Grace is defined as unmerited favor. Leaders must be the most grace centric people on the planet if you want to get the best from people. What drives great behavior and performance from the people you lead is gratitude. When people are grateful to you as the leader, they will do more than work for you, they will work with you. Gratitude drives performance. Ungratefulness drives apathy. I guarantee that you can always trace low performance back to a lack of gratitude. Whether the lack of gratitude is from a person, a position, or an opportunity it always breeds laziness. If someone is grateful for what they have and what they do it drives them to live up to that honor. Lack of gratitude equals lack of production. Don’t get me wrong, people can be appreciative and still lazy, but I wouldn’t necessarily call appreciation gratitude. They are different. Appreciation is about you, gratitude is about others. Appreciation says, “This is awesome I am so glad I have this.” Gratitude says, “This is awesome, I am so glad I have this, now I am going to do my best to return the favor.” See how gratitude is appreciation in action. It’s about giving back, not just receiving.

Being a grace centric leader, giving people unmerited favor, allows them to be grateful. People are not statistics, they are human beings. When we recapture the human relational element of leadership is causes us to connect with people rather than systems. Too many leaders treat their people as animals not humans. They forget that people are emotional and spiritual beings. This means that they deal with fears, worries, dreams, desires, frustrations, hurts, motivations, etc… When we lose the human interaction with our people we lose the ability to inspire them. This is where grace comes in. We must believing in people and give them an opportunity to be their best. If we miss the opportunities to raise people up by spending time developing them we miss the potential they have within them. But when we give them grace to do, fail, learn, and apply we invest into their potential.

Grace drives gratitude. If you want to see your people grateful for what they do by giving it their very best make sure you walk with grace. And remember grace is more than allowing people to fail, it is about empowering them to succeed. Grace-empowered leadership allows people to step out and have the freedom to do. Believing in people on the front-end allows them to be productive on the back-end.