We need to reverse the usual formula if we want happiness at work (and improved productivity).
Psychologist Shawn Achor, in his riveting (and extremely funny) Ted talk endorses everything OND has been saying since our foundation: the current way of building organizations is geared to bringing out the average in people.
Deloitte, Gallup and others agree. They have shown that businesses recruit people with 100% potential. But as soon as they put them to work those people deliver only 40% of that potential. That’s less than half of the available potential put to work. In most schools 40% is a fail, yet businesses go on, year after year, delivering the same poor performance. At the same time as businesses are failing, most employees in those businesses are unhappy – only 30% of us are fully involved with our work, enjoying what we do. It’s an all-round disaster.
Shawn says that we need to reverse the formula. Currently we believe that when we work harder we will be more successful and when we are more successful we will be happy. He says that scientifically this is broken and backward. Shawn says that we need to start by being happy. When we are happy our creativity rises, our energy rises and our intelligence rises. We perform better. We start to close the gap on that 100% potential.
So, how do we start by being happy? The answer lies, quite literally, in our heads. We are all made with different natural abilities. Our school system ignores those abilities and instead teaches us that acquired knowledge and skills are the way to success (and therefore happiness). The school system is wrong. We can only become happy when we build our lives around our natural abilities. These abilities are literally part of us, hard-wired into our brains. Skills are not. When we are happy because we are using our abilities every day with others, we become creative, energetic and release our intelligence. Everybody wins.
But here’s the even better part: when we are working in collaboration with others, all of whom are using their natural abilities and are happy as a result, we are in a worker’s paradise. We would pay to work in that place.
Method Teaming is the only technology in the world today that we know of which can reveal our natural abilities and light them up in all-round 360˚ technicolor and place us in a team with the right people around us. It is perhaps the most significant development of the millennium so far.
If you want your world lit up, discover your abilities and put them to use. If you are a leader with a difficult year ahead, discover your own and your employees’ abilities and put them to use. Then you’ll get the Happiness Advantage.
To get started with the Happiness Advantage click Contact Us.
