How to Cultivate Joy on Your Team
29:39 Share

A sona is where work connects, where projects, teams and company goals are seamlessly entertained with A I to propel your organization towards shared success. Try for free today at a son of that com.

You know, there's another H B R podcast you might like. Coaching real leaders takes you inside real life leadership coaching sessions host mario wilkins has advised CEO for nearly twenty years, listen in as he helps gifts work through their hardest career chAllenges, find new episodes of coaching real leaders wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to H, B, R and leadership case studies and conversations with the world's top business and management experts hand selected to help you unlock the best in those around you.

If you had to describe your company's culture in a single word, what would IT be? Maybe your super flexible and casual, or may be collaborating and inclusive, but would you describe IT as joyful? Software executive Richard sherron argues that joy is a key ingredient that's missing from too many workplaces.

As C. E. O of menlo innovations in enterprise software company based in michigan, he deliberately focuses on cultivating joy in his company. He wrote a book called chief joy officer, how great leaders elevate human energy and eliminate fear in in IT, he offers advice for how to create joy at work and why it's so important for innovation. In this episode, you're learn the difference between joy and happiness, and how to harness joy in service of a larger project.

You'll also learn how, as a leader to model joy for your team, and why joy and a culture of fear are incompatible. This episode originally aired on H B R. Idea, cast in december twenty eighteen.

Here is.

Welcome to the H, B. R idea cast from harvard business review. I'm curt nick.

See the name Thomas Edison. And you think of the light bulbs, the photograph and the big businesses he built around them. But do you think of workplace culture?

There's a biography titled working at inventing that describes Edison on's famous laboratory at menlo park, the worklife. There was, quote, punctuated by gambling, practical jokes and singing songs at the organ. The online experimental sessions, with their midnight feast and hours of storytelling became is an important part of the Edison myth as the inventions themselves.

One employee said, the strangers think to me is the twelve dollars that I get each saturday for my labor does not seem like work. I enjoy IT. Those stories of menlo park inspired our guest today.

The software engineer for years, Richard chairman, says his work was as far from joy as he could get. So when he cofounded his own enter Price software company, he named that man law innovations. He wanted his work and the work of his employees, to be joyful. He has a new book out about IT, and he's here to tell us what he's doing. Rich, thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me good.

You've written two books about joy, first, joy ink and now chief joy officer. But I want to take you back maybe to a non joyful place. And I want to ask about maybe you're the worst job you had or maybe the worst day at that job that you had yeah.

I graduated from michigan in one thousand nine hundred and eighty two with a master's degree in computer engineering and took a job here and name arbour place that I hit in turn for a few years and started getting a accolades from my new boss and the team I worked with and that sort of thing and my boss came in, brought me, which can put in charge of a new project. And I looked at him and I said, awesome.

Um here I want to do a really good job so i'd like to get out and talk to actual customers, people who will one day use the thing we're going to quick because I really want to thrill them. I want this to be a terrific thing. And he said, no, no, we got gym m for that and I could already feel my heart thinking in that moment, but I try to keep my optimistic self.

I said, absolutely, i'll talk to gym m, but I also want to get out talk to customers. And he looks me as you, not guidness are you? So what I mean is, as well, if you keep bugging me to talk to customers are sticky and customer service.

So I looked to me that be awesome. I mean, I be able to talk to customers all day long. I we understand what what excites them, what their greatest needs are, where they're having problems.

And I could really fuel my understanding of what IT will take to build a great product. And he finally looks me, as you really not get in this, are you? If I stick you in customer service, you're never coming out.

嗯， yeah, get back in that box is basically what you are saying .

and do what I tell you to do. And I will tell you, and I would quit that day. I quit about two weeks later, but I decided this wasn't the place for me.

This wasn't the boss for me. I'm not interested in staying here because I want to do great work. I want to create great things for the world. And so that was the first sort of playing symbol moment, my career, where I realized, oh, this isn't can go ceased as well as you think, no matter how good your degree is, how much passionate you are about what you do, or how even good you are about what you do.

how do you get to joy from those earlier experiences then?

I think I always implicitly understood what joy would feel like for me in my technical career and and that heart of an engineer is ultimately to see the work of our hearts, our hands and our minds get out into the world and delight the people is intended to deserve. We want to be seen as clever. There's no question about that.

But cleverness isn't near enough. We want people to delight in what we've created. We want them to hold IT in their hands or touch IT with their fingertips, or whatever IT is that we're engineering.

And later have someone who doesn't know what we know, who uses this thing every day, look at us and say, I got to tell, I love this thing that you created. I use IT every day. You made my life Better because of this. And that's really, I think, is, I think about joy. Now, as I talk about IT in my books, as we embedded in the mission statement of our company, that's what I think about is that service to others.

You're talking there about the joy of new product or creating joy for others. So how does that translate into creating a joyful workplace that creates those products? What's the connection there?

The connection is what I think is the thing that makes us the most human, and that is creativity, imagination, invention, innovation. It's when every company in the planet is expecting from their teams, they want that. And what I had learned, the negative lessons I had learned, is fear takes that away.

I learned the nearly a states to walk up to people and say, he, kurt, hausa gone. What you've working on are you almost done, are you coming in this weekend? And I could generate art, official fear, and I was taught, that's what motivates people.

But in fact, when we get into that fearful place, we going to fight flight mode, and IT shuts down the part of our brain that we really need inside of our organization. So that was, that was one element of leadership and management that I learned IT early on, is that we have to create an environment where those kind of innovations that are going to threw others can flourish. Yeah, this is we need a different leadership style with our people.

We need a different way of leading our teams. We need different processes around them. They don't feel heavy and bureaucratic, but light weight and energy sing.

I think the question and a lot of listeners are going to have now is so how do you try to do that as a CEO and as as a leader in your company and and stay away from that urge to, you know, have fear by the driver and and let something else drive people, which is maybe a little more complicated, a little harder to measure in and may be no right away if its working.

Yeah, I think is probably one of those things that you actually do know when it's working. You can feel IT. Uh, but articulating how you get from where you are today to where you want to go might not be quite so straight forward and not necessarily easy either. I had to reinvent myself first. I had step away from trying to always be seen as that smarter sky in the room in the answer, man, because for Frank, this is probably got me most of my promotions and and learn how to truly craft an environment where a team, or confluence tion, the only place team or conflict sh is in a place of high relationship, in my mind, high relationship and trust.

Before we get to that, I want to ask about how you decided to do that yourself, because I think a lot of people want to be that type of leader. But there is no, especially after you've gotten all those promotions, there is a muscle memory to behavior in the workplace and to you. You've also been in printed on for years now where you have managers above you and leaders above you have been motivating you a certain way. And so how do you shake that off if you feel like there is a Better way, but you're you know the thing you know is something else.

I became an avid reader. What I looked forward, books like tom Peters book in search of excEllence, Peter druck ers books on management, john nys book book megatron, Peter sang's book the fifth discipline on the arterton practice of building a learning organization. And what I found in these books were pictures and glimpses of a different way of thinking.

They were inspiring books to me. I, I, they took me off into a fantasy y world of a different way to run a company or or be a leader than I had been up to that point. But I was yearning for that kind of result that they were describing in the companies they were describing in those books.

And I wanted that. And I just kept toughing IT out every day and being inspired by these books, but not necessarily always making the changes that the books pretended, because you got meetings to run, two emails to answer, phone calls and meetings and fires to put out now that sort of thing. But I never gave up the dream.

I think there were two things at work here. One was, uh, an urgent search, you know, just almost like catalog ging in my head, positives and negative positives and negatives and and that pain I I think literally the whole place i'm in now was out of the pain of the earlier part of micro that lasted a long time. The joy that I now talked about was elusive. I never got to IT, but I so wanted to get to and I just never gay about because .

I kept that search going. Um you've reminded me of the episode that we did with Jerry sign felt the comedian and he said that his definition of innovation, of course, you're talking about sort of innovating a different type of workplace culture, but he said his definition of innovation is when you say, you know what i'm really sick of and IT sounds like you were really sick of that type of company and that track type .

of job absolutely. And and I remember one night I came home from and IT was probably late night dinner was probably called in the microwave and Carol, my wife looks at mith says, honey, you look really tired I said that I am SHE goes, you also don't look happy and I said, i'm not and SHE said, what are you going to do about IT and I said, I don't know. At that point I was probably my mid thirties.

Here's what I knew. I'd looked ahead thirty years, and I knew I couldn't keep doing things the way I had been doing them for the next thirty years I will survive. And he was, is kind of of IT was a scary moment because this is what was feeding my family, keeping us in our house, paying for nice family vacations, uh, sucking waste of money for eventual college educations and weddings for three beautiful daughters. And so none of this is easy and none of this is trivial. And if if you've got listeners who are struggling in the same place in their lives, I get IT mean .

your wife Carol said, you don't look happy. What's the thanks for you between joy and and happiness?

Yeah, a lot of people think we're about happiness, and there's nothing wrong happiness. In fact, I think there is certainly also aspirational. We have a lot of fun at mental.

We laugh a lot. We we have a good time at work. But I don't think IT is possible to accomplish great things while being happy every minute of every day. For us, joy is in that external focus. Joy is in serving others. Joy is in that long work done together, hard work, maybe even times angry, cynical, sarcastic to get from point a to point b and tough your way through the tough times. For me it's that delivery, that thing that you work so hard at its for those of us who have raised a now adult children like I have, we understand that parent thing is not happiness every minute of every day and yet there is definite joy and being a when did IT so .

when did this click for you? Yeah, when I A video on the industrial .

design firm, california LED o suddenly I had that click moment. I started racing towards a new vision for how my team would be organized. Now is A V P at the time.

So I had the perch. Kind of handle, listen to me. And I made big changes quickly, and they worked. And IT was no way to no head of time that they would. And six months into the change, when everything was working really, really well beyond my wildest expectations, actually one of my programmers pulled me aside who had been at the company much longer than me.

And he didn't understand why I was willing to put everything on the line for this change that I he knew I couldn't have known that would work as well as I had. And he ask me, I think he was trying to, like, garner some leadership lesson from him self. He looked to me as rich, why are you willing to take this risk? You had everything at the title, the authority that stack options that pay. You put everything on the line for this change and you had no idea at the beginning that would work out as well as and I looked to me, so I don't get IT.

Where did that come from? I I totally understand the question because I know that that's the situation many people get into is that it's used to keep the train rolling in the direction it's going in, right? Yeah at least that to train.

you know yeah, there's always tomorrow. You'll get Better tomorrow. In this time I said.

nope and work. So what did you tell him?

I looked at him and said, David IT was easy, which shocked him. And I said, because here is where I want to flip the equation. I decided that the risk of staying the same was far greater than the risk of change.

And once I made that decision in my head, racing towards change wasn't racing towards risk if was running away from rest. Because what was that risks? Me, my heart, for what I did is a profession. I knew I couldn't keep doing this to Carry my life, my family, my career, another that point, probably twenty five years. And so I made this fundamental choice that i'm either gonna change and succeed or i'm gonna change and fail and get out.

Why should you listen to the workload podcast from microsoft? Because it's made for leaders who know they have to adapt to stay ahead. And those leaders know that A I powered organizations will be Better at spotting opportunities, creating new products and business models and maxi zing value word lab is the place to find real world lessons and actionable insights to prepare you for the next phase of A I at work. That's work. Lab, W O R, K, L, A, B, no spaces available, whatever you get your podcasts.

Tribe digital transformation with foxed pedia editor, their comprehensive sweat features is available a fraction of the cost of leading competitors, making in an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes. Enjoy powerful PDF editing, e signature capabilities and A I powered and enhancements without breaking the budget. Foxy helps you innovate while keep in costs under control. Start your digital transformation today at foxy dcom.

There is one line in the book that kind of jumped out at me and I said that your in your engineer once in algorithm to find the right baLance of optimism, realism, fear and hope IT was interesting because you still used realism in fear. Like you're in an industry that has absent downs. You have layouts, you have projects that don't come through. It's a competitive risky venture even though can go really well and it's going well. And so how do you work with a team and encourage them to be open and creative and also down the earth and um you know delivering yeah that that's still .

that I talk about of optimism but realism and hope and fear all at the same time where we deal with IT every day. And what I talk about, this will never be the perfect leader, because you can get rid of all fear, in fact, that we need me healthy. There's certain fears that you absolutely want to pay attention to and keep alive.

The fear of going out of business, the fear of not making payroll, fear of running out of cash, all those kind of things are real fears that we have to pay attention to. But we have to know when our team needs us to be an optimist to when our team needs us to be a realist. I lean back on an author. Just greatly admire Patrick anionic in his book five dis functions of a team and what the opening line of that book is, not finance, not strategy, not technology. IT is teamwork alone. That remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because is so powerful and so rare, and to me, that the essence of leadership is to truly build a team, a team that me is a CEO and lennon, when i'm worried, when i'm nature about the future that will catch me, when i'm stumbling well, speak truth to power, when I need to hear that, who will also encourage me, maybe when i'm not quite sure about what's going to happen .

next yeah when you are being a leader and I know I know you should stay away from the term boss. You like the term are you strive to be a leader more than than A A boss um what things do you do or what things do you catch yourself doing that what you hadn't done to try to be a leader of this type of organization?

Yeah I want to be very clear there. There's good boss and bad bosses, good leaders and bad leader. So I don't think there's anything in principally wrong with being a boss. And quite Frankly, A C, E, O, the company, i'm absolutely boss. No question about that.

The part where I catch myself, the part where i'm like but I did that again as when I start using a lot of eye language, when I start making IT about me rather than about us, we, about the team, that sort of thing, and I try to catch myself. But I think so i'm probably going to spend the rest of my lifetime unlearning all those in printed lessons to the past. And I will never be perfect at IT. And so when I do dumb stuff like that, when I get angry, when I shouldn't, when I um when I try to motivate with artificial fear like I shouldn't, I try and catch myself sooner. The good news is that people around me who are willing to coin could speak truth to power because they've been around long enough and then they know they're safe enough to do that or they .

are my wife and they have the that as .

ah she's not too concerned about IT. And so I do in those moments trying listen. I think that's probably another skills that I could definitely use improvement on is just basic listening skills, spending more time with my mouth close to my ears open.

IT was something that was striking in the book, is just how much you think about IT, like you are really analyzing the things you say and the things you do. You know there is a story in the book how you chastise somebody for saying that he didn't know something. Um even though one of the sort of things that hangs on the wall in the company is that it's okay to say you don't know .

he was embarrassing sing because I literally chastize ed him while standing under the poster that said it's okay to say I don't know there was a dumb thing well.

at least you notice, right? I mean, I think that's the thing is that a lot of bosses, I mean, this just sounds like a lot of work too, right? That seems like you spend just a lot of time really being intentional about a lot of your actions, and that might sound exhAusting to some people that this really does .

take a lot of work.

IT does take a lot of work. How do you do something really hard like like fire somebody .

ah I wish we did that well every time. But what I tell the team is when we're gona fire somebody, I never ever wanted to get to the point where that feels easy. That should be one of the various decisions we make and what kind of the opposite of the standard business tax in so many ways, we hire quickly and fire really slowly.

We try to give people a chance to to work through whatever chAllenge or having, uh, but when it's obvious at a certain point is not going to work out, I tell the team now we need to switch. This is in a conversation with curt, the employee. This is a conversation with kurt, the human being.

Now we have to shift into, hey, we're about to let kurt go, were about to cut them off from the the income that's feeding his family. And while we don't need to take grand responsibility for cut from this moment forward, that's still gonna mostly on him. Are there things we can do for kurt right now that would ease this transition? And IT could be as simple as give a hug, could be as involved as me offering up to court. Hey, let's go out to lunch in a couple of weeks once you've had a chance to can collect your thoughts about where you are, talk about where you want to go next and whether I know anybody in the community that might be able to offer you something.

What do you think creating this type of company is possible anywhere at any institution?

I think the chAllenge that a lot of people have when they come see manalo, talk to us, read the books and so on is that they they do something we encourage them not to do. And that's to state this thing of h, oh, you're so lucky, uh, that you get to do IT. You do? We couldn't because we're to fill in the blank were too big.

We're too old. We're too regulated. We're too unregulated. We're two government or two.

This were to that.

We're not mile. Yeah, we're nonprofit. You know, we we were too busy doing good to be good to each other.

Yeah people are here because mission. So we don't have to we have to treat them well.

Yeah, we don't have to be nice to one another yeah if they don't like that, they can go somewhere else. But because we're just hear about the mission. Um and what I tell them is because a lot of people look and see what you're small.

That's why this works. And I get that I mean, that makes complete sense to me that you would draw that kind of conclusion. But then I look at and I said, you know guys, you don't need to change your entire corporation.

You could just change the piece around you. You can if you look at my lower about fifty people right now and look at demand. Cy, your organizations actually composed of a bunch of the person fifths that all fly a common flag.

So even if you're one of the largest corporations on the planet, you can change your group of fifty or your group of one hundred. Uh, the story I tell and chief joy officers run sale story inside of general electric corporation, inside of the employee services group and ran made big changes just in his team alone, and others would come from G, E. See what they are doing.

So I want some of that. I want more of that. How do you guys get to do this? Who gave you permission to do in the fact matter is run, just let is great leader.

What's the first thing a leader should do if they want to do this at their own organization?

The first place change needs to occur in the heart of leader. I needed to become a different kind of leader for. So my encouragement to your listeners is just simply the the first turn inward that that all saying, how can I be the change I want to see in the world and I think that's really important place to start.

Uh, a few other things I would encourage them to think about is moved to an action orientation away from a contemplation orientation. In other words, we have a famous phrase of metal, let's run the experiment, which basically says, you know, we're not going to spend a lot of time thinking about this or can we go try and see what happens because if we spend too much time thinking about IT will defeat idea. We when you move to action, IT actually increases human energy. People feel the excitement, even if IT doesn't work that, I think, god, we tried IT. Now we know that doesn't work.

One of the best actions you can take the signal to your team that this is gonna done differently in that the year you're taking IT to hard yeah.

a lot of top leaders come to me and ask me kind of the simple, practical things they could do first did send a signal that changes in the works. And I smile in a lime and move on to your office, turn your office and do conference room, move yourself out into space for the rest of of the teams. Datta send the signal.

And i'll look at me so well, where would I go for private conversations? And I said about what and they realized that in that moment, i'm asking them to change, and they're not comfortable with that and they shouldn't be. I mean, if you're going to make important change, I think any important change that occurs anyone in our life is gonna art with discomfort. Think of IT is like, you know, that workout routine. We're all going to start next january.

First of the other end of the career spectrum here. What would you tell the twenty something rich or the thirty something rich? You know, what would you tell somebody who's at a job now where they don't feel draw in the workplace? They're not a manager of a team, they're hating their job. What can they do?

My encouraged to the Young people in the world that are just starting out their crews that may be experiencing some version of the dissolution, and I experienced first is there are a lot of things you can do individually to lead, truly lead, and they don't cost anything. You don't have to quit your job to do them. You can smile and say, good morning, everybody you walk into.

You can be that kind of positive energy. You can start to uh experiment with optimism and, uh lead maybe just another person, uh, along side of you to make some change inside of your organza. Something simple, something quick, something inexpensive and something that isn't so are shaking that management above users. Hey, wait a MIT.

What's going on here? Yeah, we get these people who come and visit us and they're wondering if their bosses would let them do anything like we're doing and I say, yeah, I don't think there's a boss out there typically that would say, hey, how can you bring in so much energy to work today? OK, where's that smile coming from? Why do you seem to have a bigger spring in your step today?

Joy, I refute the .

ah that's right exactly but leave that at home. That's not for the workplace um you know I would you would have to be a pretty seriously broken boss to train, uh, tamp down any of those kind of things and so you can start bring this stuff to work. I tell that story in the book about the mike mcDonald and deal metro airport.

He's just like us around and yeah ah cleaning up the tables after all the busy travellers are moving through and every time I saw he walked up to me and he said, how you do on you need an APP in or anything like now i'm OK mike, this will have a safe flight and I thought that moment when I saw that, I thought, wow, how does he do that? And every time I went there, he did the same thing. And i'm like, what are you doing? One of the most relationless places on the planet of people are just buzz in and out. And there you are giving him a smile. But I asking them if they need something simple and and and wishing them say, fly or a good day, I thought, if I can do that inside of my downs, we can all do that inside of where we work.

Rick, this has been a real pleasure and a real joy to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on the H. B. R. Idea test.

and thanks so much for having me here.

That was Richard shadin in conversation with curt nicki h on h br idea cast. He's the CEO of the software company menlo innovations and the author of the book, chief joy officer, how great leaders elevate human energy and eliminate fear. Will be back next wednesday with another hand picked conversation about leadership from harvard business review. If you found this episode helpful, share with your friends and colleagues and follow our show on apple podcasts, spotify or wherever you get your podcasts while you're there.

Be short to leave us are reviewed .

and what you're ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books and videos with the world's top business and management experts. You'll find IT all at H B R. Dot work. This episode was produced by mary dew and Sunny and me, hana bates, ian fox is our editor, music by common media, and special thanks to rob by car, adam buck's, marine hook arc trusler, rami ka oz, Michael Smith and bar foam. You and do our listener see next week?