Begin anyway: Dealing with unsupportive leadership
One of the biggest challenges leaders face in trying to implementing gratitude into the fabric of their culture is that they have a limited scope of responsibility and that higher level leadership isn’t fully supportive. I know this as I frequently hear this is challenge for many leaders. In these situations their question is, "So what should I do ?"
My answer begins with a story.
It’s 1993. I’m working in the metering department at the power company. While we are focused on maintaining the electricity metering equipment, ultimately our job is to ensure that customers are billed correctly. Every year, we spend about $250,000 to an external agency that provides inspection and oversight to verify the quality of our metering "system" (for perspective, this adds about 25% to the cost of every meter we purchase). In order to eliminate this expense we need to implement a third party certified quality management system.
While a 1/4 of a million dollars is a lot in our budget, this doesn't justify a corporate wide quality system for a billion dollar company. So we implement the equivalent of an ISO 9000 quality system in our department and it gets certified.
While it would have been easier if the entire company was on board with the quality system, they weren’t stopping us. Our team acted within our area of control and responsibility. It took us longer to implement but it ended up benefiting customers and the entire company.
So what should you do if gratitude must be a priority for your department or division and senior leadership isn’t supportive ?
The answer is simple, "Get started."
To get started, give us a call or please make use of our do-it-yourself Playbook for More Gratitude at Work available for free here.
BTW - this applies to any idea you want to see flourish in your organization.
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