What is Happiness at Work? Really…
Tags: Talent Development, Employee Engagement, Talent, Leadership, Talent Management

Happiness at Work

The purpose of this article is not to convince you, dear reader, that it is worth being happy at work, that you should strive to be happy at work, that there are all sorts of positive benefits from being happy at work for you, for your colleagues, for your organization. For this article, we are operating under the assumption that you already believe all that. This article is about what happiness is, what you need in order to be happy at work so that you can go out and get it or, if you are a leader, create an environment where your people have a chance of being happy.

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So what is happiness at work?

We are not talking about a momentary emotional state like amusement or pleasure or joy. We are not talking about the kind of happiness achieved by surprise or thrill. We are talking about an overarching quality of life that is filled with challenge and achievement and all of the emotions life has to offer.

Note that we are not excluding sadness or anxiety or fear or dread from this experience of happiness because this kind of happiness is really more about engagement with your life than it is about joy. And true engagement acknowledges and celebrates that life is not always going to be happy, but that even the more challenging emotions offer opportunities — perhaps even more opportunities — to reach down into yourself and come out on the other side stronger for it.

…this kind of happiness is really more about engagement with your life than it is about joy.

What that also means is that the job of a leader is not to protect his or her people from difficulty. It is to help them to feel supported when they are facing difficulty so that they can overcome it and to be there to celebrate alongside them when they do.

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What kind of environment do we need to achieve that kind of sustainable happiness?

According to Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas and her colleague, Dacher Keltner at The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, happiness at work comes down to four feelings:

Purpose. Purpose is when you are in the moment, available to help and connected to the present. Purpose is the feeling that one is part of and contributing to something larger than him or her self. (Daniel Pink refers to this as Transcendent Purpose.)

Engagement. Engagement is about feeling challenged. When something is easy for you, you don’t have to engage. Your brain can accomplish the task while thinking about something else. Just remember this morning when you brushed your teeth while watching the news.

Resilience. Resilience is inherently connected to failure and difficulty. A resilient person doesn’t avoid failure. He or she is able to bounce back from failure and persevere. A great leader allows for failure and then, importantly, recovery from failure.

Kindness. It feels good to be kind — to reach out to a colleague and help that colleague to understand something, achieve something, get through something. This is closely connected to collegiality and the feeling that you are connected to others. No one wants to show up to work every day and feel alone.

In order to create an environment with these qualities — Yes. Environments have qualities just like you and me — leaders need to build a community. In a community, everyone is cared for. Everyone is accepted. And everyone supports everyone else.

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Who is responsible for my happiness?

We cannot put the responsibility for every individual’s happiness on the leaders of an organization. To be sure, it is partly the job of the individual to seek out happiness. But it is also true that as a leader, you have power that is unique to your role. You can define the rules of the game. You can call out those who are damaging the psychological safety of the environment. (See my colleague, Gabe Gloege’s article on the importance of psychological safety in creating a positive work environment.) And you can celebrate those who are upholding the values of a positive work environment.

CultivateMe is a talent development agency for agencies. We help agencies establish a repeatable, scalable, and sustainable system for growing their people and winning the talent war. To get fresh ideas on how to improve learning at work, sign up for our newsletter.