Beginning and Ending with Gratitude, Part 2

Continuing the ideas from my previous post, I want to share a virtual version of a practice Dr. Glenda Eoyang calls “Poems,” an exercise for expressing gratitude toward your teammates. I had done it with senior leaders and natural working teams with outstanding success, but always in the same room. People take turns silently reflecting on one person’s positive attributes, write them on sticky notes and hand them over like gifts, and I wondered how much of that would be lost if we couldn’t be together.

When I finally found the courage to run it in a Zoom world, boy, was I proven wrong! It was still easy, still impactful, and the energy still went off the charts. Here’s how I did it, so you can try it too.

I used Mentimeter as the main tool and asked everyone to bring a smartphone, tablet or second device for the polls. They knew coming in that this would be a special retrospective and team-building session.

I opened with a light-hearted warm-up question about gratitude, and as you can see, they took it lightheartedly.

Then I used two slides to set the stage, reminding everyone to practice the art of noticing positive attributes in others, before showing the prompt:

What is a positive attribute you would use to describe your teammate? For example: funny, approachable, honest, radically curious.

In each round, the person named on the slide was the receiver and everyone else was a sender. Senders typed their answers but held off on submitting until, one at a time, each of them said out loud what they noticed in their colleague (more than one attribute was welcome). Together we created a poem for each person. Here are a few of them:

The feedback from the session confirmed what I had come to believe: gratitude is an energy, and whether you give it in a structured or unstructured way, you build energy for yourself too.

I scheduled the session after the team had spent a month getting to know each other, on the last day of the week and late in the day. If you had met them afterward, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were a team just starting their week and ready to take on the world.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post, and I encourage you to build more positivity and gratitude at work, at home and in your communities!