Five Organizational Languages of Appreciation
“To be heard, you must speak the language of the one you want to listen.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
While working with a client the other day, I asked how they felt seen, appreciated. They looked at me, a bit confused, and I said, “You know—acts of service, quality time, gifts. What is your language?” After another quizzical look and even more confusion, I knew that this wasn’t a concept they knew, and I needed to make clear what I was talking about.
And then it hit me. If individuals have languages of appreciation, then so must organizations. We just need to listen, to observe, to find out what it is. So that is the question for this post: what is your organization’s language of appreciation?
The Five Love Languages
I first ran across this book, The Five Love Languages, in the early 2000s, about ten years after its initial publication. I read it as part of a book group. Parts of it were a bit hard for me to swallow (yes, there is a bit of sexism, the gender roles have some rigidity to them), but it also made a lot of sense. What is meaningful to me may not be to someone else on my team. If I want to honor them in a way that says something to them, then I need to pay attention to how they feel appreciated.
While I have not gone back to this book in well over a decade, it has clearly stuck with me. The designations make sense, they’re easy to remember, and they work. Here are Chapman’s five love languages, but seen through the lens of team and organizational culture.
Gary Chapman’s Five Language of Workplace Appreciation
Words of Affirmation—This is affirmation using written or spoken words as praise for accomplishments or how a person shows up. When you offer a coworker sincere, heartfelt congratulations on receiving a well-deserved promotion, that is words of affirmation in action.
Acts of Service—Acts of service is about pitching in to help and get things done, though there are nuances to watch for (e.g. asking before helping, finishing what you start), else it may backfire. When you clean up the lunchroom microwave after a failed chili experiment (not yours) or spend the extra time preparing a room for a full-day meeting, these are examples of acts of service.
Receiving Gifts—Lewis Hyde says that “It is the cardinal difference between gifts and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling bond between two people.” Gifts, namely the offer of thoughtful, meaningful gifts to those who appreciate them, can be incredibly powerful. Giving a fellow coach a deck of Inspire Me cards or the time a coworker brought me a specific kind of tea that I loved are examples of gifts.
Quality Time—Quality time is about giving someone undivided personal attention. Those 15 minutes you spent mentoring a coworker or the time that your team spent talking about how their values were or were not being met through work—both examples of quality time. One reason that coaching and mentoring are so powerful is that they are the very definition of quality time.
Physical Touch—Of the five senses, touch is the only sense crucial to humans’ survival. Physical touch is how many of us form relationships. In the workplace, platonic, physical touch could be a celebratory fist bump, a handshake, a high five.
What Is Your Organization’s Culture for Appreciation?
In Aristotle’s treatise On Friendship, he denotes three types of relationships: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of virtue. Relationships of utility are often found in the workplace simply because we need work products from one another. (In other words, it doesn’t matter if you like the person or not just as long as you deliver what they need by when they need it.) Relationships of pleasure are those flippant, fun gatherings, more shallow and less deep. You likely have a friend that is great fun to hang out with, but under no circumstances would you depend on them to get you through a tough spot. Lastly, relationships of virtue are the friendships of deep conversation where both parties feel seen and valued and appreciated. This is the friend that will miss her party so that she can shave your head before the chemo drugs make it fall out. These are the foundational relationships of our lives, the ones of our most inner circle.
Organizational culture is a scaled version of the relationships between coworkers. American psychologist and researcher John Gottman works with that “magic ratio” of 5 to 1. What he means by this is for every negative interaction during conflict, a stable and happy marriage has five (or more) positive interactions. We can extrapolate from marriages to organizations, because what is marriage except for a very small team? As humans, we often teeter between connection and estrangement. When we don’t feel appreciated, seen, or valued, it’s all too easy to tip over into estrangement. By paying attention to how we appreciate one another in an organization, we stay out of estrangement and in connection. So, look around and pay exquisite attention to what you see happening around you. What do you see? What do you not see? What effect do organizational choices have on individuals?
Things to Try
I’ve listed five exercises here, one for each language, for you to try with your own organizations.
Dance It Out—Physical touch is perhaps the most difficult of the languages to navigate in the workplace, but it is an integral part of how we connect as humans. My solution? Dance. Celebrate organizational successes with impromptu, celebratory dance. Few things help appreciation like seeing a colleague do the sprinkler, the shopping cart, the canoe, the robot, or the moonwalk.
360 Degrees of Appreciation—When I first read the facilitation plan for this exercise, it scared me half to death. Why? Because the mere thought of standing in front of my peers while they said nice things about me put my introverted self on display, leaving me raw and exposed. What is more, I knew that I was not the only person on the team that felt that way. However, I loved the intent of this exercise, and I wanted to find a way to do the work while not triggering myself and others. So, we did the work virtually. In Trello, I created a column for each person on the team. Others then created cards in each person’s column, telling them what they most appreciated about that person. (Mural, Miro, or any virtual tool would work just as well here.) I shared the board amongst the team, meaning that they could read and share with one another what others appreciated. Bonus—save a PDF of the board to refer to at a later time, allowing the team to remember how they felt when the received a particular compliment!
Community Service—Summers can be hot, but in the American southwest, they can be scorching. As such, one of the biggest needs for shelters, the Salvation Army, or Goodwill is for hats. A gentleman at a company I was doing some work with knew this, so he put out a companywide call, asking for hats. He hoped to gather 50 hats to deliver to the shelter, so imagine his surprise when several hundred hats appeared within his office. Everyone teamed up to get those hats loaded into cars and delivered to some shelters, making this a double win: service and team bonding.
The Gift of Laughter—We all have photos that we use as avatars, me included. One of my favorites to use is of me in an orange jacket, holding a muppet who just happened to be dressed identically to me. A coworker found a photo of one of those strange, hairless cats wearing an orange jacket similar the one I was wearing and promptly shared that meme with the team. We’ve laughed over that meme for years, and he’ll still send it to me on random occasions. The gift he gave to me is shared laughter, shared joy.
Time for Lunch—Several years ago, I managed my family’s veterinary practice in addition to coaching teams at IBM. Every six weeks, I traveled north, working remotely from Montana in order to be on site and better support those employees and the community. When I was “in residence,” as we called it, I made a point of making lunch for the team. It was a home-cooked meal, sometimes bison-lentil chili, sometimes breakfast tacos, but always dessert. I’d bundle it up in the truck, go to the clinic, and then we would eat lunch together. Yes, cooking for that team was an act of service, but the time we spent chatting and laughing with one another was quality time together as a team. That bond that a shared, home-cooked meal helped to build got us through some difficult times.
What would organizations be like if we had more virtue, less utility? Pay attention, close, exquisite attention to what is happening to the people around you. Find out their languages, and then make that part of your organization’s culture. By doing so, you’ll stay in connection and out of estrangement and change the way that your company works.
The image used for this blog post was captured by Linda Nickell. Connect with her on Instagram as @coznlinda, or join in on Wednesday evenings for the Happiness Hour. Details, upcoming presentations, and past recordings can be found on her site.