The Currency of Gratitude

Do you ever find it difficult to get someone to do something for you? As a project manager, I find one of my greatest challenges is to get people who don’t work for me to do things for the project. Why do I find this so hard? After all, I’m a graduate of the Dale Carnegie Course (Dale Carnegie wrote “How to Win Friends and Influence People”). In that course, we had to face loud objections and heckling from the rest of the class when we gave our speeches, just to learn not to back down in front of a hostile or apathetic audience. I made a pretty good case against expressions like “so aren’t I” and “I could care less” that I hear only in New England, while the class jeered and accused me of ironing my underwear and folding my socks.

But as my project management responsibilities increased, it seemed that my chutzpah went missing during one-on-one conversations about assigning tasks to team members and making sure they got done.

Then, a couple of years ago, I took a class from the Learning and Organization Development department at DFCI on different methods of influencing people. One of the main points of the class was identifying the most valuable “currency” you use when negotiating with someone. We practiced asking others in the class, in one-on-one conversations, to agree to tasks that we expected would be met with resistance. For example, one of my classmates was someone I knew everyone asked to do everything because she had a huge amount of expertise, but because she had been with the organization for years, everyone took her for granted. So I started by telling her that I admired her breadth of knowledge and that I had observed that many people took advantage of that. After explaining the task I needed help with, I asked her opinion on the best way to get the task done. Then I asked her who she thought should be responsible for doing the task and what I could do to facilitate the process. Finally, I thanked her for taking the time to talk with me and for her expert opinion.

This model of using reciprocity to gain influence is not new, but it was new to me. Expressing gratitude had come naturally during much of my career.  In fact, a former manager had once told me I gave other people too much credit and should not be so quick to attribute the success of a task to another person. But it was not natural for me to change this behavior, even though I often did it with a nagging suspicion that I was “brown-nosing”.

The class validated that gratitude was the “currency” I spent most freely when interacting with others. The payoff was not only “getting stuff done”. I found that when I expressed gratitude and admiration toward others, it made me feel good, both about the other person and about myself.

During the practice interactions, not only did we need to identify what our own currency was, but what was valuable to the other person as well. One thing I have learned about myself is that I can do a job without expecting praise, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of my team doesn’t expect and need praise. Some people’s currency focuses on personal courtesy and acknowledgment. So if I observe someone being less than courteous to one of these team members in a meeting, although I would never expect an apology personally, I would ask the offending party to apologize to a team member who would respond positively to it.

Knowing that I have this currency in my pocket makes it much easier for me to ask people to do things, and it actually makes me feel good to spend it. What is your currency?