The Gratitude Diaries

by Janice Kaplan

  Intrigued by the power of gratitude, Grant and a colleague, Harvard professor Francesca Gino, designed another study, where they asked professionals to review the résumé cover letters of students applying for jobs. After receiving the suggestions, the students asked for help with another letter. Some 32 percent of the professionals agreed. But when students added a single line to their note about the first feedback—“Thank you so much! I am really grateful!”—a full 66 percent stepped up to give them that second round of help. A simple expression of gratitude doubled the response.

  Then came an even bigger surprise. After a student had asked for help, Grant had a second student do the same. If the professional had received the “I am really grateful!” reply, the willingness to help the second student soared from 25 percent to 55 percent. In other words, after they had been appreciated (or “socially valued,” as Grant put it), people’s general willingness to help doubled as well. “I never would have guessed that receiving a tiny note of appreciation would then make you more likely to help a total stranger,” Grant said. “Gratitude is more powerful than we realize.”

  When The New York Times Magazine wrote a cover story about Grant, he forwarded the reporter forty-one grateful e-mails that he had received the previous week, mostly from students thanking him for his help and saying how he had changed their lives. “Most people would be thrilled to receive one note like that in a lifetime,” reporter Susan Dominus marveled. Grant said he got dozens every week.

  When I brought that up now, Grant was slightly abashed and said he had sent the e-mails only to help her, in case she wanted to contact some students about him.

  “You mean it’s not typical?” I asked him.

  “It’s fairly common,” he admitted. “To me those notes are a barometer of whether I’m making a difference. I should be able to do something that benefits a few dozen people every week.”

  I thought only God or Bill Gates helped that many people in a week, but college professor Grant took it as a matter of course. The thanks of others, along with the realization that his contributions mattered, stood as one of his greatest motivators—with a few caveats. Thanks that came accompanied by a bunch of other asks made him wary. (“Then I wonder—is this person more of a taker than I realized?”) And while he understood a prompt thank-you as obligatory politeness, he liked when someone followed up two or three months later to tell him that something he’d done had a lasting impact.

  When I asked Grant how businesses could show more gratitude, he admitted that finding a formula was tricky. “I think it’s hard because what’s the ulterior motive? You can’t thank people in a Machiavellian way. People see through that and separate genuine gratitude from manipulation.” He told me that one of the people who got it right was Doug Conant, the former CEO of the Campbell Soup Company. A couple of days later, I tracked Conant down. Like Grant, he was smart, thoughtful, and happy to discuss gratitude. Talking to the two of them, I felt like Alice in Wonderland (MBA edition) falling through the rabbit hole into the land of the Good Guys in Business.

  Conant came to a struggling Campbell’s in 2001, and business savants credit him with turning the place around—not just in profits (which soared) but also in reversing what Conant himself called “a toxic culture.” Unlike many corporate honchos, who pride themselves on their personal power, Conant believed success depended on the people who worked for him. “I couldn’t be in every room making every decision, so all the people in the company represented me. I needed their heads and hearts in the game,” he said.

  Conant tried to move away from the standard business model of focusing on problems. “It’s usually the ten percent of things that go wrong that get ninety percent of the attention,” he told me—and he preferred to celebrate the 90 percent (hopefully) that went right. Despite our usual instinct that makes the bad outweigh the good, Conant wanted to change the mentality and focus on the cherries in the bowl rather than the occasional cockroach. And though he was responsible for a $2 billion company with twenty thousand employees, he made it personal—writing thank-you notes to employees for work done well. Doug and a staff member watched for positive news around the company, and when he heard about something he admired, he sent his thanks. He figures he wrote ten to twenty handwritten thank-you notes every single day, six days a week, for the ten years he was CEO. “If you do the math, that will take you way north of thirty thousand thank-you notes that I wrote,” he told me. Celebrating what went right became the new corporate culture.

  Conant didn’t write just to executives—his notes went to workers at every level of the company. Many would never expect the CEO to even know they existed. Conant might have ended up with writer’s cramp, but his leadership style is now quoted in Harvard Business School case studies. His warmth was not weakness—he had financial targets and scorecards and replaced 300 of the top 350 corporate leaders when he first arrived to have people whose values were in harmony with his. Half of the replacements were promotions from within. “My message was that Campbell’s will show we value you as an individual, and you’ll help lift us up by performing at a high level,” he said. He watched as managers across the company got the idea and modeled his example of leading with gratitude.

  A poignant footnote to Conant’s personal, gratitude-focused style occurred in 2009 when he had a near-fatal car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. As he lay in the hospital trauma center, cards started coming in from employees around the world—New Jersey and Texas, California and Canada, Asia and Australia. Sitting at his bedside over the next several weeks, his wife read the cards and letters aloud to him. Most mentioned a thank-you note that Conant had written to them years earlier that made them feel a personal connection. Getting words of appreciation from the CEO had been incredibly meaningful, and some still kept his note on a bulletin board at home or displayed on the refrigerator. Whether someone was in sales or production or packing crates at a distribution facility, Conant had seen them as real people. Now they thought of him as a friend or member of the family, and their hearts and prayers were with him as he struggled through surgeries.

  “What goes around comes around. Now I’ve lived it, and that’s what gave me strength,” Conant told me.

  As we continued to talk, I mentioned the praise Campbell’s had received under his leadership for its advances in diversity and as a place that cared about life-work balance. Conant brought it all back to the same central core.

  “The notion of gratitude cuts across all generations, ethnicities, and social or economic boundaries. Gratitude is universal, and it’s the one thing that can pull us together,” he said.

  After we said good-bye, I felt unexpectedly warmed and happy—like I’d just slurped down a big bowl of chicken noodle soup. People could debate about whether nice guys finished first or last, but I’d started to believe that grateful ones were always winners.

  Conant joined a great line of leaders who understood the power of appreciating people. When I wrote my first article for Cosmopolitan magazine at age twenty-two, I got a handwritten note from Helen Gurley Brown, the magazine’s legendary editor. In florid script on very nice stationery, she thanked me profusely and said how very lucky Cosmo readers were to have me. Awed that she even knew my name, I tucked the note in a drawer. I still have it.

  Ms. Brown probably didn’t match Doug Conant in her volume of thank-yous, but she sent them regularly to photographers, columnists, models, and actresses. Writing from her office with its pink silk walls and leopard-print carpet, she developed an unusually loyal following. Her flair for making people feel appreciated wasn’t the only thing that led to her extraordinary success—cleavage-baring covers helped—but it played a role. When she died in 2012, the New York Times obituary said her style of “winning the right friends and influencing the right people was squarely in the tradition of Dale Carnegie, if less vertically inclined.” (It also noted that she was ninety, “though parts of her were considerab
ly younger.”)

  Dale Carnegie, of course, wrote the multimillion-selling book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which has stayed stubbornly on bestseller lists more than eighty years after it first came out. A CEO I worked with once had taken the Dale Carnegie course and had his certification framed in his office. Every week or two, on a Friday afternoon, I’d get an e-mail that said

  Dear Janice,

  Thank you!!!

  Sometimes he elaborated to:

  Thank you for all you do!!

  One of the key principles taught at a Dale Carnegie course is to give honest and sincere appreciation, and while I realized that he didn’t yet have the “honest” and “sincere” parts down, at least he was trying.

  Any expression of gratitude (however awkward) is better than nothing. A young litigator I know at a Washington, DC, firm works long hours—arriving by eight A.M. most days and often not leaving until near midnight. She’s paid well, enjoys the challenge, and loves feeling that she’s at the center of important cases. But she also hankers for the Conant touch—some personal appreciation.

  “My managing partner never says thank you. It would mean so much if he did,” she whispered one day when we were sitting in her office.

  She’d recently argued a big court case and hoped her win might inspire some grudging gratitude from her boss. But he never said a word—just telling her she’d be on his team for the next assignment. Craving some more extravagant pat on the back, she stopped by his office later and gently pressed about how she was doing. He coldly replied, “You should know I’m satisfied. If I weren’t, you’d be gone.”

  “That shut me up,” the young lawyer told me.

  The law partner probably thought that withholding thanks showed his strength. I think it showed his insecurity. The too-tough-to-be-grateful pose is wrongheaded, as Adam Grant pointed out, and while executives can get away with different styles of managing, gratitude by default (If I haven’t fired you, you’re doing okay) doesn’t help anyone.

  Thinking about it now, I realized that one of the most gracious thank-yous I ever got at work came from Clint Eastwood—whose tough-guy credentials go unchallenged. Shortly before his movie Flags of Our Fathers premiered, we spent a whole afternoon talking in his bungalow on the Warner Bros. lot. At the start of the visit, I mistakenly pulled into his personal parking spot. In Hollywood, taking a star’s parking space is practically a capital offense, but Clint was gracious. He came over to my car window and politely introduced himself (as if I might not know) and in a soothing voice said, “If you just pull up a little, there’ll be room for both of us.”

  After that, we ambled into his bungalow together like old friends. Once we sat down, the conversation ranged in all directions, from heroism and bravery and the devastation of war (themes of the movie) to his continued need to challenge himself. At one point, as the sun streamed in the window over his craggy face, he stretched his long legs across the sofa and admitted that his fame still surprised him. “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,” he said with a wink and a wry smile, quoting a line from his movie Unforgiven.

  When I finally left, I sat down on a bench in the studio lot and called my husband.

  “Gotta say, honey, much as I love you, he’s the sexiest old guy I’ve ever met,” I said.

  “You’ve left his bungalow, haven’t you?” he asked anxiously.

  “Sadly, yes,” I teased.

  Clint had been far more charming than I could have imagined, kind and cavalier, and extremely genteel. His musings were thoughtful and even profound. But now came the tricky part. Instead of the usual celebrity profile, Clint and I had agreed that I would write an article in the first person, in his voice. I’d never ghostwritten before, and several writer friends promptly called me to tell me their own bad experiences. You get no credit. The star makes crazy changes. He pretends he’s done the whole thing himself. You get blamed for anything that goes wrong.

  But a deal’s a deal, so I wrote the article and sent it off to Clint. A day later, it came back—with a single word changed. And late that afternoon, Clint called.

  “Thank you for what you wrote. I liked talking to you, and you did a good job. You got my voice. In fact, you got me better than I get me,” he said.

  “I’m so glad,” I said, blushing furiously and glad that nobody was around to see.

  “Well, thanks. I appreciate what you did. Really, thank you,” he said.

  When I met up with Clint again a couple of years later, he seemed much older and some of the glow was gone. But to me, he would always be the big star who was willing to say thanks. He knew that gratitude can make your day.

  The best stars and bosses are willing to give thanks—but like everyone else, they like to get thanked, too. Once when she was writing a cover story for me on actress Drew Barrymore, longtime Hollywood reporter Jeanne Wolf called from the photo shoot to say that Drew had been great—helpful, easy, and fun to work with. She’d also looked adorable in one of the dresses she’d modeled, and Jeanne wanted to let her keep it. Clothes for photo shoots are usually borrowed and then returned, so giving the dress to Drew meant paying the designer the full price.

  “I’m not sure it’s in my budget,” I said, since I was running the magazine at the time.

  “Well, it should be. A little thank-you gift goes very far,” Jeanne said firmly.

  Reluctantly, I told Jeanne to go ahead. She called me back a few minutes later to say that Drew was thrilled, sent profuse thanks, and offered to do whatever was necessary to promote the issue.

  “I won’t say ‘I told you so,’ but I’m glad you listened to me!” Jeanne said gleefully.

  Jeanne had the right instincts. Stars are paid plenty, and Drew Barrymore could buy any dress she wanted. But it probably made her smile to know that being upbeat and sunny on the shoot had mattered. People had noticed and appreciated, and the cute dress was a simple way of saying thanks. The flashy gifts studio heads dole out—cars for the whole cast!—can come across as bribes or publicity moves, rather than genuine thanks. Jeanne’s gifts were smaller but from the heart.

  People at every level need to know they’re appreciated, and it doesn’t take a $400 dress to send the message. When my sister, Nancy, held a top position at a nonprofit consulting company in Washington, DC, she gave out Kudos bars at weekly staff meetings to thank people for their various efforts and successes. As a tastier equivalent of gold stars, the treats seemed to do their trick—until the owner and CEO of the company called her in to complain that she never gave one to him. It took Nancy a moment to realize that he wasn’t joking. Though he owned the company and everyone at the staff meetings worked for him, he still wanted kudos—chocolate or otherwise.

  Now I understood why my husband the doctor got such a kick out of the little gifts patients brought him—the homemade pizza from an Italian family, the fruit baskets at Christmas, the bottles of Harveys Bristol Cream that we’d never drink. Curious, I went to our basement and found half a dozen hand-knit blankets that Ron had stashed away, made by elderly patients wanting to reciprocate his kindness and caring. A shakily crocheted green-and-orange afghan had a note attached: Made for you, because nobody is sweeter to me! The note, signed Mae, had little pink hearts. I dragged it upstairs and asked Ron if she might have been flirting with him.

  “She’s ninety-three, so I wouldn’t worry,” he said.

  “But you love to be loved,” I teased.

  “Don’t we all?”

  General internists aren’t motivated just by money or they would have chosen a different specialty. Knowing that patients recognize his dedication has always kept Ron going. Thanks aren’t a substitute for proper pay, but they reinforce each other. Even Daniel Craig needed more satisfaction than came with the $3 million he got for his first Bond movie (soaring to $20 million by the third). He cared about doing the right thing by both the fans and the franch
ise and wanted to be appreciated. In that way, my husband was a lot like him (a compliment to both of them).

  My college friend and roommate Anna Ranieri, a psychologist and executive coach based out of Stanford, has found that even in hot tech companies, a bigger bonus didn’t trump being appreciated. “A company known to value the people who work there will attract good talent, and giving those people extra thanks will keep them from leaving for the start-up down the road,” she said. Anna figured the best way to sell gratitude to occasionally arrogant executives was to let them see the advantages to themselves. Since gratitude blossoms in all directions, the boss who extends the thanks feels better about himself, too.

  In other words, even in Silicon Valley, gratitude could become the killer app.

  A few smart companies are starting to make gratitude part of their bigger game plan. Google is widely considered a dream place to work, and not just because of the pool tables and free lunch (though they help). Recruiters for the company have a list of “Reasons to Work at Google,” and the top five include:

  Life is beautiful

  Appreciation is the best motivation

  We love our employees, and we want them to know it

  I can’t code, program, or do much other than use Word on a computer, but if Google would have me, I’m pretty sure I’d do a great job for them. Because when someone says life is beautiful and they appreciate and love me, well then, gosh darn it, I want to do whatever I can to make them happy, too. Who wouldn’t? Being in a conference room isn’t all that different from being in a living room (or bedroom), which means that love works better than fear at the office, and when you’re upbeat, people want to be around you.

  Professor Grant told me that cool companies including Zappos and Southwest Airlines (as well as Google) have peer-recognition programs in which colleagues can nominate one another for having gone the extra mile. “It basically ends up being a gratitude note, which comes with a small bonus from the company,” Grant said. “Empowering coworkers to appreciate each other is one way of making sure that gratitude doesn’t get overlooked.”