Grateful Leadership: Using the Power of Acknowledgment to Engage All Your People and Achieve Superior Results

Go Grateful--have the courage to learn, the vision to lead, and the passion to grow.

When employees are engaged, they are passionate and feel a deeper connection to their work. Grateful Leadership is an essential approach for leaders who want to achieve the bottom line and foster a valuedriven workforce to build stronger professional relationships with customers, stakeholders, and employees.

Grateful Leadership shows how to create a more positive and meaningful connection between you and the people you lead. These skills are a catalyst for making immediate positive changes in your workplace that will enhance productivity, reputation, and overall performance.

Leadership training expert Judith W. Umlas provides the rationale, tools, and methodology to build a company culture based on the free expression of gratitude, and she reveals simple but remarkably effective ways for leaders to build a culture in which each individual employee possesses:

• Courage to make important decisions
• Willingness to take initiative
• Trust in the organization and fellow employees
• Motivation to strive for continuous improvement

Acknowledgment is a basic human need and a powerful motivator--people want to make a difference. In a culture of gratitude, employees stay; unappreciated employees leave.

Your company will benefit from the many Grateful Leadership stories from leaders such as Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, that attest to the fact that when you appreciate, acknowledge, and affirm the essential contributions of employees, you unlock their potential to deliver superior results and enable your business to meet stakeholder expectations and outperform.

Grateful Leadership is a best-practices guidebook to employee engagement, staff retention, and increased productivity. Motivate and inspire your team, your organization, your customers, and, yes, yourself by following the book's actionable next steps for implementing a culture based on acknowledgment, appreciation, and gratitude.

"A road map for leaders to cultivate more engaged, value-driven workforces." -- Joanna Durand, Managing Director, Citigroup; Chair, Citi Program Management Council; Head, Citi Global Program Management Office

"Provides the missing link for leaders who want to retain their best employees and guide their companies to maximum performance." -- Marci Shimoff, New York Times bestselling author of Happy for No Reason, Love for No Reason, and Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul

"Gratitude is . . . a key to inspiring high performance in the workplace. Grateful Leadership offers essential knowledge of the 'why' and 'how' of this life-enhancing skill of emotional intelligence." -- Michael J. Gelb, author of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci

"A deeply engaging and practical guide that will help leaders more fully express their humanity and thereby create more endearing and enduring organizations." -- Raj Sisodia, founder and Chairman, Conscious Capitalism Institute, and author of Conscious Capitalism and Firms of Endearment

"Just when I thought I had fi gured out the concept of servant leadership, I ran across an outstanding resource, Grateful Leadership, that opened up a whole new level of appreciation for what can actually be accomplished." -- Steven DelGrosso, PMP, Director, Project Management Competency, IBM Project Management Center of Excellence

"I hope that more leaders will get enthused and become Grateful Leaders within their organizations." -- Grant Wren, CHRP, Manager, Human Resources & Safety, Amway Canada Corporation

"A must-read for any manager or team leader in any corporation." -- Richard D. Vega, Senior Vice President, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney

Judith W. Umlas is SVP at International Institute for Learning (IIL). She is publisher of IIL Publishing and the project management website allPM.com. She has trained more than 20,000 professionals, including project managers, engineers, executives, and C-Level leaders. Umlas is the author of The Power of Acknowledgment and has written articles appearing in Working Woman, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune.