The other day I had an epiphany! I was watching a Matthieu Ricard TED Talk on “The Habits of Happiness” and was struck by his equating happiness with well-being. I suddenly realised that happiness is not an elusive emotional sense but actually a situation of satisfaction. I liked that idea because it made happiness somehow less fleeting and transient.
Ricard claims “authentic happiness can only come from the long-term cultivation of wisdom, altruism and compassion.” (My emphasis) Reflecting on this brought back a childhood memory. As a young boy of about eight I heard my parents complain that the carpet was dirty. So I decided that I would surprise them and clean it. Thus the next day when they went off to work, I managed to roll it up, take it outside and wash it.
My parents were surprised. Unfortunately they weren’t as pleased as I had hoped. Yes, they came home to a nice clean (albeit still damp) carpet but it was now half an inch smaller on each side than the previously same-sized underfelt! Fortunately they vented their true feelings to my aunt, who had been looking after my sister and me, rather than to me!
In this instance things clearly did not turn out as well as I had intended. Yet the story illustrates the innate desire to please we all possess. Something that doesn’t diminish as we get older. We all derive our greatest pleasure from pleasing others.
Yet this is something that we largely overlook in the workplace. Constant monitoring, measuring and managing erodes the “altruism” of our efforts and sucks any joy we might get from our work, which ultimately become just a job.
Some companies recognise this and are aspiring to create happy employees, and my friend Alexander Kjerulf (The Chief Happiness Officer”) is doing great work in this area. Perhaps, however, this work would be more mainstream if we moved away from the “pursuit of happiness” to the more inclusive “pursuit of well-being.” This would do more to recognise the inter-connectedness of everything.
Your organisation is ultimately an organism of people. While management theory propounds the “3P’s” – Product, Process, People – people are key to all three. Consequently organisational well-being depends on the well-being of your people. And so does your personal well-being as a leader. With more happy, fulfilled people you have better results, less stress and greater quality of life.
The Zealise methodology perpetuates my childhood desire to please and offers you a way to ensure this ultimately universal desire. That desire is core and the methodology builds on this to create the infrastructure for you to introduce, maintain and sustain it Wonderful Organisational Well-being (WOW!) Right now! In your organisation! Isn’t that what you have been looking for?
Bay is the founder and director of Zealise, a company created to help larger small to large business organisations to properly value their people and thereby inspire them to optimise their self-worth and so engage them that they transform organisational performance and bottom-line results. Bay is also the author of several books, including “Lean Organisations Need FAT People” and “The 7 Deadly Toxins of Employee Engagement.”