There’s a difference between ‘being really good at what you do’ and being ‘world class’. This article is for those interested in the latter. If you have some fire in your belly, read on…
Pretty much forever, psychology focused on what was wrong with people, the aim being to identify phobias, disorders and mental ill-health, with a view to fixing people. That’s important and useful, but I always felt there was something missing?
A few years ago I realised what it was – psychologists had never studied well people, so I set out to do just that. Fifteen years later, here’s what I’ve found about employee engagement and flourishing workplaces.
You can probably count them on the fingers of one hand, the people in your life who, when they walk into the room, make you feel brilliant. They probably haven’t even spoken, they’re just there. Or the cheery souls who know the exact level of enthusiasm that will raise the level of their work colleagues. A word of warning at the outset, too much happiness (bounding into the office on Monday with a hearty whoop of, “WooHoo, don’t those weekends drag…”) will just annoy people.
I call the genuine uplifting minority. At Art of Brill we call them 2%ers, the folk who carry a feel-good factor with them. I describe being a 2%er as a ‘portable benefit’, as in Bob the Builder’s attitude – it tends to reside in the person rather than in the job.
- Science has a habit of proving what we already intuitively know. For example:
- Happy people get sick less often (and when they do get ill, they recover faster)
- Happy people have more energy
- Happy people are more optimistic
- Happy people are more motivated
- Happy people work better with others
- Happy people are more creative
- Happy people learn faster
- Happy people make better decisions
Now simply turn the positive statements above into negatives, and you get the workforce from hell! Is it really in anyone’s interest to have a negative, uncreative, sickness-prone, pessimistic, lack-lustre, sclerotic, depressed workforce?
It’s a technical (but important) point, that happiness at work is a joint effort between the business and the individual. My top tips below are about ‘what businesses can do to create happiness’ and less about ‘what individuals can do to create happiness’. Without this important insight your business will never get it right because happiness (along with all other emotions) is an internal construct. That basically means happiness isn’t real, it’s generated from within. This explains why some people fail to shine, even in the most jaw-dropping business environments.
All is revealed in our workshops and books. Meantime, here are a few quick wins:
- Encourage staff to go way beyond SMART objectives. They’re sooooo dull! I encourage HUGGs (huge unbelievably great goals), exciting things that are on the edges of achievability. Goals that are worth getting out of bed for.
- Strengths: uncovering people’s strengths and then finding ways for them to use their strengths every day. Simple? Yup. Are more organisations doing it? Nope.
- Positive communication ratio of 6:1. If I was a fly on the wall in your office and could hear 6 positives for every whinge, I’d be fairly sure that your team is rocking and rolling. If it dips below 2:1, the energy will be leaking. If your communication dips the other way (it, there are more negs than positives) I’d be worried.
- Purpose is key. If people have a clear and compelling reason to come to work, they will arrive with a spring in their step. Find (or remind them of) their ‘why?’ A point worth noting, you cannot command happiness or purpose. It’s about creating insight, so they can realise it for themselves.
- Care. And I mean genuinely care. Chances are that if your people can respond affirmatively to ‘someone at work seems to care about me as a person’, they will turn up with a positive attitude.
On a final note, positive psychology is much more than ‘positive thinking’ and nothing to do with pretending. It’s about using scientifically proven ways to improve your business. If one person in your organisation gets it, that’s great for them. If everyone gets it, that translates to a thriving workplace and wowza customer experiences.
Allow me to finish with an analogy. at some point, you will have rented a car. Most likely, this will have been on holiday. So, here’s a question for you; before you returned the car to the airport, did you wash it?
Why on earth not?
Because it’s not yours, that’s why. To be truthful, you probably didn’t treat it very well either.
Bringing the concept to your team – are your people ‘renting’ or ‘owning’? Organizations that achieve ownership will be rewarded with genuine and loving care.
Getting positive psychology embedded in the culture of your organisation is about ‘owning’. You can stop commanding them to be world-class because they will ooze it. Therefore ‘happiness’ is not just ‘a little bit important’, it’s an essential ingredient in your business success.