If you want to build work relationships efficiently and effectively network in general, it's vital to master the art of giving thanks and showing gratitude.
Here are the core points from the video:
- Giving thanks is a skill - Don't just send a cookie-cutter 1 sentence thanks over DM after someone helps you: It's very soulless and takes you almost 0 time to write. Helping someone out with their work performance is one of the most high-impact ways you can add value to their lives; you should respond in kind when you receive this help. Some basic tactics to "level up" your thanks is to send a heartfelt paragraph and to thank them in person, either through a video call or actually in-person if you're physically coworking.
- Thank teammates via their manager - This is especially true at a high-performance tech company like FAANG where so much of the engineering culture revolves around performance review. If someone goes above and beyond helping you, make sure to let their manager know. If they're a recurring helper, you can even tell their manager that you deeply believe that this altruistic behavior should be rewarded in their performance review: When the helper hears this from their manager, they will really value you as a teammate and know that their efforts have truly been rewarded.
- Thank publicly - This adds more weight to your gratitude and also acts as an artifact to help out the other person during performance review.
- Recurring thanks - There's no reason why you can't thank someone multiple times for the same thing. Alex had a mentee who was really good at doing this: They would be very thankful on the initial unblock, and after the full project finished, they would thank the helper again (i.e. "I just shipped this project, and it wouldn't have been possible if you didn't help me on X").
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