10 Ways To Be Thankful in a Corporate World

The corporate world can be an intense, competitive space. It’s a complex business-scape of colleagues and contractors, clients and customers, vendors, bosses and employees. Often policies, promotions and profits rule, leaving corporate environments feeling synthetic, dehumanized and lonely.

In truth, our own success usually depends upon our ability to build and maintain genuine relationships with other people. A significant component of that skill is learning how to be thankful and letting that positive approach guide everything we do.

Building Relationships Like a Pro

We may grow older and attach an MBA or other lofty title to our name, but relationship building remains the same at any age:

• Recognizing that another person holds unique value
• Demonstrating that we value their role in our own life, career or business by consistently displaying appreciation in appropriate ways

Sometimes, we may fail to see another’s potential immediately. However, being thankful is an active, inclusive process that builds not only on past successes, but also on shared disappointments and a continuing future. As trust and relationships grow, so do the people within them.

Thankfully, there are countless ways of incorporating the positive aspect of gratitude into your professional repertoire to build relationships with others:

1. Approach every person as a friend. Before transitioning into business, greet them and let them know you see them as a person. Ask about their family, the new puppy or their last round of golf. Even if you don’t know them well, you can still find ways to strengthen the friendship.
2. Offer a coffee break invite. An invitation to a one-on-one with a flexible time limit can honor personal comfort levels—and show you’re engaged in spending time with them.
3. Include someone in a group outing. Extending an invite to someone to join the friend circle signals acceptance—just be sure to be a good host throughout the event!
4. Remember important life events: A card, a note or just a verbal request to pass on happy wishes for a birthday, anniversary, graduation or other milestone event is meaningful. It makes the other person feel good, and it also marks you as a thoughtful, reliable person.
5. Drop in for meaningful life events. Dropping by for their family’s extracurricular activities like a bake sale fundraiser or car wash shows your interest and support.
6. Give credit where credit is due. Dash off a quick note or email when someone has helped you or done a task well. It doesn’t have to be long or formal, but effort should be recognized.
7. Celebrate across the board. Any given day—not just holidays—is a great reason to just say thank you. Do you need to boost morale? Try some small employee gifts as tokens of appreciation. Have you recently started working with some new contractors or marked a milestone anniversary with tried-and-true business associates? Vendor gifts let them know you’ve not forgotten their role in your organization. Do you have customers who represent the heart and sole of your business? Modest client gifts have been shown to work wonders with client retention.
8. Spotting a perfect item that immediately brings someone to mind is always an opportunity to show your appreciation. These are often things you could endlessly search for with no luck, yet they magically present themselves at tag sales or other unlikely venues. They’re finds with a personal twist. Something you can casually give to leave a person humbled and pleased—but not indebted—that you thought of them.
9. Consider others’ comfort. Crunch-time projects typically mean missed meals or a visit to the vending machine. A generous order of takeout with beverages on the house is a considerate gesture and an acknowledgement that you view your team as people—not machines.
10. Share successes. When a venture succeeds, include the people who were instrumental to that success in the result. Offer a vendor a tour that allows their team to see the results of their hard work or better understand your objectives. Take a team to see and understand a vendor’s operations. Allow valuable clients to see what made the upgrade they requested possible. Make your successes inclusive.

On a personal level, being thankful builds one’s reputation. Even more important, however, it can be contagious, restoring humanization to a too-often dehumanizing work environment. It encourages willingness in others to pass it on and take a positive, thankful approach themselves. When trust becomes the norm, it can make your companies known for being a great place to work and do business.

Cane River Pecan Company believes in the strength of gratitude and its power to shape professional relationships. If you want to learn more about building professional connections, download our ebook, The Gift of Giving: A Cornerstone of Southern Community and Tradition.