The value of handwritten notes

Four years ago, I heard an interview with Seth Godin on the CBC. It was a New Year's Day show and he was asked what one thing he would recommend for business people as a new habit. His answer was a bit of a surprise for me; he suggested handing out handwritten thank you notes every day. I remember him saying "just give it a try and see what happens". I could not resist.

For the first thirty days of that year, I gave a handwritten note to someone in the company to thank them for something they had done that day. Each note was a nice thank you card that I filled in with a special message specifically for the person and then put into an envelope and dropped on their desk (or snail mailed to people in other physical locations).  I congratulated developers for solving a particularly hard problem or for volunteering for a necessary but mundane task. I thanked testers for spending extra hours to ensure our release was ready to go out on time. I thanked the admin assistant for bringing in lunch. I expressed sincere appreciation to the marketing person for giving me some goodies to give away at a recruiting event. I thanked our program manager for working with a particularly difficult team to resolve a longstanding problem. I congratulated a manager for adeptly handling a sensitive situation with one of his team members. Most of my thank you notes, as you can see, were for things that you would expect people to do as part of their regular job, but still, each day as I sat down to think about it, these were the things that I was grateful had been done. And, as I began to realize, these were the things that I rarely explicitly thanked people for doing.

Two things happened. The first and most pleasant outcome (for me and my family) was that I consistently left the office on a positive note. Despite what had happened during the day, my last thoughts before leaving were reflecting on the great things people had done that day as I wrote my daily thank you note. And the second, and more important outcome, was the impact that it had on my team. People really appreciated that I had noticed what they had done and had thanked them personally.  They began to go out of their way to be more helpful than normal. As the notes started to be hung up in cubes, others noticed them and tried to get them. It was not an experiment that resulted in everyone getting a card; some people got multiples and some got none. Overall my immediate team became more helpful to the team and more appreciate of one another. And the extended team was much more willing than they had been in the past to help me or my team out because they knew it was genuinely appreciated.

After 30 days, I ended the experiment but I did keep a stash of thank you cards around and used them on a regular but far less frequent basis for the rest of my time at the company.

In the past month I had two colleagues mention these notes. For each of them the note had connected me to them in a more significant way that I had imagined. One told me that he had started to write notes in his new company and was glad I had taught him the lesson of being appreciative and the importance of expressing it personally. And the other just wanted to thank me for the good work my team had done and to say he missed the personal connection with the team that no longer seemed to exist.

I was reminded today of the important of handwritten notes by a post in the Harvard Business Review. You can check it out here.

Handwritten notes can be a valuable way to express your gratitude and to help build a cohesive team. They take time but they are worth it. I highly recommend that you give it a try.


P.S. Just FYI, handwritten notes actually require you to spend time and write something meaningful. Expect to spend 15 to 20 minutes and to throw some notes out if you make an error or your handwriting is illegible due to lack of practice. Dropping a pre-printed note without writing a little message or without signing it will not work. You don't get points by handwriting someone's name or address on the front of the envelope. If you can't be bothered to do this well, don't do it. Each holiday season,  I roll my eyes when someone sends me an unsigned Christmas card. Whether the sender knows it or not the message is clear "My life is too busy to connect with you, but, hey, I got the darn cards off my holiday to-do checklist". Because even my chiropodist, who I have visited only twice and who probably would not recognize me if I walked past him on the street, went to the trouble of personally signing the card he sent to me. 

How Poor Leaders become Good Leaders

It is possible to improve if you are not a good leader. Here are some tips from an HBR blog post:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/how_poor_leaders_become_good_l.html

Many of these items are what I believe make a good leader so it is good to see that HBR agrees with me!

Management v. Leadership

Many people confuse leadership with management.  In this blog post on Management and Leadership rom HBR, John Kotter shares his frustration with this confusion  It is important to know the difference particularly if you are a manager and you want to be a leader.

Leadership is essential for defining the right thing to do and management is critical to getting things done well. There are many great leaders who are not great managers and vice versa. 

I have seen far too many instances of a good manager coming up with a great plan and executing it but all for not, since the feature added was of little value or did not meet the customers needs.  Basically the manager did the wrong thing very well. Now, you could argue that they did their job and it was the leaders, the other guys, who did their job incorrectly. True perhaps but its a bit hollow given the wasted development effort.

If you find yourself in this position, that is, doing the wrong thing, you need to find the internal fortitude to speak up and to work toward a solution that makes sense. It may be hard, it may be challenging but it is what a leader would do. 

Keep in mind this phrase that a wise man once told me "a poorly executed brilliant plan is vastly superior to a brilliantly executed poor plan".