CHI:

A 3-Step Approach to Appreciating Your Employees Every Day

By Candace Fitzpatrick, CSP

March 6, 2020

So, it’s Employee Appreciation Day. What have you done for your staff? Quite possibly you’ve scheduled time for a special lunch or team building event. Or perhaps you’re going the gift card route. Or maybe you read that yesterday was National Cheese Doodle Day and you’ve loaded up the break room with the crunchy, puffed, addictive cheesy snack that ends up leaving an orange dusting on your hands!

All of these are great options to make an employee feel appreciated for the day, but what if you were to show your employees how much they are appreciated every single day of the year? You can by giving them a gift that will not only make a huge difference in their lives, but will ultimately give your company a competitive advantage. What if you were to give your employees some “CHI”?

Over the past two decades, researchers in the positive psychology field have uncovered that people perform best when they are allowed and encouraged to build on the areas where they already have an innate level of proficiency. The challenge with truly getting to the pinnacle of our “best self” is that it may not seem all that extraordinary to us, especially at first. After all, these thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are normal, ordinary, everyday occurrences that we likely do on autopilot, without thinking about doing them.

In fact, for many of us, being complimented on something we’ve done that is a natural behavior is likely to be discounted. “Oh, it was nothing”, we might say to the person delivering the praise. Because, to us, it was as natural as breathing.

While it is important to appreciate others, it is more important for us to first learn to appreciate our own unique gifts – and quirks – that we bring to the office every single day. Since no one else will ever be able to truly understand us at our core, it is imperative that we have a clear and accurate way to articulate who we are and how we can contribute the best of ourselves to move the company’s mission forward.

But here’s what’s so fascinating. Your brilliance is tied to becoming what we call an “Authority of One”. This is when you understand yourself so well that you become the author of your own life by design, not default. This is when you recognize opportunities for your brilliance to shine because they are in alignment with who you are and what you do naturally. It is also when you clearly see when a new option is not a good match for your talents, and you are able to turn it down gracefully.

As someone who takes responsibility for the growth and development of your people, it’s important for you to help them each become an Authority of One. And how do we do that? Remember the “CHI”?

There are three components to becoming an Authority of One:

1.     Clarity of Core

2.     Honesty With Self

3.     Intentionality

1.   CLARITY OF CORE

Getting to know yourself and understanding your gifts and talents is at the heart of this first major step. It’s all about self-awareness. What can you do to help your people strengthen their knowledge of their own personal gifts and talents? What are their superpowers? What do they do best when given the opportunity to be who they are – every day? What common language does your company have for talking about these gifts? Clarity of Core is all about stepping into one’s own personal power.

Something important to keep in mind is that how other people see you and what they say to you is often not about you, but more a reflection of who they are and what they have experienced in their lives. Unfortunately, depending on our levels of self-awareness, self-confidence, and resiliency, some of the innocent comments made by others can be construed as expectations that we believe they want us to meet, so we modify who we are in a work environment to meet those supposed expectations.

What are you doing to make sure that you aren’t encouraging your folks to wear some metaphorical mask to cover who they truly are just so that they can fit the persona that others want to see?

2.   HONESTY WITH SELF

The second step is both scary and liberating. You have to be completely honest with yourself. Oftentimes we are at the mercy of our autopilot and we don’t know how to stop ourselves from doing those things that we do naturally. An acceptance of our talents and strengths, along with an accurate awareness of our personal limitations, weaknesses, and blind spots (many of which are created by those same talents) is necessary to be able to master the double-edged nature of one’s gifts.

For instance, if one of your talents is the ability to gather massive amounts of information and become a virtual storehouse of knowledge, you might not have a filter that determines what data you seek, or an organizational system that keeps it in order. If you accept that this could be a potential limitation, that awareness alone gives you the ability to interrupt a natural pattern when you stray into areas that aren’t relevant. It also allows you to reframe how you view your role. While others might accuse you of hoarding information, you can choose to view yourself as a curator of data, which would allow you to treat the data in the same manner a museum curator would select and care for their specialized collections.

For you to truly appreciate your people, you have to help them see that it’s actually okay to remove that mask and be their best self. You also need to evaluate if YOU are wearing some kind of mask that is keeping your folks from seeing you as your true self. The Honesty With Self aspect of CHI is probably the most difficult to achieve – but it can also be the most transformational!

3.   INTENTIONALITY

The third step is to design your life so you can intentionally apply the talents that you have in a way that leverages the best of who you are. Putting yourself in a position where your natural gifts are an asset and not a liability will allow you to live and work authentically. No one benefits if you have to change your personality to do your job. When you are working in your talents, you’ll continually add skills, knowledge, and practical experiences around these base gifts, which will allow you to sustainably expand and grow in ways that you might not have previously dreamed possible.

Are you providing training for your employees so that they can build upon their talents? Are you giving them opportunities to utilize their gifts? Are you doing this with an acute level of intentionality?

Let’s look at an example. You have an employee who is great at writing and speaking but not always highly proficient in strategic planning. Do you put your energy into helping them build up their strategic planning skills and knowledge? Or do you send them to writing and presenting classes to become even more brilliant in areas where they already show natural abilities? The smart leader chooses the latter. And then, when it’s time for strategic planning, the instructions to that team member might be to sit in on the strategic planning session, help the team articulate the plan, and then use their gift to present the outcomes to others around the organization. This is how you truly leverage each person on your team. That’s Intentionality.

Studies have shown that people who are tapping into their talents on a daily basis are happier, healthier, more engaged at work and at home, and more productive than the average employee. Using CHI, you can help your people become that much more engaged!

For less than a case of cheese doodles, buy your people (and yourself) a copy of StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath and start discovering everyone’s core talents. You have a choice: become an Authority of One or continue to be an authority of none. No choice equals no voice. Choose wisely.

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