Thanking your manager: acknowledging help without flattery

Thanking a manager may seem like simple courtesy; within a hierarchical relationship, it can also be interpreted as an attempt to gain favour. The useful question is therefore specific: how can employees acknowledge their manager's help without turning appreciation into flattery?

What the literature establishes

Adam M. Grant and Francesca Gino (2010, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show across several experiments that receiving thanks can increase willingness to help again. The mechanism they identify involves feeling socially valued, rather than merely feeling competent. These findings concern helping situations: they do not demonstrate that employees improve their hierarchical relationship by thanking their manager.

Recognising the person behind the help

Sara B. Algoe, Jonathan Haidt and Shelly L. Gable (2008, Emotion) studied gratitude in a gift-giving setting among members of a college sorority. Their observations support the idea that gratitude contributes to relationship formation beyond simply repaying a favour. Applied to a manager–employee relationship, this suggests a hypothesis: acknowledging a specific intervention could make the manager's contribution more visible without explicitly creating a debt.

The premature conclusion

It would be tempting to derive a formula: give more thanks to obtain more support. That would turn a finding about gratitude into a promise that an influence tactic works, something these studies did not test in upward hierarchical relationships. Acknowledging concrete help requires neither approving every managerial decision nor giving the manager sole credit for a collective result. (our executive and employee training programmes)

What the evidence cannot settle

These studies establish neither an optimal frequency for expressing thanks nor wording that is universally appropriate when addressing a superior. Experimental helping situations and student relationships do not reproduce an organisation's stakes around evaluation, dependence and fairness. Public thanks, in particular, may mean different things depending on team norms; their superiority over a private exchange is not established here.

A practical check in Berne

As part of SHR's programme « Construire une relation efficace avec son manager », an exercise could be proposed in Berne, within the federal administration, public health, telecommunications or precision industry: when genuine help occurs, acknowledge it by naming the intervention and its concrete effect on the work. Over two weeks, participants keep a record of the thanks they actually express, without sensitive information, and count those containing both elements as a proportion of all recorded expressions of thanks. “Your introduction to the relevant department helped clarify the procedure” is thus a verifiable statement, unlike general praise. This monitoring measures the specificity of acknowledgement, not an increase in trust or an entitlement to further help. To go further: explore the Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.

In pictures: Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager in Bern

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