In this fourth and final installment in our series on hope and joy, we’ll look at ways leaders can draw on the joy of leadership and become a source of joy for their employees.
Rich Sheridan knows joy—and so do his employees. The cofounder and “Chief Joy Officer” of Menlo Innovations, a custom-software design firm in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has made workplace joy the value around which his company has been built. Not for nothing, Menlo has made best-of list after best-of list for the unique, employee-first company culture that’s resulted.
In 2013 Sheridan published Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Loved, a chronicle of his evolution from burnt-out executive overseeing coding “death marches” (all-nighters in the office) to joy evangelist, the kind of manager who encourages “people [to] work 40-hour weeks and take regular, unburdened vacations,” as a review of the book in Inc. magazine details.
Sheridan insists that striving for joy is the highest and best aspiration for a workplace. “A pursuit of joy within a business context is not about the pursuit of fame or profit. Humans aspire to a higher purpose. Teams desire to work on goals bigger than themselves. They want to have lasting and valued effect on the world. They want to make their mark, not for the glory, but for the purpose of bringing delight or ending suffering.”
While ending suffering may be a lofty goal for most of us, we can certainly relate to wanting to delight our customers, clients, and team members. As Sheridan puts it in Joy, Inc., leading with joy is just good management: “For Menlo, building a culture of joy was simple: we wanted to create a place where we were excited to come to work every day.”
Can you say the same? If not, here are four tips to help you lead with joy.
Top 5 Tips to Lead With Joy
Open Up
Humans are social animals, and that goes for even the more introverted among us. Accordingly, some of the deepest forms of meaning we create come through connections with others and experiences, not material goods.
For joy to flourish, then, these connections must be in place. As a leader, that means it’s your job to facilitate them, even if you don’t really feel like it or it feels awkward at times.
So-called small talk gets an unfair rap. One way to look at it is that it’s a means to an important end: forming a connection with someone. Talking about a movie or concert you saw, new restaurant you dined at, sporting event you watched or attended, or place you recently visited can be an entrée into a deeper discussion that reveals common interests (or dislikes) and more personal disclosures, not simply idle chit chat. (Though it can be that too.)
So when the opportunity presents itself, strike up that conversation. Let people in, and more likely than not they’ll reciprocate. Secure in the feeling that only good connections can create, they will be ripe to experience joy. Leading with joy begins by opening yourself to others.
“A joyful company cares deeply about the change it is making in the world. You can’t sustainably achieve that outside joy unless there is also inside joy.”
– Rich Sheridan
Recognize Generously
As we covered in the previous article in this series, gratitude is a huge element of joy. So what better way to model it than publicly demonstrating your own gratitude?
This could be intangible, such as publicly offering your appreciation to an employee for a job well done. Or thanking a team member who went above and beyond to help a coworker out or to get a stuck project over the finish line.
Any thanks could also be accompanied by a gift card, bonus, extra time off, or some more concrete benefit. Your employees will surely feel more joy at this kind of recognition; a certificate tacked up to the wall, while thoughtful, only goes so far.
The goal here is to foster a culture that revels in recognizing accomplishments and assists. You do this by consistently performing these kinds of joy-inspiring behaviors.
Tip
By its nature joy can be hard to quantify, but there are a few things you can do to gauge the success of your attempt to better lead with joy.
Anonymous surveys are one potentially good option, since respondents won’t feel as much pressure to tell you what you want to hear as they could in one-on-one interviews. The downside is that respondents may be a self-selecting bunch who have the strongest feelings, whether negative or positive. So keep this in mind.
Lead With the Joy You Wish to See
This may seem obvious, but it’s still worth spelling out: there’s no more powerful way to inspire joy than demonstrating what a joyful person looks like. Express gratitude frequently. Maintain perspective in the face of challenges. Act like an excited kid when you come across a promising opportunity. Be in awe of a job well executed or a knotty problem ingeniously solved.
This is what the joy of leadership is all about. Importantly, this is not the same as toxic positivity, the pressure to only display positive emotions and suppress negative ones. Joy can co-exist with frustration, angst or even sadness. We’re complex beings, we humans, and we’re capable of experiencing more than one emotion at a time. The key is being honest about all of those emotions.
Joy can be a powerful force in the face of painful emotions – not to cover them up, but to more effectively endure their inevitability.
I understand this may not come naturally to everyone, including you. You may even feel a little weird as things get going. If you’re a more reserved person, it may feel awkward offering public praise to an employee for a job well done.
But just as a joyful environment doesn’t magically appear, neither does a joyful person. Both require deliberate effort. Yes, the experience of joy itself is ineffable, something that can’t be summoned on demand. But you can help create the conditions that make these experiences more likely to occur. First and foremost, by being joyful. Second, by being a generally positive, uplifting force.
Criticize judiciously and fairly. Praise lavishly. And never forget to laugh at yourself.
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Start a Blooper Board
A few months into the pandemic, an organization I worked with had the clever idea to take a moment every week to share employees’ “WFH mishaps” as well as their “unexpected WFH delights.” The stories were humorous and lighthearted, providing a much-needed dose of levity and encouraging unity during a scary, uncertain time.
We’re a long way from July 2020 (and thank God!), but I’m a firm believer that this kind of group activity is still worth doing, whether your team works from home, from the office, or splits their time doing both.
You don’t need to limit employee reports to mishaps that happen in a certain location (say, at home); another option is to focus on a specific workplace domain, ideally one that lends itself to funny situations: the worst spam emails, tech disasters, meeting gaffes, etc. Also, instead of expecting people to chime in on a group call, you could use a shared document or whiteboard, allowing people to contribute at their leisure. It should be a low-stakes affair.
Be sure to tread carefully, though. Obviously, you don’t want to make anyone, employees or clients, feel awkward or bad. So establishing some ground rules (e.g., “Be respectful”) is probably a good idea.
If done right, this “blooper board” is an easy, participatory way to spread laughs—and, thus, cultivate an environment of joy.
Are You Leading in Alignment With Values?
Make Joy a Top Company Value
As we touched on earlier, a joyful workplace doesn’t just happen. (If it did, Sheridan wouldn’t have anything to teach.) It needs to be actively worked toward. Long-term social transformation like becoming a joyful company takes time.
When you’re ready to make this leap—and really, what’s stopping you up!?—you should formally articulate, to your entire organization, that joy matters. That it’s a company value, up there with honesty and thoroughness.
Of course, this is just the start. Next you need to actually create a joyful company (much like it’s on you to create a company that’s honest and thorough). But because many if not most people don’t give much thought to joy, calling direct attention to it helps signal your commitment to it, maximizing your impact.
As we all know, there are plenty of times when leading is far from joyful. No one expects work to be amazing and uplifting all the time, even Sheridan. The goal, then, is to create a baseline environment that facilitates joy when opportunities for it arise.
Commit yourself to bringing joy, and you too can experience the ever-elusive joy of leadership—and happy, fulfilled employees and customers to boot.
Create a Joyful, Purpose-Driven Environment in Your Workplace
Ready to embrace the joy of leadership and transform your workplace? Dive deeper into Navalent’s proven strategies and partner with seasoned consultants who understand the essence of joy in leadership.
Our expertise has helped many leaders just like you build a better work environment. We’ve:
- Coached over 600 C-suite executives
- Done over 200 organization diagnostics
- Spearheaded over 1,800 transformation projects
Let’s co-create a joyful, purpose-driven environment for your organization.