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I had the good fortune to be able to attend the IAAP Spring Professional Education Conference in Reno, Nevada last week.  One of the many learnings that I took away came from the session led by Jennifer Webb on the topic “Ignite Your Super Hero Powers: Taking Relationship Building to the Next Level”.  One of the discussion points in that session touched on the super hero power of “spontaneous combustion”, about how we can motivate people and how important it is to acknowledge, thank and create an epidemic of appreciation around us.  As I looked out the airplane window and contemplated life on the long trip back home to Hamilton, Ontario, Canada (via Dallas!), I was reminded about a really unique colleague thank you program that our office implemented about eight years ago.  At that time, we had come across a magazine article about how people show appreciation to their co-workers.  We adapted some of those ideas and came up with what we happily referred to as our “Thank You Bead Program”.  It was quite simple:  Each of our 12 staff members was given a lovely small glass bowl, which was filled with one colour of those dollar-store glass beads (the kind that people sometimes use to decorate the bottom of a flower vase or an aquarium, etc.).  We each were assigned a specific bead colour.  Whenever we “caught someone doing something right” through a behaviour or an attitude, and we wanted to acknowledge them – we simply left one of our own coloured glass beads on the chair or the desk of that individual.  It was always fun to come back to your desk to find a new bead on your chair, which we knew meant Mary thanks you, or Bob appreciated what you did, or Joan really values your offer of assistance.  To come back to your chair and find 2 or 3 beads – well, that was a big thank you from someone! - and to find a little pile of beads (one from every person) was a fun way for the group to say Happy Birthday or bon voyage.  The unwritten goal was to end up with a bowl of multi-coloured beads, and not so many of your own colour.  That would reflect that you had been distributing your own beads to "talk" to others, and that people were valuing the difference that you were making in their day-to-day work lives.  People sometimes got creative too – it wasn’t unusual to find a new bead that had a happy face painted on it with liquid paper, or one that someone had attached to sticky note or a magazine article.  As our staff team has gotten a little bigger over the years, we’ve silently moved away from using that glass bead thank you program, but we do recall it with great fondness.  It was a fun, simple and creative way to connect with others in our office.  Perhaps your office co-workers might enjoy something similar.

Anne Lupkoski CAP
President-Elect 2009-10
BurlOak Bay Chapter, Burlington, Ontario, Canada