Showing more gratitude and putting less emphasis on exercising power promotes physical, emotional, and psychological advantages that enhance your meetings. 

Gratitude is one of the values leaders can show especially when leading remote teams. Employees have been making it clear throughout the pandemic how much recognition means to them. Recognition makes the difference between workers staying in a position and them looking for work elsewhere. As a result, leaders have been forced to adjust their leadership styles, adding a more personal touch to their approaches by being more active and transformative. Additionally, showing gratitude promotes the sort of positive engagement that aids productivity and garners the sort of business value organizations crave. 

With every meeting that you have, expressing gratitude is a must to keep employees invested and motivated. 

Impact of Gratitude on Business 

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A misconception that some leaders have when going into meetings with their team members is that they have to exert authority and consistently demand ideas. While it’s true that teams need someone who can set a good example for others to follow, the most successful meetings take place when leaders create an environment where team members feel like equal contributors.

Gratitude improves leadership because it breeds engagement, allowing leaders to facilitate more positive engagements while dissuading them from making rash judgments. Values like gratitude allow leaders to appreciate the contributions of others during meetings, making them feel more structured and open-ended. This generates the sort of value-driven conversations that create game-changing ideas. 

Furthermore, gratitude helps leaders to appreciate the accomplishments of the team, focus on successes, and have the ability to pull a team together, regardless of the situation. Thankful leaders aren’t worried about competitors nor feel that they have to force moves to maintain a competitive advantage. There is a certain poise under pressure that gratitude gives leaders, presenting a calm yet assuring demeanor that team members can draw inspiration from. 

How Gratitude Positively Affects Leadership Styles 

Gratitude encourages leaders to become more open to ideas and creates environments where everyone feels empowered to express their ideas freely. Thankfulness is an integral part of different leadership approaches, such as participative leadership. Remote team leaders are increasingly practicing the participatory leadership model, inviting their team members to offer as much input as possible about business decisions. Participatory leadership is democratic, where leaders lead by example, encourage creativity, and establish morale within meetings so that everyone feels comfortable. Enthusiasm and encouraging innovation, as well as having the right technology in place to extract valuable insights and takeaways from conversations, makes participatory leadership a reliable method of spearheading teams, as statistics show.

Gratitude is also a fundamental aspect of transformative leadership, an approach where leaders have a strong sense of purpose, focusing on positive change with every decision while creating a wholesome culture of innovation and reliability. For every meeting, transformative leadership encourages input where leaders show appreciation for the positive contributions of their cohorts while creating a big-picture outlook for the organization with markers along the way for improvement. Courage, empathy, and understanding are all key elements of transformative leadership. Leaders need to set the stage for their employees to express their concerns during meetings and not feel guilty for showing vulnerability. Honest expression facilitates better takeaways in meetings and improves conversational value considerably. 

How Can Leaders Practice Gratitude Successfully?

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Gratitude is a natural trait that takes some time to cultivate. It needs to become easy to accept and convey to team members without coming across as ingenuine. Team members can tell the difference between you being genuinely grateful and you just saying thanks for the sake of it. As a result, when thanking team members during meetings, be specific with the actions you are thanking them for and why you appreciate their efforts. 

For one, leaders can schedule some time to reflect with gratitude before going into meetings with the right attitude. By prioritizing gratitude in your schedule, you have more time to appreciate the successes your team has achieved and translate your appreciation into action, rewarding team members for their many efforts and contributions to team success.

Additionally, leaders should celebrate wins, no matter how big or small they are. Leaders should treat every milestone with the same appreciation and build on them so they can facilitate increased productivity. As soon as a team member does or says something groundbreaking, leaders should express gratitude, thus creating a comfortable atmosphere for everyone involved. 

Artificial intelligence provides the sort of conversational and business value that allows businesses to facilitate better teamwork while easing the tensions and uncertainties surrounding remote work. Versational provides a conversational assistant solution to ensure team leaders connect with their teams in the most effective ways possible and give employees the praise they deserve. Try our product for free today. 

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