratitude in their teams?

One practice I like is to create a “Wall of Awesomes” in the office. You just leave a pile of cards or sticky notes and pens or markers beside it. Encourage people to write down something that they appreciate whenever they feel like it. Maybe they love it when there’s still hot water left in the kettle in the office kitchen. Or when they’re late to a meeting, but their boss is even later. It can and should be organic. But when people start writing things like that down, you end up having this physical manifestation of gratitude in the office atmosphere. It becomes impossible to walk by without seeing some positivity reflected at you.

You can also start a meeting with “Rose, Thorn, Bud,” which is a classic gratitude practice in which people share a success, a challenge and something with potential. As the person leading the meeting, you can stress that there’s no pressure to play, and then start by doing it yourself. It’s not easy. In fact, it can be a bit awkward at first. But if you do that at the beginning, the tenor and the tone of a meeting changes. People become more naturally open, more willing to share, more likely to trust and lean into each other.

Another way is to end a meeting with a round of appreciation. Encourage anybody who feels comfortable doing so to say a thank you to anyone else on the team for something they’ve done. Again, as a leader, you can start, or you can sit in a nice 30-second pause and let it kind of bubble up. The combination of gratitude and recognition can reduce a lot of workplace challenges and open up peoples’ ability to feel more seen and human at work.

Again, it’s not always easy. These little games and activities take courage to initiate. But they do make people feel seen, and they do help our brains to be more positive when it’s not our natural default position.

Can you share a tip to help leaders integrate more gratitude into their own busy lives? 

Here’s a simple one: Try to write down tiny and specific things you’re thankful for every day. Not the big things that come to mind first, like your husband, or your kid, or your dog. Instead, something like, for example, that your husband, Antonio, put the toilet seat down, or that your daughter rode her bike without training wheels. Noticing small and specific things lights up area 17 of your visual cortex and creates a specific memory. When you write it down, it lights up area 17 again. And when you read it later, it lights up a third time. Simply writing down small, specific things you appreciate can have a doubling and tripling effect on the positive moments of your day.

As someone who’s now been practicing gratitude for the better part of two decades: Does it get easier with time?

In my experience, yes. Gratitude becomes a bit like a large sun in your mental solar system. I have days that I’m unhappy, that’s for sure. But if you actively seek out things to be grateful for, it becomes easier to find them. And the more you look, the more you see.