We now have evidence that happier people lead to higher levels of passion and engagement at work. Happier people also lead to happier customers and clients. And happiness at work spreads into the rest of people’s health, relationships, life, and well-being.
Leaders in organizations, formal and informal, are uniquely positioned to cultivate a happiness-friendly organizational culture.
Life in the Old Days of Happiness Illiteracy
Before we had the compelling and growing body of research on happiness we have today, happiness was considered to be a byproduct of genetic predispositions or circumstantial variables. The old narrative placed happiness outside the actionable domains of intention and learning.
In this world, the most a leader could hope for is being given enough surrogate resources to literally “compensate” people for their intrinsic and intractable unhappiness. This is the model that has been the foundation of the current state of organizational happiness. In the US alone, the 75% of employees who are mostly unhappy at work costs over $300 billion annually.
The New Happiness Imperative
Thanks to the emergence of happiness research over the past decade, we have come a long way in understanding the neuroscience of happiness and the practical and empowering implications.
We now know that happiness is a practice. It is a function of how we focus and engage in our world. And as such, happiness can be learned and cultivated. It is an intentional possibility and actionable strategy when we know how to make it actionable.
In “The Joy of Thriving” we talk about five prime practices of happiness that make happiness more accessible anywhere anytime: appreciation, generosity, interest, lightness, and easy. Each has the power as a principle of practice to transform leadership.
Transformed leadership creates happier organizations because it designs conversations and practices that invite the practices of happiness. The evidence is now clear: happiness is a choice of how we focus and engage in our world; it can be learned and developed; and it has profound implications for personal and collective thrivancy.
The Possibilities of Transformed Leadership
Here is an introduction to some of the possibilities.
Appreciation We can begin or end meetings with people telling success and progress stories featuring explicit appreciation for contributors to each scenario. We can schedule time for people to regularly email or text thanks to someone who has made their life in any way easier or better. We can invite people to design beauty into their work spaces. We can regularly invite people to share their vision for their work group’s impact.
Generosity We can set a practice expectation that everyone in our group spends up to a specific percentage, like 5%, of their week giving someone else help and receiving help from others in the organization. We can make some of our spaces and resources available to people in other work groups. We can set the expectation that everyone will weekly do some random act of kindness for someone else.
Interest We can ask everyone to set quarterly new learning targets and give people time to share their gains. We can sustain accessible talent directories for anyone looking for peer2peer learning. We can translate all performance and outcome measures into learning measures that we share as a work group. We structure every meeting and presentation with participant inquiries and questions, which is to say shift from an information push to pull model, to build a vibrant and relentless culture of curiosity.
Lightness We as leaders can model a healthy sense of humor and perspective. We can have regular half-days where everyone goes outside the organization to explore and play with something or someone new. We can create and utilize physical and virtual water coolers for impromptu conversations that make strategic serendipity more possible. We can actively encourage the ha-ha as provocation to the ah-ha.
Easy We can consistently engage people in simplifying anything: systems, decision making, and access to resources. We can use simple and easy as design principles in designing every aspect of what we produce and how we produce it including how research, communication, learning, and accomplishments occur. We can teach people how to have easier conversations, organize projects and time more easily, and make their happiness at work more contagious to the rest of their lives.
The Call for Change
It takes a whole new kind of leadership to create happier organizations. Current practices, even those deemed unquestionable, are yielding high levels and costs of unhappiness at work. We have sufficient data demonstrating that. There is no evidential support for conventional leadership practices that naively expect performance to exceed attitude.
Fortunately, making the transition doesn’t require expensive investments in capital improvements. Happiness is a practice not a purchase. It starts with giving formal and informal leaders in organizations new levels of happiness literacy. Leaders will care about happiness indicators in their organizations in an actionable way at the rate they are exposed to the compelling research on happiness that invites practical everyday implication possibilities.
The new research profoundly holds old management practices and perspectives directly accountability for the fact that worldwide, according to Gallup’s annual research, fewer than 20% of employees feel the happiness of daily engagement of their strengths by their employers. And recent studies indicate that the vast majority of managers are equally unaware of this reality, the costs of it, and the way forward.
The way forward is educating leaders so they discover and deploy the power to create happier organizations where, at the end of the day, everyone gains.
It is an imperative for any leader who is passionate about the power of engagement and the possibilities of change. We can expect happier people to embrace engagement and change.
