Expanding Gratefulness

I love that the “holiday season” starts with Thanksgiving. It’s my favorite holiday (Fourth of July is a very close second). I am blessed to receive an email devotional from Starla Shattler, and her first posting in November suggested that it should be Thanksgiving Month. I agree. If we can expand Christmas (thanks mostly to marketing), then why shouldn’t we expand our observance and practice of gratefulness?

Our gratitude as leaders changes the people we serve. It’s not just about feeling better ourselves. When we practice genuine appreciation, we expand our influence in ways positional power never could. Here are three tangible ways this works.

Trust and Psychological Safety

When you express genuine appreciation—as opposed to superficial praise or manipulative flattery—to your team members, you’re telling them they matter as human beings, not just as producers of work. Gratitude requires seeing the person behind the performance. It means acknowledging their contribution to the team in both tangible and intangible ways.

Leadership starts with modeling what you want to see. When I express gratitude, I’m being vulnerable. I’m admitting I didn’t do it alone. I need others. Their efforts made a real difference. That kind of honesty creates space for others to be honest too.

Here’s where it expands: one person feels safe enough to take a risk, admit a mistake, or bring their full self to work. That safety doesn’t stay contained. Trust is contagious. Other team members notice. They see that vulnerability isn’t punished—it’s valued. Before long, you’ve got a culture where people actually tell you about problems when they’re still small, and they don’t hide them until they’re catastrophic.

Grateful leaders create environments where people can breathe. People who can breathe can think. People who can think can innovate. 

Vision Beyond Today’s Problems

Leaders are wired to find problems—it’s part of our job description. But that problem-finding mode can become our default setting if we’re not careful. We start seeing everything through the lens of what’s broken, what’s behind schedule, what’s not working yet.

Gratitude acts as a corrective lens. When I take time to appreciate what’s working—people showing up every day, systems functioning quietly in the background, small wins that add up—I can see past the immediate challenges. I can see future possibilities. This connects to positive prospection and imagining success while acknowledging difficulty.

Here’s the expansion: when I focus on what’s good, my team starts seeing opportunities instead of just obstacles. If I only ever talk about problems, guess what my team will bring me? Problems. If I regularly acknowledge what’s working and express gratitude for it, they start bringing me ideas. They start seeing potential. They start believing we can actually get there.

Grateful leaders don’t ignore problems. We just refuse to let problems be the only story we tell. That expanded viewpoint becomes the vision our teams carry forward.

Capacity and Resilience

Research shows that people who regularly express gratitude experience reduced stress, better sleep, increased self-esteem, and greater resilience. Those aren’t just nice personal benefits—they’re leadership advantages. A leader who can manage their own stress and bounce back from setbacks is infinitely more valuable than one who amplifies every pressure point.

This ties to one of my core beliefs about leadership: we’re supposed to be shock absorbers, not amplifiers. When difficulty hits—and it always does—a grateful leader has the internal resources to absorb that impact, not multiply it across the team.

But this doesn’t stop with us. Resilience is contagious (so is panic). When your team sees you acknowledging the challenge while also expressing gratitude for the resources you have, the people beside you, and the opportunity to solve hard problems, they learn to do the same. Your capacity expands their capacity.

I’ve seen this in my own recovery. The days I practice gratitude, I have more to give. The days I forget, I’m running on empty by noon. Leaders can’t pour from an empty cup. Gratitude keeps us filled up so we can keep serving others.

Grateful leaders create grateful cultures. Grateful cultures have a capacity for difficulty that entitled cultures will never have. When hard times come—and they will—the team that has been practicing gratitude will have the resilience to weather the storm.

The beautiful paradox of gratitude is that it expands everything while requiring us to give credit away. We become more influential by acknowledging we didn’t do it alone. We become more effective by recognizing others’ contributions. We build stronger teams by admitting we need them.

This Thanksgiving season, I challenge you to practice expanding your gratefulness. Express specific appreciation to your team members. Acknowledge what’s working before diving into what needs fixing. Model the resilience that comes from genuine gratitude. Grateful leaders don’t just lead better—they expand the capacity, vision, and trust of everyone around them—the Bison Way.