Have you ever stopped to think about success? What it is? Whether you have it? How you get it? How important is it? How much of it is there? What is the price you have to pay for it?
“Enough already!” I can just hear your reaction as you drown in the questions. But if you do stop to think about it I am sure you will agree success is a rather strange phenomenon. Easily defined, it is not so easily measured. This is because it is ultimately completely subjective: a roomful of people asked to quantify personal success would probably produce as many answers as there were people in the room.
Perhaps it would be easier if we took Maya Angelou’s definition: “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it.” Simple yet profound, this highlights that – no matter how or how much other people may judge you – success is ultimately personal. But what is really remarkable is how closely it resembles Mahatma Gandhi’s statement: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.” The essence of the two statements is so similar that it is only a small step to conclude that success and happiness are one and the same! And that is certainly enough to make one pause to think.
And there is even more to think about if we apply this logic to organisational success. It would mean that organisational success is the same as organisational happiness – a new concept for all but the most progressive organisations.
Yet this is perhaps not the leap of logic it may first seem. The natural corollary to the statement ‘you are only as strong as your weakest link’ is that the most successful team is the one with the most successful players. And since any organisation is ultimately a team, it is entirely logical that the more successful its people are individually, the more successful the organisation will be. Dale Carnegie said, “You never achieve real success unless you like what you are doing” and it thus makes perfect sense that a company should focus its efforts on ensuring people like what they are doing. Numerous studies indicate that companies with happy people outperform those where the people are not.
In fact the link between happiness and success is neither as surprising nor as tenuous as one might first think. It brings us back full circle to the Harvard Business Review comment quoted in my last blog, “Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop demotivating them.” To do this they simply have to create an environment in which fulfilled people can engage all their talents and so like themselves, what they do and how they do it. Yet we do seem to be very slow learners. Albert Schweitzer identified this secret more than a century ago when he said, “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing you will be successful.” This applies equally to organisations. The most successful organisation will be the one with the highest proportion of successful (happy) people – those who are using all their talents.