This is the second article in a leadership series exploring the six practices that create exceptional leaders. Read the introductory article here: The Future Of Work Has Outgrown โGood Enoughโ Leadership. Your 6-Part Playbook To Become An Exceptional Leader Starts Hereย
In most organizations, gratitude is the thing leaders know they should do more of and rarely get around to doing. It gets deferred, confused with performance reviews, or outsourced to a recognition platform that sends automated kudos on someoneโs work anniversary. Meanwhile, the people doing the work are quietly deciding whether their leader actually sees them.
That quiet decision matters more than most senior leaders realize. When we partnered with The Harris Poll to survey 2,206 employed Americans on what separates exceptional leaders from good ones, gratitude came in as the number one differentiator out of every practice we measured.ย
Exceptional leaders were 2.30 times stronger on this dimension than good leaders, the largest multiplier in the study.
When I share this finding with executive audiences, the reaction splits along predictable lines. Some nod. Some look skeptical because gratitude sounds like the thing you put on a poster in the break room. I want to go deep on this one for the skeptics.
What the research actually says about gratitude
Our research found that 54% of employees working under exceptional leaders strongly agree that their leaders show gratitude and acknowledge hard work and effort. Under good leaders, that number collapses. Under leaders who take more of a top-down approach with limited focus on the soft skills, the number is 5%.
The business consequences are well-documented outside our study too. According to Gallup, employees who do not feel adequately recognized are twice as likely to say they will quit in the next year, and only one in three U.S. workers strongly agree they received recognition or praise for doing good work in the past week.
Recognition does not cost money. It requires attention, which is why most leaders put it on the back burner, with immense costs to the organization.
The specific way leaders get this wrong
Here is where most good leaders fall short, and it is subtle enough that they usually do not realize they are doing it. They recognize output. They rarely recognize the person.
โGreat job on that presentationโ is output recognition. There is nothing wrong with it, and leaders should keep doing it. But our research uncovered a second layer of recognition that exceptional leaders consistently deliver and good leaders consistently miss.
Under what we defined as โgoodโ leaders, 35% of employees feel valued and appreciated for their contributions. Yet our research found only 16% of employees working under good leaders feel that what is important to them is valued. That 19-point gap is the one exceptional leaders close.
The difference sounds small until you hear it out loud. One layer acknowledges what someone did yesterday. The other goes deeper to acknowledge who they are, what they care about, and why it matters to them. Employees can tell the difference immediately, even if they cannot put it into words. That deeper layer is why people stay.
A leader who understood this before anyone was talking about it
In 2001, Campbell Soup Company was in serious trouble. The stock had dropped from a high of $60 in 1998 to $30. Employee morale was, in the words of new CEO Doug Conant, โtoxic.โ
Conant did not start with a strategy overhaul. He started with a pen.
As he later described in a LinkedIn Post and in other publications, he asked his team to compile a daily list of good things happening inside the company. Then he hand-wrote thank-you notes. Ten to 20 a day, six days a week, for nearly a decade. Over his tenure, more than 30,000 notes to roughly 20,000 employees, meaning some people received several.
The notes were never generic. Conant wrote them by hand in part because more than half of Campbellโs employees did not use a computer at work. He wanted the recognition to reach the people most likely to feel overlooked. And he was specific. A note might acknowledge delivering on a number, outperforming a prior yearโs engagement score, or handling a hard customer situation well.
His leadership team noticed. When one of them asked whether he expected them to write notes too, his answer was no, but he did expect them to find their own way to celebrate significant contributions. That permission cascaded.
By the time Conant retired in 2011, Campbell was outperforming the S&P Food Group and the S&P 500. Engagement scores that were once among the worst in the companyโs history became among the highest they had ever recorded. Gratitude was not the only thing Conant did. It was the foundation under everything else.
Three moves leaders can make starting Monday
If you want to close the gratitude gap with the people you lead, here is where to start.
1. Stop thanking the team. Start thanking the person.
Generic appreciation lands as generic. When you catch yourself about to say โgreat job, team,โ stop and pick one person. Name what they did. Name why it mattered. A few sentences in person or in writing. Once a day, every day, and you will have changed the experience of working for you inside a month.
2. Move from output to identity.
Once you have the specific-recognition habit, go one layer deeper. Tie your appreciation to what you know about the person. โI noticed you pushed back in that meeting on the customer angle. That is the kind of thinking I want more of, and I know it matters to you because you have been raising this for months.โ That sentence acknowledges the work and the person. It tells someone their perspective has been heard, not just tolerated.
3. Set a daily floor, not a ceiling.
Most leaders aim for meaningful recognition moments once a week and hit one every two weeks. Reverse the math. Set a floor of five expressions of appreciation every day. That is roughly 1,250 per year. At that volume, you stop having to remember to be grateful. It becomes how you operate.
Why this matters right now
The conditions that made gratitude a โnice to haveโ leadership trait are gone. Employees can see every alternative to their current job on their phone. They can feel when a leader is distracted, performative, or phoning it in, because most of them have had that leader before and they know the signs.
A leader who consistently makes people feel seen is doing something that cannot be automated, commoditized, or scaled by software. It is one of the rarest and most valuable signals people receive at work, and in a moment this uncertain, it is often what makes them decide to stay.
Gratitude came in first in our research because it is the practice that everything else sits on top of. You cannot build trust or grow a culture without it. You cannot get listening, inclusion, or growth right without a gratitude-first approach.
Next article: Listening, and the specific reason most good leaders think they are doing it well when the people they lead strongly disagree.
