The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace w/ Dr. Paul White
If you’ve read Gary Chapman’s book The 5 Love Languages, then The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace is the business/workplace version. Co-authored by Chapman and today’s guest Dr. Paul White, The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace is all about improving workplace relationships by learning your coworkers’ language of appreciation. The book has sold more than 500,000 copies and is currently selling 1,000/week.
In this episode, Dr. White says, “If I had written the book on my own, it probably would have sold 3,000 copies,” and then tells us how he was able to get through Chapman’s gatekeeper and convince him to co-author the book with him. Dr. White also shares how he built a business around the book that now support five other team members in addition to himself through speaking engagements, consulting, and other products and services.
Dr. Paul White's Links:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Today, my guest is Dr. Paul White. Dr. White's best-selling book, The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace is all about improving workplace relationships, simply by learning your coworkers language of appreciation. Now, if you think this book sounds familiar, you may have heard of The 5 Love Languages, which is the written by Gary Chapman, who's the coauthor of The5 Languages of Appreciation. So kind of part of the same series. I always like to talk about The 5 Languages of Appreciation as the business version of the 5 love languages. So The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace has sold more than half a million copies. And it's selling a thousand books every single week online.
Paul, welcome to the show.
Dr. Paul White: Thank you. I'm glad to be with you.
Josh Steimle: One of the things I was telling should I call you Dr. Paul, Dr. White, Paul, what's best for you.
Dr. Paul White: Yeah, I like Grand Poobah, but not too many people go with that, but either Paula or Dr. Paul is fine.
Josh Steimle: All right, I'll call you Paul.
So one of the things I was telling Paul before we started the show here is that this is one of my favorite books. I read The 5 Love Languages years ago with my wife. We loved it. It was game changing. We use it all the time. We use it with our kids. And then when I saw The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace, I thought, “Oh, this is perfect.” Cause I love business books and I love The 5 Love Languages. And now I can apply this in the workplace.
In fact, I tend to remember where I was listening to books because I mostly listen to books to read books. And I remember specifically where I was running in Hong Kong on Lantau Island when I was listening to The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace. So it made an impression on me and it's a fantastic, great book that everybody should definitely read.
All right. But with that introduction Dr. White, give us your background, how did you get involved in this field? And then how did you get connected with Gary and get interested in writing this book?
Dr. Paul White: Yeah, so an Important piece is that I grew up in the context of a family owned business outside of Kansas City, in Lawrence, where the University of Kansas is. So I'm a Jayhawk basketball fan. And so I grew up in that context and actually went a different direction for awhile and got my Master's in Counseling at Arizona State and worked with kids and families, and then moved to Atlanta, got my doctorate there and developed a specialty in testing students that have learning difficulties and ADHD and that kind of stuff. And did that. Moved to Wichita, Kansas, where I've lived for a number of years. I had a year of training and then needed to find a place to work, not moving after one year, I had three little kids and did that.
But I'm about 10 years into my career. Some friends of mine that were business consultants kept running into family issues because FA family businesses make up 80-85% of all businesses in the United States and they know my background. And so I started consulting with them, dealing with the family issues of working together, both the relational side, but also like business succession planning and so forth.
And it was in the midst of that. I was in North Carolina, working with a family and talking to the dad, who's the CEO. And I said, “How's this succession plan going?” And he said, “It's going well, my son is stepping up. I think it's gonna be okay.” And I walk across the hall and I asked his son the same question. He said, “This is a disaster. It's never going to work. I can't ever please my dad.” And it was just clear. They were not connecting. And at the same time, my wife and I were reading through, probably a second or third time at that point, The 5 Love Languages.
And I thought, I wonder if this could apply to work-based relationships? So I wound up pursuing Dr. Chapman for a year. He had this, I called the nicest bulldog Southern administrator, and I just could not get through her, but finally met with them and pitched the idea.
First of all, we had to identify what's the concept? Cause we didn't want to talk about love in the workplace in that setting. And so we agreed that appreciation seemed to be the best correlate. And then I started working on the assessment that became motivating by appreciation inventory to identify each person's language of appreciation and the actions they value. And then develop some training materials that we've used with companies and then wrote the book. And so the book came out in 2011 originally, and we redid it in 2019. And like you said, we’ve been fortunate that it's done well. And then we've had 300,000 people take our online assessment, as well.
Josh Steimle: That's fantastic. So when you started writing the book, it sounded like it just grew out of, “Hey, this is great material. People should have access to this.” But now with it being such a phenomenal bestseller, how has that changed your personal professional trajectory?
Dr. Paul White: Yeah. The way to think about how the book actually came about is I'm sort of a “Need Meter” in the sense. That's how I got into testing students. It was a skill I had, there was a need, developed a practice around that, and then the family business side. And then this, it just seemed like there was a need because as I talked to people and worked with people, it was like, employee recognition programs are out there, but they just weren't working. I talked to my HR friends and they said, “Yeah, we know they're not really working, but we don't know what else to do.” And I said, “We're going to figure that out.” So that's what we did.
And so over time, this has been an overnight success over the past last 12 years. It's like what you hear stories about, that the last two or three years it's really taken off. And so it's slowly tapered off. I do just a very little bit of testing the students. I do a very little bit of consulting with family businesses and have built a team. I really moved from being a psychologist, which is my training in practice, to a small business owner. I have a team of five people. And even though I'm a little bit older, I'm 64. I feel like I'm a young business person in sense of inexperience. Although, growing up in a family business and then consulting with businesses. I was able to observe and learn a lot of lessons that help make it go well.
Josh Steimle: So now you've got this five person business that you've built around the content of this book, and you're doing these assessments. You're doing consulting. What takes up most of your time, these days?
Dr. Paul White: It's a combination. We just finished another book that's going to be coming out in January. It's called Making Things Right at Work, which is about resolving conflict successfully in the workplace. So there's always that piece. I write a weekly blog and also do research that I publish. And that's a benefit of being a psychologist, having that there. Do a lot of podcasts one or two a week. And then managing my team. And largely what they do, we have an online website and shopping cart, it's appreciationatwork.com. And, we have lots of people type in and want to know about our stuff or have questions. And so they manage that. And a lot of mine is still product development. And then speaking, so I’ll do speaking for organizations or associations, that kind of thing. It's a variety of things, actually.
Josh Steimle: We should probably run through what the 5 languages of appreciation are. Can you run us through those one by one?
Dr. Paul White: I think I can remember them. Yeah. So they're the same in name as the 5 love languages, but they look differently in their application. So words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, tangible gifts, and even physical touch.
And yeah. The book is an easy read and I wrote it while traveling on planes, a lot, number of years ago, and it's really in chunks and easy to follow. And so words of affirmation are pretty easy. They're words that are affirming. We tell people what we value about them and what they do. And just a key difference for us around appreciation is that it's about the person, not just performance. Employee recognition really focuses on performance, which is good and it's necessary, but we believe that people have value beyond just what they do and create. And so it can be a, a compliment about, you know, “Hey, it's really cool that you are, training for a half marathon. I'm just really impressed with your self-discipline to do that.” So it's not always directly work-related.
Quality time has differed over time. It's changing generationally. In the old days, people wanted time with their supervisor and manager. There was a saying, people don't leave a job, they leave a manager. It's less true than it used to be. The younger employees really value collegial and peer relationships. And so quality time often is, going out to lunch together, doing something after work together. They value that and feel valued when that happens.
Acts of service are not rescuing a low-performing colleague, but more small things that you can do to help make somebody's week or day go better. The easiest contexts to think about is when they're working on a time limited project. That they are just pushing on, have to get done. What can you do to help make that go better for them? So it could be, handle some of their emails or answer calls so they can keep focus, maybe bring lunch or dinner in for them so they can keep working, maybe delegate part of the project. Just little things like that. It looks different in different settings.
And then tangible gifts are not compensation and benefits and that kind of stuff. That's between the employer and employee. It's really about small things that are showing you get to know your colleagues, so it could be bringing in their favorite coffee. It might be you found a magazine about a hobby that they're working on, or you found an article and giving that to them, could be something about one of their sports teams that they're following. So it's not a big deal. It's just showing that you're paying attention to them and their life.
And then a physical touch, which is an interesting one in the workplace.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. I remember when I was reading the book, I was like, how is he going to handle this one?
Dr. Paul White: Yeah. So we always finished training with a group hug. But not really. And it's largely spontaneous celebration. It's a fist bump when you finish a project or a high five when you solve a problem, that kind of thing. And it's not that big a deal, but it is for some people, especially in some industries and even regions of the country, I mean they're more physical Northeast is less so. So you live in Massachusetts, not the hot bed of physical touch in the workplace, it happens. So we address it and have some fun with it as well.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. So one of the things that I found tricky when I was learning the 5 love languages, and then the 5 languages of appreciation, is that what is my love language that I like to receive is not necessarily the same way that I show love. I might receive it in one way or recognize it in one way when it's being given to me. But then I go and I deliver that appreciation or love to somebody else in a different way. Can you speak to that a bit?
Dr. Paul White: Yeah. There's a couple of variations on that theme. One is that most of the time we start with the language that's important to us and give that to other people. That's fine, except that not everybody has the same language as you do. So you're going to hit the target with some and miss others. And also we did a little research that found that 75% of the time, people do use the language that's important to them, but 25% of the time they don't, and that's especially true with gift givers. There are a lot of people that like to give gifts that don't necessarily like to receive them. So just watching them and observing what they do, isn't necessarily going to give you a clue to what's important to them.
And the other part is people's personal love language and language of appreciation in the workplace differ as well. About two thirds of the time a person's primary language personally is one of their top two work languages, but it's not exactly one for one kind of thing.
Josh Steimle: And it's interesting to get into some of the nuances of this, because for example, I don't see my love language as giving gifts or receiving gifts.
For me, I would put that way down on the totem pole. And yet I love receiving books and I love giving books. If you're watching this on video, you see my bookshelf behind me. Obviously I like books. And I often tell people, I say, my love language is giving books. If I like you, I'm going to send you a bunch of books that I like, to share with you. And yet, at the same time, when you take that out of the book context, I don't give anybody anything hardly. Like I'm not sending people T-shirts, I'm not sending them mugs. I'm not sending them chocolate, unless there's some compelling reasons. It's not my to say, oh, I'm going to send this person a gift, but I do send a lot of books out to people.
And I've often wondered at that. So obviously it's part of my love language, but only within a certain context.
Dr. Paul White: And you touched on some of that. We learned early on that in the workplace, especially just knowing somebody’s language of appreciation, isn't sufficient. That you really need to know the specific actions.
I've had people who are fairly shy and introverted and say, “I don't want time with my supervisor. They're pretty intense. And I just get overwhelmed, but I like to hang out with my friends.” So it's about finding out the specifics.
Same thing with words. Some people don't want any kind of compliment in front of anybody. And then there's those of us, bring on the TV cameras, we're good to go with it.
So you really have to get the specifics. And that's where our inventory we created continued to develop over time that we identify not only person's language, but the actions that they do and also the ones that they don't like. So you don't create problems that way.
Josh Steimle: There's something else I've noticed about myself. I would love it if you could give me some insight on this, is that this almost seems like words of affirmation to me, except there aren't words, but it's when people listen to me, I tend to remember those people and really have warm, affectionate feelings towards people who listen to me ramble on and on and on. And I noticed specifically that there are people that I met in college, other people I met later on, that I felt like these people were my best friends. But then I realized they didn't see me the same way. And I thought, why do I like them so much? And it was, they listened to me. They listened to me talk and share all my ideas and ramble on and on. But apparently that didn't bond them as much to me.
But I'm not sure what that love language is or how that translates to languages of appreciation.
Dr. Paul White: Yeah, we would tend to put that in quality time. One of the key ways of quality time is focused attention, that you are there with them, there's no distractors, they're listening, they're responding, and you feel you are important to them or what you're saying is important. And that's how we would tend to frame that's a kind of quality time. That's important to a lot of people.
Josh Steimle: Interesting. And my understanding is that, I guess I'll just put the question to you. What do you do if you're not sure what somebody's language is?
Dr. Paul White: We've worked on this and what we found is first of all, there's not enough data points just to observe. In a personal relationship, you maybe can see what they do and how they respond, but in the workplace, there's just not enough examples of what's going on for them to show appreciation or receive it.
Secondly, it's a weird question in our culture. It’s like, “If I want to show you appreciation, how should I do that?” Most people are going to go, “I don't know. Tell me Thanks.” And that's about all you get.
So what we found is that really having people take the inventory is really important. And so that's why we actually include a code for taking it with the book. You can buy codes for your team members as well. And then we have tools to be able to combine the team's results and that's really the best way that we found. Talking about it doesn't really get you anywhere or not very far at least.
Josh Steimle: And I've also heard people say, if you're not sure, just do everything, just do all the things.
Dr. Paul White: If you have unlimited time and resources, I guess you could do that. But part of our process is we don't want you to do that because actually communicating appreciation in the ways that aren't meaningful can be a bit of a negative. It's like if you spend time with somebody and they don't want to spend time, it’s like, “Get out of my office,” kind of thing. And so we want to help people really identify the specific actions for each person. I would say the safest, if you absolutely don't know, and they haven't taken the inventory, our data shows that 46% of the workforce choose words as their primary language.
And you can do that in a way. So it's still less than half of the workforce, but it's the biggest group and you can do it, be very specific about what you're communicating, do in writing and privately. And that's probably the easiest. Most people don't get offended by words, unless you're doing it in front of a bunch of people.
Josh Steimle: Now I want to put you on the spot here. I've got a question about how can we apply this to the people who are listening to this podcast, aspiring authors. And I wonder if there's an analogy to be made here, that if you're an executive in a large company, trying to implement the languages of appreciation in your workplace. As the leader of a large company, there's a lot of one-way communication. You send out memos, you might make videos, you might speak to your teams, your employees, but you can't necessarily spend one-on-one time if you've got 5,000 employees or something. You just can't spend the quality time that you might like to.
How can a leader show appreciation to a large group like that, where it really is a one way thing? And is there a way to apply that to being a book author where you're writing a book and then you send it out? How can you communicate perhaps that appreciation to your readers somehow through your writing?
Dr. Paul White: Let me take the first part, first, the large company. So we created an online train the trainer course. I grew up professionally in the not-for-profit and social service world, where people don't give a lot, but they don't have money for training. And so I wanted to create low cost training resources. So we created this kit: videos, PowerPoint, facilitators guide, handouts, all that kind of stuff that people can take. In companies where they have somebody, often an HR person or a corporate trainer take that course and then run groups with that across the organization.
And so one of the best things a leader can do is help support that effort, both by giving the resources to let people go through the training, take the inventory, as well as model it. When you're dealing with a big group of people, you can't do it effectively with everybody. So you've got to break the group down. We know that almost 80% of the people who leave a job, leave because they don't feel valued. They actually don't leave for more money. And so if you have key team members you don't want to lose, you'd better be communicating appreciation to them.
And also with the people that you work with on a day-to-day basis and get that foundation going with that group. And then you can hopefully grab somebody that would work with you as a team member and do it with their group. And you go out from there. It’s kind of a take beachhead kind of approach. Although, we're now working with PepsiCo and Samsung and some other big companies that we've developed a whole strategy, but most of the time we start with a small group within even the large company and do a pilot there and start from there and see how it goes and tweak it, and usually it goes well.
With authors, I'm not sure about with their audience, but authors have lots of other important relationships, whether that's with their publisher or the distributors or podcast hosts, websites. And I think always trying to really be kind and polite and finding out how you can help them is a great starting point. And part of it is also, as a business person, we have a standard within our company.
I used to help companies develop their mission vision value statements. Largely a waste of time because it was just, put it on an 8 ½ x 11 sheet and post it on the door, but we develop what our values were and then the behavioral correlates of that. And so we wanted to demonstrate that our customers and the people we interact with, are important to us. And so we have a standard that everybody gets responded to within 24 hours. They may not get the problem solved in the 24, but they get responded to. And I think having that kind of timely response, and if you're an author and you want to speak, man, if somebody connects with you, get back to them as soon as you can, because you can make their life a lot easier. And if they're communicating, that means they're at their desks right there, get back to them right now versus sending them a call in however many days. I think that kind of timeliness serves well. And people feel respected and valued. And that's the core issue.
Josh Steimle: I think that's great. So with your book, obviously having a co-author who's already sold millions of copies of his book is helpful.
Dr. Paul White: That's a major understatement, but yeah.
Josh Steimle: And it's an interesting scenario, right? Because Gary had already sold millions of his book. It was this wild runaway bestseller.
And yet it was difficult for you to get through and say, “Hey, we should expand this. We should run this into this other aspect.” And now he's done this in a number of ways. It's 5 Love Languages for Kids and for teens. And they're all these different ways.
And you see this with some other authors, where they'll take a central core topic and then they expanded into different audiences or different approaches and such. And even like you were saying, you've taken some of that core material and you've expanded and you're publishing other books that are along that same line.
How can authors set themselves up, do you think, for that type of opportunity in the future? Because I think a lot of authors are not thinking beyond the first book. First time authors, that is. They're thinking, “I've got a book idea. I'm going to write that book. And then I die.” or something. They're not really thinking what happens after that first book, but how can an author set themselves up for longer-term success in that kind of opportunity to write these follow on books?
Dr. Paul White: So yeah, so I've been told, I think it's generally true that the average business book sells about 3000 copies of this lifetime. We're selling that much in a month. But I tell people if I wrote the book on my own without Dr. Chapman's platform, I probably would have sold about 3000 copies. It's a good book, often it's not about the content, right? It's about the marketing.
So just a couple of comments. One is you've got to take responsibility for marketing yourself, as an author. With the publishers, and this is true for me with our new book, it's not even 90 days.
It's going to be 60 days of their focus and they're moving on. So if you're relying on them to do a lot, you're going to be disappointed.
I think the theme part is I really believe now marketing is being find-able, right? People do Google searches. How can they find you? And so as you work on a book and/or maybe a series, think about how they're related so that the searches cross, right? So whether it's appreciation or workplace culture or whatever it might be, that there's multiple sort of search terms that fit the different projects. And then you got to get out there and do the work of whether it's writing blogs or articles or YouTube videos or podcasts, and getting out there with those tags so that people can find you. Because you can't get in front of everybody, especially when they're looking for you. It's like how many times do you speak to a group and they're going to go buy a book? That's a very limited number of people.
I think, thinking in terms of themes and to be honest, I've written weekly blogs for 12 years, published 300 to 400 articles. And, you just sorta grind them out. And a piece of advice that my advisor for my PhD gave me said, “A professional learns how to get multiple uses out of the same content and project that you tweak a little bit.” So we have article coming out for physical therapists and appreciation. We have one for veterinarians, for nurses, for long-term care. So is it the same content? Yeah, sort of, but the examples are different and we frame it differently. And so try to use what you have, but multiply your efforts by tweaking it a little bit.
Josh Steimle: And if you're looking to take the other path of, “Hey, I want to go find somebody who's experienced success and I want to see if I can write a book with them and ride those coattails a bit.” What are some tips you would have on approaching people like that? What finally helped you to get through to Gary and get his attention?
Dr. Paul White: Well I wore him down. It was literally a year that I would call or email every couple of weeks. Maybe once a month. And then he told me later, the perseverance impressed him and the publisher. And I had a half hour time slot where he was doing a workshop. He gave me some time the afternoon before. And, you got to organize your thoughts and you gotta be able to talk about, what are you bringing to the table and how is that different?
For me, I'm a follower of Christ and believe in God, and he helps direct my paths. And I've clearly believed in that. But there was the issue of, okay, I'm a psychologist. I understand relational stuff. I was working with businesses. I had that piece. I had already written some, a lot of articles and stuff. And then, he and I went to the same undergraduate school. So it was like, okay, we've got a connection there, and so that helped with getting the foot in the door. And then we just work the plan. And I think perseverance is huge.
And, probably, if I were going to do it now, I would either try to develop a relationship with their right hand person and convince them, or clearly if I have any kind of relationship with somebody that has a relationship with that author, I would try to work that. Cold calling is just super tough. But if there's some kind of connection and they can see how you're adding value versus just wanting to use them as a launchpad. I think you're increasing your odds.
Josh Steimle: Great advice. What's next? You mentioned the other book that you're working on or that you've already published. What else do you have in the future that you're doing to get the word out more?
Dr. Paul White: My publisher routinely asked me if there's another book I wanted to write. Cause that's how they make money. And I told him a year ago, they sort of pulled me into this joint project, but I said, there's still so much opportunity and need with the 5 languages of appreciation and increasing positive workplaces and building healthy work relationships and dealing with remote employees and hybrid workplaces, that I just want to focus on getting the word out.
And so really what we're doing is focusing on industry sectors, government agencies, lots of times have not the greatest work cultures, Hospitals, long-term care facilities, K-12 schools, Universities and Colleges are nasty often. And just identifying specific areas and finding co-workers or people that are using our stuff or like our stuff, that we can write together and reach out to different associations. I guess that's another thing, if you're looking at workplace kinds of things, there's so many professional associations, both regional, state, national for every kind of profession, but that's a really great way to penetrate and get some exposure.
Josh Steimle: When you were launching and first marketing the book, what were some of the things that worked the best? Was it enough that Gary was a coauthor on it or what did you do to push it out there that actually worked?
Dr. Paul White: The publisher hired a marketing coach to work with me because I told them I wanted to build a platform separate from Dr. Chapman, and they did too, to help out and got some great advice there. One is it's really important, probably one of the most important things, is to identify your target audience and specify them. And it can be multiple audiences, but you gotta specify and then find out where they meet. Where do they get information, conferences, websites, podcasts, whatever, just like and yours is a great, very narrow target for people that either have authored a book or want to. And so they find you and man, boom, there you are. And so identifying that target audience. So that's where we look to those associations or the podcasts or articles and so forth. So being able to figure out where do they meet, what conferences do they have, post COVID now?
And the other part is people, and this has to do with behavioral science, people don't make logical decisions. I don't care if you're an accountant or an engineer, you may think you're logical, but ultimately we make decisions based on how we feel. And so the way to sell a book is to convince people that you can make their lives better or help them feel better or get rid of pain. And the easiest, I think, greatest motivator, while we like positive goals, if a person's in pain or looking at experiencing pain, and if you can help them get out of it or avoid it, that is a super motivator for them. So you've got to identify, how do you help them make their life better and feel better, you reduce their worry, you decrease their frustration. And so you use these action labels plus an emotional word and use that on your back cover or in your advertising and that's how you grab people, I think.
Josh Steimle: What do you think is the power of having a system or a set of steps? The 5 anything sounds better than just a general idea. If your book was titled The Languages of Appreciation. That might work, but saying the 5 languages of appreciation that's a little bit better. And if it was titled How to Show and Receive Appreciation in the Workplace, that would be even perhaps a step down from The Languages of Appreciation. How important is it to have kind of that formula or that method or the set of steps, in your opinion?
Dr. Paul White: It's interesting. Over time it differs, right? Because we've had single word titles that have done well, Blink, and different kinds of things. But your audience are people. And so it's helpful to understand people and people have limited time, energy, mental resources. And so the more that we can make it easier for them to understand and capture and communicate. Originally I was embarrassed about how simple the 5 languages were. I'm a psychologist.
I want to do deep stuff. But that's been the saving grace really because people in the workplace don't have a lot of bandwidth for learning new stuff, trying to implement it. It's easy. There's 5 of them. They're pretty easy to remember. We've got visual symbols with it. I think that's a key part is to try to create some visual symbols that go with it. And having that contained system, like you said, like whether it's 5, 4, 3. They know, “Okay. I got to just get this.” Cause if there's no boundary there, they're like, “Ah, how far is this going to go? Are there 52 of these?”
He's a great author and speaker, but John Maxwell, man, he gets up there 23 irrefutable laws. Who can remember three laws. But it works for him. So anyway, I think having that contained system works well.
Josh Steimle: Great. This has been a fun conversation, Paul. I appreciate your time here today.
Once again, if people want to reach out, if they want to find you, if they want to learn more about what you're doing, where's the best place for them to go?
Dr. Paul White: Yeah. Sort of our mothership website is appreciationatwork.com. And you can find out both about the book, about our assessments, the training, as well as other books written about toxic workplaces and conflict resolution, that kind of stuff.
Josh Steimle: Great. Thank you so much for being with us here today on the Published Author podcast.
Dr. Paul White: You bet. Thanks for having me.
