Happiness first, then success
ACCORDING to Gallup, a body that delivers analytics and advice to help leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems and knows more about the attitudes and behaviors of employees, customers, students and citizens than any other organization in the world, in 2013, unhappy employees outnumbered happy ones by two to one worldwide.
Based on studies that took place in 142 countries and covering approximately 180 million employees, only “13 percent of employees worldwide are happily engaged at work.”
I am sure you probably wouldn’t need statistics to know that as being miserable at work has just become a way of life.
While life is too short to be unhappy at work, yet many ordinary workers and professionals who are free to shape their careers are disengaged, unfulfilled, and miserable.
Multiple factors account for this contemporary malaise. The American Psychological Association found in 2017 Americans are reporting more stress than ever owing to politics, the speed of change, and uncertainty in the world. Could it be that the reasons why there were many killings and shootings in the streets of the major cities in the USA?
You may agree with me that it is not always the outside forces that push us over the happiness line. Sometimes we inflict upon ourselves.
Accordingly too many of us fall into common “happiness traps” - destructive mindsets and ways of working that keep us stuck, unhappy, and ultimately less successful.
Three of the most common happiness traps are ambition, doing what’s expected of us and, working too hard - seems productive on the surface but are harmful when taken to the extreme.
Most management gurus will tell us that in order to be happy at work we must have three essential elements: 1. A sense of purpose and the chance to contribute to something bigger than themselves; 2. A vision that is powerful
and personal; and 3. Resonant, friendly
relationships. I cannot disagree with the gurus’ contentions.
In real life we may be making a lot of money, are married to the woman we love, and are happily devoted to our children.
We had everything we thought we wanted, alas we are not happy. The real truth reveals that things are tense at home, and work no longer gratified us.
We are tired of workplace politics and cynical about the never-ending changes that would supposedly fix whatever was wrong with the organization in a given quarter.
We begrudged the long hours we are required to put in.
That next promotion and bonus are not as enticing as they used to be. But then we still worked as hard as ever because holding our responsibilities are our habit.
There are times we blamed others for our disillusion. We believed that the executive team was disconnected from the dayto-day business.
We grumbled, complained to friends and colleagues about management’s bad decisions, the selected strategy and what we perceived as a lack of vision on the part of senior leadership. All the members of our team seemed to be slacking.
There are times we think we know we could probably fix things better but we are too preoccupied, it doesn’t matter whether we are happy or not.
What matters is that we hit our targets or Key Performance Indicators. In our more pensive moments, our stress and unhappiness were affecting our work relationships, our family, and eventually our health.
Suddenly we realize that we had begun to compromise our ethics in small ways.
What we couldn’t see was the link between our growing misery and our dwindling ability to do our job effectively.
Many people believe that if they are successful, they will be happy. That’s feebleminded.
Shawn Achor, who is the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University says it straightforwardly: “Happiness comes before success.”
That’s because the positive emotions aroused by being engaged, fulfilled, and valued at work have a host of benefits.
Among others, our brains function better; we are more creative, innovative and adaptable; we have more energy, make smarter decisions, and better manage complexity. We can safely confirm that happy people perform better than their unhappy peers.
In the corporate world and in our daily activities, to be successful in our endeavor, it is time to lay claim our right to happiness at work.
We must replace outdated beliefs with a new understanding of what we can expect from work - and from one another. We ought to break free of traps that keep us from happiness.
Let us begin the journey to fulfillment by focusing on discovering and living our purpose at work, reaching for a compelling vision of the future, and turning colleagues into real friends.
These commitments will surely help us create workplaces that honor our humanity, foster common decency and sustainable success galvanized with happiness.