Gratitude, a forgotten word in organizations, but a pillar for Change processes

While designing post-Covid strategies, organizations have to change and few are actually doing that.

Most of the time, we think that a set of words are just from our personal, familiar universe or, if we want, from our individual and intimate forum...

Words such as Passion, Friendship, Gratitude, Companionship or even Honesty are some examples of concepts that are far removed from the daily routine of organizations and companies.

In this almost post-pandemic context, we must ask why. We assume that, in our professional context, we have to try to defend ourselves from exposing our emotions or disappointments. On the one hand, we live daily with people we don't know, on the other, we try not to create too many expectations that can later be defrauded and thus limit our action and our relational motivation. At least, it was like that before what we have lived in recent times… Today, we miss being with strangers, “seeing”, “feeling”, breathing “others”.

But if we think about it, in reality, it is exactly in our professional context that we spend most of our lives!

If so, why do we want limits on the expression of our basic “being”? We are emotional beings and built of affections, who constantly seek “integration, acceptance and recognition”! We also feel good and full of our existence when “we integrate, accept and recognize the Other”. However, we were taught not to mix “emotions with business”.

I wonder if forcing human beings to have behaviors that inhibit their nature will be the smartest way to build the organizations of the present and the future. Is it just the rules, the hierarchies, the order that will inspire coworkers to do their best, to evolve and feel the organization as their own?

The reflection is simple: we no longer live in the Industrial Age, in “repetition” and “quantity”. We live in the Age of Unity, Altruism, Collaboration and Creativity! While designing post-Covid strategies, organizations have to change and few are actually doing that!

My point is that we need to make organizations more focused on human and “emotional” factors to achieve this transformation. And for this, the key word and the central feature of the process of change is, for me, the word gratitude. Top-down and bottom-up (we often forget that gratitude must also exist bottom-up!).

Did the pandemic teach us anything? Perhaps it has taught us that it is worth relearning to be "human" and that the foundation of success in organizations is really people, essentially the relationship that we can build with "others", and that words like Collaboration, Altruism, Creativity, Genuineness, Compassion and Gratitude are those that increasingly make the difference between companies and large companies!

It's like that in academia, in research and it should be like that in your company!

 

Author Américo Mateus is director of the Master of Design for Circular Economy at ISMAT

 

 

 



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