Share thisBarbara Fredrickson promotes the business benefit of being happy. The Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Principal Investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina in the United States says that positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and undo the lingering effects of negative feelings. Happy people disagree more effectively and their disagreements are more likely to produce innovation. It seems that finding happiness may mean overcoming discrepancies between modern and ancestral environments and fighting against the insistent undertow of competitive mechanisms. However, scientists are developing ways to measure, and identify the neural substrates of, and invoke, happy states.
The effort to design places that promote happiness—instead of focusing chiefly on treatment plans for pathology—is the emergent field of Positive Psychology. The idea is a bit like prevention is the better part of cure. In other words when people are happy, managers spend less time mending egos and fences, and employees are more likely to communicate openly, find common purpose across difference, and compromise. The result: eliminate lots of downtime, leaving more time to develop hardworking teams of cooperative, productive people.
This is all very interesting and it makes sense, you may be saying; but how do I put these ideas to work?
Appreciative Inquiry, one of a few practical approaches to building and sustaining happiness at work, has a following in both the US and Europe. Though there are differences in the details among the programs, the basic idea is to build on an organisation’s strengths and bypass altogether finding problems to fix. Here’s how it works in many Appreciative Inquiry interventions.
A small group drawn from all levels of the enterprise decide on the organisation’s strong suits—such as marketing, managing teams, customer service, problem solving, creativity, strategic planning, effective implementation, knowledge management, employee loyalty, astute hiring, effective training, retention, intuition, foresight, insight, and entrepreneurship. The group’s purview includes—and in some cases is necessarily limited to—strengths from times gone by. This starter team draws up a list of ten strengths and then everyone joins in.
The first universal exercises are for storytelling. Initially people exchange stories about happy times and success, and reflect on what made the experiences positive—or ultimately uplifting. Later people tell stories of what it was like at work—the present place or others— when optimistic people achieved goals and felt hopeful. Once again, the storyteller reflects on why. Next, teams create plans to build on the strengths that people generally agree will fund the way forward; and finally, the various plans roll up into one.