TIME MAGAZINE COVER DAY ONE DRIVER

The habits you cultivate, the way you interact with coworkers, how you think about stress-all these can be managed to increase your happiness and your chances of success. But one’s general sense of well-being is surprisingly malleable. And I’m not alone: In a meta-analysis of 225 academic studies, researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener found strong evidence of directional causality between life satisfaction and successful business outcomes.Īnother common misconception is that our genetics, our environment, or a combination of the two determines how happy we are. I’ve observed this effect in my role as a researcher and lecturer in 48 countries on the connection between employee happiness and success. I call this the “happiness advantage”-every business outcome shows improvement when the brain is positive. In fact, it works the other way around: People who cultivate a positive mind-set perform better in the face of challenge. Or, “Once I hit my sales target, I’ll feel great.” But because success is a moving target-as soon as you hit your target, you raise it again-the happiness that results from success is fleeting. “Once I get a promotion, I’ll be happy,” they think.

For one, most people believe that success precedes happiness.

TIME MAGAZINE COVER DAY ONE DRIVER

Yet happiness is perhaps the most misunderstood driver of performance. Research shows that when people work with a positive mind-set, performance on nearly every level-productivity, creativity, engagement-improves. As one member of the senior team told me a year later, Replogle’s emphasis on fostering positive leadership kept his managers engaged and cohesive as they successfully made the transition to a global company. He asked me to facilitate a three-hour session with employees on happiness in the midst of the expansion effort. He’d interrupt his own presentations on the launch to remind his managers to talk with their teams about the company’s values. Each day, he’d send out an e-mail praising a team member for work related to the global rollout. In doing so, managers jack up everyone’s anxiety level, which activates the portion of the brain that processes threats-the amygdala-and steals resources from the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for effective problem solving.īurt’s Bees’s then-CEO, John Replogle, took a different tack. In this kind of high-pressure situation, many leaders pester their deputies with frequent meetings or flood their in-boxes with urgent demands. In July 2010 Burt’s Bees, a personal-care products company, was undergoing enormous change as it began a global expansion into 19 new countries. Laughing Painter, 2003, oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm

Time magazine cover day one