‘Guilt Gratitude’ Is a Thing, and Your Team Really Hates It
Managers rarely if ever set out to be terrible bosses. Yet despite their best intentions, leaders often find themselves annoying and demotivating their teams.
There are the perpetually sunny types who exhaust workers with toxic positivity. The gentle souls who rob employees — particularly women — of the chance to improve with softball feedback. And the deliverers of endless pep talks on “resilience” who never fix the underlying problems that make heroic grit necessary.
This rogue’s gallery of inadvertently annoying bosses also includes practitioners of “guilt gratitude,” according to a great Harvard Business Review article by entrepreneur and consultant Ron Carucci.
Real gratitude is not the same as guilt gratitude.
Carucci’s article has the straightforward title, “What Not to Do When You’re Trying to Motivate Your Team,” and it pretty much delivers what it says on the tin. The article warns against straightforward missteps like lying to your team or not acknowledging their sacrifices. But it also contains a gem of a term I’d never come across before: guilt gratitude. Avoid it at all costs, Carucci advises.
What could be wrong with gratitude? Just about every article ever written on how to improve your…
