Cathy Duvel recently shared some exciting news with me. Many of you will know Cathy, a long-time friend and colleague of ours, and one of our inaugural Global Fellows. Cathy was telling me about some of the work she will be doing over the next year or so, which includes an exciting opportunity in South Africa, the country where she grew up.
Cathy’s work has always aligned very closely with the concept of emotional health. Regular readers may remember when we previously introduced her work around the Thinking Environment and Time to Think, which she brought to Australia 19 years ago. In more recent years, she has been putting more focus on an extension of those concepts centred on the importance of psychological safety and appreciation.
Put briefly, the central argument of this concept is that a strong link exists between a culture of appreciation and a strong sense of psychological safety, which in turn contributes to sustainable high performance.
What does this look like in practice? It’s actually quite simple. It’s all about routinely noticing and acknowledging the positives in what people are doing in a workplace. Unsurprisingly, when this is the norm in a team or organisation, people feel better about themselves, and that leads to higher levels of engagement, innovation and output.
In some ways this is intuitively obvious. However, research in both neuroscience and organisational psychology reinforces just how fundamental psychological safety is to human motivation and performance, especially in teams.
As Cathy explains, ‘when someone receives sincere recognition, the brain releases dopamine – a neurotransmitter linked to pleasure and motivation. This “reward chemical” reinforces the behaviour that led to the recognition and motivates people to repeat it. Appreciation, particularly when delivered with warmth and authenticity, strengthens social connections and trust.’
Teams that have a high level of trust in each other are more cohesive – they work better together, and that means they produce better outcomes. They are happier and more effective at handling challenges and conflict. In contrast, ‘feeling undervalued or ignored triggers the release of cortisol, which heightens stress and diminishes cognitive function over time’.
Unfortunately, these proven benefits don’t mean the practice of acknowledgement is widespread. If anything, as workplaces have become leaner, faster paced and increasingly competitive, pointing out the positives is often overlooked as a ‘nice to have’ that there isn’t time for.
Building a culture of appreciation requires leadership with a high level of emotional health. It can then become self-perpetuating because the culture itself will promote emotionally healthy behaviours across the team or organisation.
Fundamentally, learning and practising the recognition and celebration of positive behaviours draws on the inner observer and personal responsibility. Doing this on a regular basis requires, at least initially, setting an intent to do so and a willingness to be present. Appreciation also builds on a ‘both … and’ mentality, one focused on abundance rather than scarcity.
Appreciation has been a part of Cathy’s Time to Think workshops for 15 years. With organisations, she promotes practices like regular team appreciations during meetings, thank you notes, peer-to-peer recognition systems, one-on-one conversations and appreciation rituals such as appreciation circles. In particular, she encourages these things becoming habits within teams or across an organisation – not just one-off initiatives.
Which brings me back to South Africa. One of the strengths of appreciation practices is that they are cross cultural. The journey of South Africa has been quite different to that of Australia over the last few decades, and there are some significant cultural differences in everything from classroom teaching to business. However, what is common to any culture is that being appreciated touches your heart in ways that nothing else can. So when Cathy was invited to bring her appreciation work to pre-service maths teachers via the Capitec Foundation, she jumped at the chance. She’s looking forward to doing this work in South Africa in early 2026.
Gayle