Gratitude. It’s a big word that is loaded with connotations.

For Steve Gatena, founder and CEO of Pray.com, the world’s #1 app for daily prayer and faith-based audio content, gratitude is a leadership imperative. Steve and his team have built the digital destination for faith and they believe gratitude needs to be practiced daily.

The benefits are many and Steve’s full story will be included in my next book, The Savage Manager, which will be released in 2023. For now, I wanted to share some of the practical benefits of adding more gratitude into your daily routine.

Fernando Tatis Jr.'s suspension last week was a blow to sports fans (especially long suffering Padres fans), ardent lovers of baseball, and parents whose kids idolized Tatis for his on-field prowess, bat flipping flair, and love for the game of baseball.

Tatis’ story is a painful reminder of 3 leadership principles.

The ability to give feedback separates good managers from those that are mediocre. I interviewed Phil Dana, CHRO of AskBio for my next book The Savage Manager, and he noted that giving feedback is one of the top 5 most important skills for managers. When it comes to giving feedback, people wonder “should I be direct and to the point?” or “should I sugarcoat what I really want to say?” Like with any behavior, let’s take an inside out approach to delivering feedback.

Conflict is all around us. With every passing day, conversations around divisive topics seem to be more toxic and less productive. The latest, tragic school shooting has brought the issue of gun control, gun rights, and gun safety into the forefront. But it’s not just this issue that brings out conflict and ultimately the worst in people. Pick any topic and you’ll see corrosive discourse happening daily. And it’s not just in the anonymous annals of social media. People seem more and more comfortable ripping “the other side” out in the open in the analog world.

But there could be a better way.

I’ve been told my book The Savage Leader includes too many sports stories. Given that, why not double down and write an entire article about sports?! In all seriousness, I believe there are leaders in all walks of life and sports offers so many great examples of leadership, both good and bad. Strip away the unrelenting obsession with highlight clips and you’ll see leadership in action. You don’t need a deep understanding of sports to see and learn lessons from both the coaches and players.

For some, empathy comes naturally. They are able to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” and understand how changes in the workplace might impact their colleagues. For others, the first step to developing empathy is to Google “what is empathy?” or “what is empathy at work?”

Before we shift to the benefits of empathy and the “how to”, let’s focus on what empathy is and what it’s not.