How to Cultivate Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride on Your Team

by David DeSteno
Harvard Business Review

As a leader, what traits should you cultivate in your employees? Grit – the ability to persevere in the face of challenges? Sure. A willingness to accept some sacrifices and work hard toward a successful future are essential for the members of any team. But I believe there’s another component that matters just as much: grace. I don’t mean the ability to move elegantly or anything religious. Rather, I mean qualities of decency, respect, and generosity, all of which mark a person as someone with whom others want to cooperate.

Consider the results of Google’s Project Oxygen, a multiyear research initiative designed to identify the manager qualities that enhanced a team’s success. What they found is that yes, driving a team to be productive and results-oriented mattered, but so did being even-keeled, making times for one-on-one meetings, working with a team in the trenches to solve problems, and taking an interest in employees’ social lives. In fact, these “character” qualities outranked sheer drive and technical expertise when it came to predicting success.

This makes sense. Innovation typically requires team effort. Expertise has to be combined to solve problems, necessitating cooperation. And cooperation requires a willingness to share credit and support one another as opposed to always striving to take credit for oneself.

So as a manager, what’s the best way to instill grit and grace in your team? My research shows that it’s about cultivating three specific emotions: gratitude, compassion, and pride.

These three emotions not only increase patience and perseverance, but also build social bonds. For most of human evolutionary history, the ability to succeed rested almost entirely on the ability to form relationships. People needed to be honest, fair, and diligent – qualities that required a willingness to inhibit selfish desires to profit at the expense of others. And it was moral emotions like gratitude, compassion, and an authentic pride that motivated these actions. For example, research has shown that when people feel grateful, they’re willing to devote more effort to help others, to be loyal even at a cost to themselves, and to split profits equally with partners rather than take more money for themselves. When they feel compassion, they’re willing to devote time, effort, and money to aid others. And when they feel proud – an authentic pride based on their abilities as opposed to a hubristic one – they’ll work harder to help colleagues solve problems. And all of these behaviors draw others to us. People who express gratitude, compassion, and pride are viewed positively by those around them.

These emotions also build grit. They increase the value people place on future goals relative to present ones, and thereby pave the way to perseverance. Work from my lab, for example, shows that people induced to feel grateful show double the patience when it comes to financial rewards. They’re twice as willing to forgo an immediate smaller profit so that they can invest it for a longer-term gain. In a similar vein, people made to feel pride or compassion are willing to persevere more than 30% longer on challenging tasks compared to those feeling other positive emotions, such as happiness, precisely because pride and compassion induce them to place greater value on future rewards.

Unlike using willpower to keep your nose to the grindstone, using these emotions also helps solve an increasingly common problem of professional life: loneliness. Today, loneliness has become an epidemic in the U.S., with 53% of American workers regularly reporting feeling isolated in their public lives — an immense problem given the toll loneliness takes on the both physical and mental health. Regularly feeling gratitude, compassion, and pride — because these emotions automatically make people behave in more communal and supportive ways — builds social connections. For example, people assigned to engage in simple interventions to feel and express gratitude show enhanced feelings of social connection and relationship satisfaction over time.

Because of the connection between these emotions and grit and social connection, managers who cultivate gratitude, compassion, and pride in their team will see increased productivity and wellbeing of their workers. As one example, Adam Grant and Francesca Gino examined perseverance in an environment that is rife with more rejection than almost any other: fundraising. Over a two-week period, they recorded the number of calls fundraisers made in an effort to solicit donations for a university. Between the first and second week, however, half of the fundraisers received a visit from the university’s director of annual giving, during which she expressed her appreciation for their work. To get a sense of how this expression of gratitude affected the fundraisers, Gino and Grant had them report how valued and appreciated they felt by their superiors.

Whereas the average performance of both groups had been virtually the same during the first week of the study, those who had heard the grateful message upped their fundraising efforts by 50% during the second week. What’s particularly interesting here is the way the benefits of gratitude and pride can feed off one another. In another study on fundraisers, Grant and Amy Wrzesniewski found that the gratitude managers expressed toward their employees stoked the employees’ pride, which in turn, bolstered their efforts.

Compassion, too, builds dedication. Surveying over 200 people working in different units within a large long-term care facility, Sigal Barsade and Mandy O’Neil found that those who worked in units characterized by higher feelings of social attachment, trust, acceptance, and support — a composite that could easily be called empathy and compassion — not only showed superior performance and engagement, but also increased work satisfaction, less exhaustion, and lower absenteeism.

Gratitude, compassion, and pride make us more willing to cooperate with and invest in others. But because they accomplish this feat by increasing the value the mind places on future gains, they also nudge us to invest in our own futures. In so doing, they make both teams, and the individuals who comprise them, more successful and resilient.

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David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the author of Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride.

God’s Call to Leave This American Mess

by John Piper
desiringGod.org

What does the present political climate in America have to do with world evangelization?

Recently I preached a message on the Great Commission as part of the annual missions focus at Bethlehem Baptist Church. During the first service Sunday morning, I said something in particular that I had not said in the other two services. I regularly pray, when I preach, that the Holy Spirit will bring things to my mind that may not be in the sermon notes, but may be powerfully appointed for someone in the audience. This is one way I think about the gift of prophecy.

I was acknowledging that leaving America, with all its comforts and securities, may be hard for some of you who are being called by God to be part of the thousands who will teach the nations to observe “all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20). Then, quite outside my notes, I said, “But then again, some of you may be looking for a reason to leave America, the mess is so great.” I smiled. People laughed.

At that point, instead of returning to my notes, I felt impelled to press in on that, and what came to my mind was that God has used messes and stresses before to move his people out of their comforts into missions. I mentioned the situation in Acts 8.

Really Bad at Home

Jesus had told the apostles in Acts 1:8, just before he ascended to heaven, that he was going to send the Holy Spirit to empower them to be his witnesses “in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

But so far as we see in the book of Acts, no one had budged out of Jerusalem by the beginning of chapter 8 — let alone made their way to Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.

What was God’s way of getting his people moving out of their homeland into world missions? Answer: It got really bad at home.

Stephen was one of the greatest spokesmen for the Christian faith in Jerusalem. The leaders “could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking” (Acts 6:10). So, they killed him.

The result?

There arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria. . . . Now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. (Acts 8:1, 4)

Thus the global mission of the Christian church was launched. It had to get so dangerous at home that Judea and Samaria and the ends of the earth finally looked feasible.
That’s what I said in the first service at Bethlehem and then returned to my notes.

Disillusioned About America

Whether that was a word of “prophecy” for a particular person in that service, I am not sure. But I write about it here because I believe it is so relevant to this moment in our history, as thousands of young people wonder about the future of America. Many voting-age young people are disillusioned and perplexed about this country’s political climate. There are no heroes. No great statesmen. No champions of a vision worth living and dying for.

What God showed me in that moment is that he has a great calling for his people in this very moment of American history — this very messy, muddy, demoralizing moment. His calling is that we lift up our eyes.

First, lift them up to his triumphant, all-commanding smile as he says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18).

Then, lift them up far beyond the little scope of American politics to all the nations and all the peoples of the world, and look with joy at the all-authoritative promise:

      All the ends of the earth shall remember  
            and turn to the Lord,   
      and all the families of the nations  
            shall worship before you.   
      For kingship belongs to the Lord,  
            and he rules over the nations. (Psalm 22:27–28)

Then, lift them up above the pathetic inability of political figures to answer straightforward questions. Lift them up against the incapacity of politicians who will not let their “Yes” be “Yes” and their “No” be “No.”

Let your eyes land on the crystal clear, uncompromising, unchanging command: “Go, in my complete authority, to make disciples of all the peoples of the world. Bring them to faith. Baptize them. Teach them to live in accord with everything I taught you. I will be with you always, to the end of the age.”

The Moment for Missions

Every moment is a moment for world missions. Because Jesus reigns at every moment. And his commission stands at every moment. But some moments are like a thunderclap of awakening to reality. America is not our home. Political power is not our strategy. Privilege and political freedom in this age is not the birthright of the new birth. “A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20).

If God must wake us up by means of disillusioning developments at “home,” it may or may not mean that there is a bright future for America. But it certainly means this: God has far greater purposes for the worship of his Son, Jesus Christ, among the nations of this world than can be hindered by anything that happens in America.

Indeed. Not only will our mess not hinder his mission. I am calling thousands of Jesus’s followers to hear in it a call to the nations, just like the believers in Acts 8 saw God’s hand in the catastrophe in Jerusalem. They didn’t just leave. They left on mission. “Those who were scattered went about preaching the word” (Acts 8:4).

Lift Up Your Eyes

If this sounds like a call to abandon a sinking ship, consider this:

1. There are thousands of other ships (peoples) whose sinking condition is a thousand times more dire than America’s. Many of them have no access to the truth that millions in America hear and squander.

2. God knows exactly who should stay and who should go. All the inertia is for staying. I am lifting my voice for going. There is not one chance in a million that too many will go. I hope you will be one of them.

3. God’s method of making America well may be utterly different from the calculations which prioritize staying over going. Giving, losing, dying, and leaving are his way of getting, gaining, living, and arriving home. My own guess would be that if America gave 100,000 twenty-somethings and seventy-somethings (and a few in between) to the unreached peoples, God would rise up and clean this house.

For my own part, there are few moments when I feel more alive than when I am working for the cause of world missions. Preaching during Bethlehem’s missions focus was a huge privilege. Being a part of founding the CROSS student missions conference is one of the greatest privileges of my life. Writing this article makes my spine tingle with expectation and hope.

If you are discouraged, personally or politically, join me in lifting up your eyes. Christ has all authority over the world. His mission will be finished. Join him in it. Light will dawn in your heart.