This week's word at work is gratitude — and the fascinating side of it isn't the scheduled shout-out or the certificate ceremony. It's the recognition of the invisible base that's holding the whole thing up.
Drawing on David Whyte's reading of gratitude as a form of seeing, this episode looks at how most of what carries a business — the load-bearing communication, the quiet fixes, the translations between teams that couldn't otherwise hear each other, the people who often remain unsung — goes unnamed precisely because it works. And why a recognition programme, however well-meant, tends to pick off the visible tip while the base stays invisible.
The word gratitude comes from the Latin gratus — "pleasing, fitting" — long before it meant "thankful." Its deepest root means "to praise aloud." Gratitude was never originally a private feeling. It was a spoken recognition that something fit.
A short episode on gratitude as a discipline of attention, and the small question it leaves behind: what's carrying my work this week that I've stopped seeing?
The Word at Work is a weekly series taking a single word, tracing where it came from, and asking what it might mean for the work we actually do. New episode every week.
Read the accompanying article: https://www.cultivatedmanagement.com/gratitude-a-way-of-seeing/
