The Power of Gratitude

I’m putting the theme upfront in this post and stating here and now that I am grateful.

I am grateful for family, health, home, and career. Grateful for friends, opportunities, and fun times. Professionally I am grateful to all that share and support our vision, to those who challenge and question (you just make the drive to succeed even stronger and the solutions we create even better), and I’m grateful to all of our team at FCSS for their dedication and commitment to the children, families, and communities we serve.

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the challenges and changes of the past couple of years and asked myself if I share and express my gratitude often enough.

It’s been such a busy time since we launched FCSS, we’ve grown rapidly, managed difficult situations brought about by Covid-19, restructured our Leadership Team, and brought new team members on board.

Geographically we’re spread around the country, with those whose roles allow working from home, and very little time when our Leadership Team have actually managed to be together in one location.

In the early stages of the pandemic, we made real efforts to connect but as we’ve all got busier, and a bit Teams meeting weary, there are times when I wonder if we are connected enough and do the team know how well they are doing. Do I say it often enough?

I suspect I sometimes don’t take enough time, or place enough value, on the importance of saying “Thanks”, “good job”, or “I really liked the way you handled that”. So, this year I am making the effort to stop, reflect and thank our team…not just at the high points but also at the difficult times where things sometimes go wrong.

I’m working on the belief that if any member of our team is failing, we’re all failing, that if someone isn’t meeting the objectives of their role there must be a reason for that and realistically it could be down to our communication, training, or support. I’m committing to calling out blame, promoting support and guidance and building up our team, and I’m starting by saying thank you.