Appreciation 101

I spent several days over the Summer putting together a one-day staff conference for a client. The theme was "appreciation". A colleague and I came up with the concept of the conference and then sat on the organizing committee. My role, once the ball was rolling, was to design and deliver a workshop on how to make appreciation a personal and team habit when the day was over. I used the Dewitt Jones video, "Celebrate What's Right With the World to establish the emotional tenor for the one-hour workshop. (If you haven't seen this video, go to the Star Thrower Workshop and watch it. It is quite wonderful!) In the after-glow of the video, I asked the table groups to brainstorm the elements that make a compliment really mean something. The results across several workshops were amazingly consistent. Here they are:
1. Be sincere
2. Make it genuine
3. Give it from the heart
4. Make it timely
5. Or make it spontaneous
6. And unexpected
7. Validate something important about who they are or what they did
8. Be specific
9. Don’t have an ulterior motive
10. Give it to anyone – a stranger, a colleague, a friend, a boss

The conference was a spectacular success. About 500 people attended and no-one had a complaint! We set up a big piece of canvass and several magic markers to get immediate feedback. The most frequent words used were "thank you" and "fantastic".

I was pondering on what made it so successful, and realized (in the shower, naturally!) that is was because we hit all ten appreciation must-have's in the design and delivery of the day.

It's experiences like this one that keep the facilitation joints limber!