The Joy Of Leadership: How Positive Psychology Can Maximize Your Impact (And Make You Happier) In A Challenging World

THE

JOY OF

LEADERSHIP

THE

JOY OF

LEADERSHIP How Positive Psychology Can Maximize Your Impact (AND

MAKE

YOU

HAPPIER)

in a

Challenging World

TAL BEN-SHAHAR ANGUS RIDGWAY

Copyright © 2017 by Potentialife, Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the Web at www .copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with the respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002. Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available: 9781119313007 (Hardcover) 9781119314479 (ePDF) 9781119314486 (epub) Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © Lava 4 images / Shutterstock Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Warren Bennis, Richard Hackman, and Philip Stone—I miss you. —Tal Ben-Shahar To Marisa—with thanks for the tireless support. —Angus Ridgway

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

ix

PART I

1

THE DISAGGREGATED WORLD

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3

The 10X Effect: Performance Multipliers to Achieve Lasting Success and Fulfillment

3

Giving Way to the New: The Boundaryless Twenty-First-Century Work Environment

15

Myths of Happiness and Leadership: Making the Case for SHARP

29

PART II WHAT 10X LEADERS DO

41

Chapter 4

Strengths: Making the Most of Your Gifts

43

Chapter 5

Health: Injecting Energy into Life and Work

67

Absorption: Revealing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary through Mindful Engagement

87

Chapter 6

Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9

Relationships: Forming Authentic and Positive Bonds

107

Purpose: Meaning and Commitment Are the Path to Joyful Leadership

129

The Balanced Approach: SHARP and Cascading Success

149

PART III HOW TO CHANGE—AND STAY CHANGED Chapter 10

Obstacles—and Pathways—to Lasting Behavioral Change: Neuroplasticity and the Possibility of Joyful Transformation

vii

159

161

viii

CONTENTS

Chapter 11 Creating New, Durable Pathways to Joyful Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Making SHARP Changes

177

Chapter 12 Finale: The 10X Effect Revisited and Becoming the Sum Total of Who You Are Notes Index

191 197 215

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS he people without whom Potentialife and, by extension, this book would not be possible is too long to mention. Here is a partial list of people to whom we’re deeply indebted and grateful.

T

Craig Collins, whose brilliant mind and open heart helped birth this book. Karen Barth, Kim Cooper, and Adam Vital, whose ideas and passion are present in this book’s every nook and cranny. Our editors at John Wiley & Sons, Richard Narramore and Danielle Serpica, for their patience and professionalism. Rafe Sagalyn and CJ Lonoff, our agents, who tirelessly help us get our ideas to the general public. The extraordinary Potentialife team, who inspires us every day: Matthew Arnold, Hattie Crosthwaite Eyre, Jeremy Davis, Nicole Hurley, Luis Javier Castro, Atli Knutsson, Cyrille Kozyreff, Marita Lekmo, Tshepiso Maledu, Ehud Moses, Conor O’Meara, Kerrin Miller, Alberto Padilla Rivera, Caro Parker, Daniel Philbin-Bowman, Antoine Pissot, Arik Praisman, Miranda Shu, Guy Sigston, Kim Singline, Edward Short, Ciprian Spiridon, and Nelly Worsley. Our mentors, who embody 10X leadership: Pia Andersen, Warren Bennis, Richard Hackman, Martin Hirt, Klemens Hjartar, Eric Labaye, Ellen Langer, Brian Little, Joshua Margolis, Mihnea Moldoveanu, and Philip Stone. Last and most certainly not least, we are ever grateful for the support, love, patience, and generosity of our dearest families.

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THE

JOY OF

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PART I

THE DISAGGREGATED WORLD

CHAPTER 1

The 10X Effect Performance Multipliers to Achieve Lasting Success and Fulfillment

Y

ou probably feel you know these people:

We’ll call him Tristan—and we’ll call him tired. He manages a team at a large consulting firm, and he wakes up every morning feeling exhausted. Today, when he gets out of bed, the first thing he sees out the window is the rosebush he planted years ago, for his wife on their anniversary, now studded with spent blooms that need deadheading. He used to love gardening—and he still does, or he thinks he might, if he ever had the time for it. After his first of many cups of coffee, he makes lunches for his kids to take to school—the same lunches he’s made for years now, and which they don’t seem to like very much. But he can’t seem to break the routine, because among the many things he hasn’t had time to discuss with his kids recently, this seems pretty far down the list of priorities. At work, the end of the quarter is looming, and Tristan is slammed with reports that need to be churned out—and like his kids’ lunches, he never seems to get them exactly right. They’ve been sent back repeatedly for changes, and while he reworks them he falls behind on returning phone calls, e-mails, and texts from colleagues who need the information and guidance he usually provides when he’s not sucked into the vortex of quarterly reports. His skill and ease at communicating with others is one of his greatest strengths—in fact it made him a standout in the interview that got him hired—but he turned down a public relations track to pursue what he thought would be a more 3

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rewarding executive career. He’s been trying ever since to shore up his weaknesses in finance and analytics, and though he’s still not great with numbers, he insists on being involved in the financial details of these quarterly reports. He often asks other team members to stay up late with him, either at the office or at his home, where they skip the family dinner to eat takeout in the den while they go over reports. Tristan was on the cross-country team in college, but he can’t remember the last time he walked farther than the driveway, let alone hit the gym. He’s giving the job everything he has, and to add insult to injury he’s pretty sure he’s being passed over for promotion. It’s rumored that Felicity, the thoroughly-nice person he’s viewed as his nemesis since business school, will end up with the senior position. He’s been cranky at home and edgy at work, and he’s felt increasingly isolated. He has a hard time recruiting younger people to his team, in part because when he gets a whiff of ambition from a colleague, he feels threatened and ends up working alone. Every day is a grind. When he gets home, the time he spends with his family is stressful, as he tries to juggle phone calls and text messages, while being somewhat attentive to his wife and kids relaying their daily adventures. He’s almost 40 and wondering where it all went wrong. Felicity will, in fact, get that promotion; actually, she’ll end up running the firm in another few years. She has been carrying about the same workload as Tristan, and has young kids, but she wakes up every day feeling rested, with a deep sense of well-being. Like Tristan, she’s knee-deep in quarterly reports, but she calls it a day—and urges her team members to do the same—when she feels too tired to think. Felicity has a relaxed, trusting relationship with her team members, who often tease her about the fact that she can’t create a spreadsheet to save her life. What she does better than anyone, however, is intuitively grasp the essence of a load of data, no matter how massive. When her team delivers numbers verbally, she’s able to tell them exactly where problems and trends are emerging—and she’s able to figure this out much more quickly than anyone could by studying a spreadsheet. People love working with Felicity—she seems to bring out the best in everyone, acknowledging employees’ strengths and helping them find ways to build on those strengths. She is naturally respectful and usually has something positive to say about and to her colleagues. The firm’s

THE 10X EFFECT

5

smartest employees are competing to join her team, and she welcomes them, knowing their skills complement one another. They all make one another look good. She’s not naturally athletic, but Felicity schedules exercise into her calendar at least three days a week. She sticks with it even in the busiest times, to keep herself energized and to avoid feeling burned out. Her energy is infectious. She becomes easily absorbed in her work and is able to draw others in with her—not only at work but also at home, where she’s cultivated a support system, with her partner and others, to help care for her family. Though she occasionally indulges in chocolate and red wine, Felicity makes the time and the effort to eat a healthy diet. Her world is much larger than the workplace. Like most people, she feels she should be spending more time with her family—but she makes sure their time together is well spent and gives her partner and children her undivided attention. Felicity is also an active and generous member of her local community, contributing time and money to several charitable boards. And here’s the thing about Tristan and Felicity: The differences between them—in their backgrounds, their education, their circumstances, and even in their innate abilities—are negligible. They both grew up in lower middle-class families; each was the first in his or her family to attend college. They went to the same business school and graduated near the top of the same class. They both began their careers with a sense of optimism and promise: smart, ambitious, and seemingly capable of anything. Tristan and Felicity could have followed twin trajectories to success. But by their late thirties it was clear that Tristan was floundering while Felicity was flourishing. It’s hard to overstate the difference between them, in terms of both job performance and overall happiness. How does this apply to you? Think of the times you were at your best, and of the times when you were just getting by, going through the motions. It wasn’t just a five percent difference in how you felt and what you produced. It was much more, even, than a 50 percent difference. The divide between flourishing and floundering is abysmally vast—in the quality of experience, the level of engagement, and the quantity of

6

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production, it’s more like a factor of 10. We have a term for people who function at this level: 10X leaders. 10X leaders make everything look effortless. Working with them feels easy. They bring out everyone’s best, helping teams and organizations prosper. They’re the dream bosses, the dream partners, and the dream colleagues. 10X leaders and organizations are real, though rare—and their rarity is what led us, Angus Ridgway and Tal Ben-Shahar, to begin asking the questions that culminated in the founding of our own organization, Potentialife, to help develop present and future generations of leaders.

THE ORIGIN OF THIS BOOK AT MCKINSEY AND HARVARD Angus began his career with McKinsey & Company, a worldwide consulting firm, as a student of strategy and eventually led the firm’s strategic consulting practice for all of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He traveled constantly, helping clients design solutions to problems—but over time, something began to nag at him: He noticed that for some clients, no matter how good the strategy they’d developed was, the effort was doomed to fail. The strategy they’d so meticulously crafted would never be implemented. Soon Angus could almost predict when this would happen. The key, he learned, was leadership: the ability to influence the thinking and activities of other people in a shared effort to achieve goals and, ultimately, to realize a shared vision. Organizations that had good leaders—not just at the top but also at all levels—would be able to carry out an initiative. Others were almost certainly wasting their time. The realization caused Angus to shift his focus to developing leadership, both within McKinsey and within the firm’s client organizations. Over time he became the leader of McKinsey’s global leadership development program, and in that role he began to intensely study the question of why so many smart, capable people failed to reach their potential and assume a leadership role in their organizations—why so many people ended up like Tristan, rather than Felicity. His investigations led him to the work of Tal, whom he knew as one of the

THE 10X EFFECT

7

highest-rated lecturers at Harvard University. Tal’s courses in positive psychology and the psychology of leadership were among the most popular ever offered at the school: About 1,400 students a semester signed up. Tal was an acclaimed author of several international best sellers, including Happier and Being Happy, which had been translated into over 25 languages; after leaving Harvard, he’d been traveling the world teaching personal and organizational excellence, leadership, happiness, resilience, ethics, and self-esteem. In April of 2011, Angus was hosting the annual McKinsey Partners Conference, a gathering of the firm’s 100 most senior partners worldwide, in Washington, DC. He invited Tal to address the leadership group on the topic of strengths. We, Tal and Angus, sat together at dinner one night during the conference—and realized we were both struggling with the same troubling observations: Across the board, organizations—companies, communities, schools, and nonprofits—were failing in their attempts to create new generations of vibrant leaders. Wherever we went, whether in consulting assignments or speaking engagements, we saw ineffective leadership development. And it was in this first meeting that we came to what we believed to be an important understanding. We realized that the problem was that most organizations were thinking about leadership in the wrong way. What was needed was a new paradigm, a new way of understanding what leaders, today, need to thrive. The core, the essence, of effective leadership is personal flourishing. Put differently, in today’s disaggregated world, where all employees in an organization have personal wriggle space to interpret for themselves what they are supposed to do, the best way to think about leadership is associate it with personal flourishing. If you have an organization full of flourishing or on-fire people (with individuals being the best version of themselves and helping others also become the best version of themselves), then you have a leadership organization ready to confront today’s world. In short, personal flourishing and leadership are synonymous.

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We also saw that this realization has revolutionary implications for how to think about winners and losers: The winning organizations will be those that see this, recognize this, and act on this—by developing flourishing leaders throughout the organization. So more people need to be leaders than ever before. Similarly, the losing organizations will be those that reject this idea, by trying to reimpose order, control, alignment, and compliance, and thereby squeeze out the oxygen and space for expression that disaggregation has created. The upshot for us was twofold: First, a new definition of leadership for the modern era was required, one that focuses on personal flourishing, not command and control, and second, new intervention methods were required to be able to reach deeply into the organization in a way that existing, nonscalable, and labor-intensive approaches cannot do. This realization that would change our lives and in turn lead to the creation of Potentialife—indeed, it was at that same 2011 conference that we decided to join forces and create a new road map building on our shared expertise: to apply the science of positive leadership in an experience that would allow as many people as possible to thrive in an era that, although uncertain, is abundant with opportunity. And by reaching deeply into organizations, help those organizations implement winning strategies that leverage the power of positive leadership at scale. We knew they needed a solution that was personalized, local, and context specific but also scalable to thousands of people around the world. The solution would have to integrate the best evidence-based thinking, not only about what defines good leadership but also about how to create lasting behavioral change. It would need to make clear why there’s such an enormous gap, both in happiness and in performance, between those who are able to develop their potential for leadership and those who aren’t—why Tristan flounders while Felicity flourishes. So we embarked on a shared exploration, meeting dozens of times, working for hours together, often in windowless airport lounges— Paris, Tokyo, New York, and London—while PA systems droned on and streams of bored travelers flowed past on moving walkways. Each

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time, before we headed off in different directions, we moved closer to our solution. The purpose of this book is to share what we’ve learned about the behaviors that make the very best leaders who they are and how everyone can put these behaviors into practice—to explore and define the scientific underpinnings of our company, Potentialife, and its 10X leadership program.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS FOR AND HOW IT’S UNIQUE As we explored the new realities of the working world, we were guided by an important truth: The two questions that have fed the fires of each of our careers—What makes a good leader? and What makes happy people flourish?—have the same answers. Of course, those answers are neither simple nor easy to come by. Angus had spent more than 20 years trying the answer the first, and Tal had spent an equal length of time focusing on the second. And in that relatively brief span of time, we’d watched the world of work undergo a historic upheaval: People are on the move, changing jobs and allegiances at an unprecedented rate. Roles at the workplace and in the marketplace are in constant flux. Absorbing and synthesizing information has become an overwhelming task. Such an uncertain and unsettled world requires creativity, adaptability, innovation, pattern discernment, vision, and endurance. This is true for individuals and for organizations. These are the very qualities that define 10X leadership. The rate at which the business environment changes today is a key reason why there’s such a wide gap between those who flourish and those who flounder. The inability to adapt constantly, to maintain your energy and continue to learn and grow, will leave you far behind. The 10X leadership program aims not merely to help you and your organization survive in today’s world but also thrive. This book combines expertise in the areas of study in which we each developed our careers: Angus’s knowledge of the research-based leadership models that continue to be refined and adapted by an emerging generation of leaders and Tal’s knowledge of positive psychology, the study of how individuals and organizations flourish. It’s our hope that each chapter in this book will answer, in its own way, the

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two crucial questions anyone wanting to develop a more positive and meaningful leadership role poses: 1. How can my role as a leader help my organization achieve our shared goals? 2. How can my role as a leader bring me, and those around me, joy? The ambition of this book, which is based on Potentialife’s 10X program, is to contribute significantly to the world by fostering a redefinition of the way leaders are developed. The unique combination of our spheres of knowledge—of what makes a good leader and of what makes people happy—has allowed us to develop a leadership program that combines resources traditionally presented as mutually exclusive. In their groundbreaking management treatise, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras describe what they call the “tyranny of the OR,” a narrow approach to decision-making that dictates a choice between one of two options. The “tyranny of the OR” pushes people to believe that alternatives are mutually exclusive—either X or Y—and that they can’t possibly choose both.1 As you read this book, you’ll recognize its embrace of what Collins and Porras call the “genius of the AND”—the ability to embrace two or more different and seemingly contradictory possibilities at the same time—in several ways: • Theory AND practice. This book presents sound and compelling theoretical arguments and illustrates them with examples of actual business practices. • Scientific evidence AND case studies and personal stories. The backbone of this book and the 10X program is empirical science in organizational and individual behavior, which we bring to life with stories—from both the wider world and from individuals who’ve been through the Potentialife experience. • Individual AND society. We address not only the broader societal shifts taking place today but also how these shifts are affecting every one of us.

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• Breadth AND depth. We integrate several different fields of study, collecting key ideas—from psychology, sociology, business, education, and other fields—about how to flourish. At the same time, we provide sufficient depth, drilling down far enough to provide practical advice for making real change. • Leadership AND well-being. This book argues, based on mounting evidence, that the two fields are inseparable: Those who want to lead in today’s world must account for their own and others’ emotional well-being; and to be happier, we need to cultivate the characteristics of 10X leaders. What are these characteristics? That’s a major part of what this book is about. Much of the time we’ve spent together developing the Potentialife program has been spent studying the leaders we most admire in business, government, science, academia, and other pursuits. There’s more than one way to lead, succeed, and be happy, of course. But as we spoke to and observed these leaders, and continued to examine the research on success and fulfillment, we noticed five recurring areas of focus: • Strengths. 10X leaders primarily focus on getting a lot more out of their strengths, rather than on getting a little more out of their weaknesses. • Health. They stay productive and happy by avoiding burnout—by balancing periods of stress and exertion with recovery activities that restore both mind and body. • Absorption. They succeed by spending much of their time living fully in the moment and immersing themselves in the work at hand, rather than by waiting for inspiration to strike at rare moments. • Relationships. They lead not by wielding power and control, but by cultivating authentic and positive relationships to achieve a shared vision. • Purpose. Rather than simply grind out tasks on a to-do list while waiting to discover life’s ultimate purpose, 10X leaders find meaning and commitment in their daily activities.

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These aren’t vanguard ideas. They’re all well within the mainstream of psychology and organizational theory, and some have a decades-old body of research showing that by focusing on one, you can achieve remarkable results. When we looked into the traits of 10X leaders, we found that they tended to combine and integrate these performance multipliers to achieve lasting success and fulfillment, in both their professional and their personal lives.

HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED This book is divided into three parts. Part One introduces our view of leadership development, combining organizational science and positive psychology. In Chapter 2, we’ll describe the increasingly disaggregated world we live in today. The ideas about living and working, defined during the industrial era, are fading as a more volatile postindustrial world takes shape. This new world, defined by fluidity of people, fluidity of roles, and fluidity of information, has had two important effects on society: It has made leadership behavior more important than ever, for both individuals and organizations, and it has made our commonly held views about happiness and success seem more conspicuously outdated and, frankly, wrong. In Chapter 3, we begin to introduce the vast body of peer-reviewed evidence that both exposes these falsehoods and suggests new and different strategies for being happy and successful. In Part Two, Chapters 4 through 9, we share our examination of what makes 10X leaders and organizations—and despite their demonstration that there are a variety of ways to lead and flourish, we reveal what we have identified as the five essential performance multipliers common to 10X leaders: strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose (SHARP). We’ll explain exactly what we mean by each of these, provide concrete strategies for developing each, and give examples of how people have used these performance multipliers, both singly and in combination, to become happier and more capable. In each of the SHARP chapters, we’ll prompt you to take a SHARPening Moment to reflect on tactics that have worked for you in the past—and, given the science and information we present in each

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of these chapters, to identify some that may work well for you in the future—and to develop each of these performance multipliers as an asset. We’ll also offer a brief sampling of tactics and techniques we’ve seen effective leaders use to cultivate each SHARP component among their colleagues, using SHARP to inspire and lead in the workplace. In Part Three, Chapters 10 through 12, we will address the difficulty of making lasting change. We’ll introduce some of the barriers that commonly get in the way of making meaningful change—but also provide an overview of the science that proves change is possible, both in the way we think and in the way we behave, and then explain some of the proven methods for making these changes. We’ll introduce you to practices for changing undesirable habits and behaviors; for ritualizing healthier, more productive behaviors; and for making these rituals a permanent part of your life. Finally, in our last chapter, we will zoom out and take a last look at the 10X effect—at how people and organizations function, and maintain positive results, after putting to work the ideas and methods discussed in this book. Our hope is that all who read this book will make the leader’s choice to be active agents of change, lifting themselves and everyone around them ever closer to shared happiness and success.

CHAPTER 2

Giving Way to the New The Boundaryless Twenty-First-Century Work Environment

“You cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh waters are flowing in upon you.” —Heraclitus of Ephesus

In the summer of 2014 the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive American think tank, launched what it called the Next American Economy project, calling on experts from business, government, and academia to identify trends and challenges that would shape the economy over the next quarter century. Within a year these experts had settled on a bold claim: “The U.S. economy,” wrote Institute senior fellow Bowman “Bo” Cutter, “stands at the precipice of a transformation on par with the Industrial Revolution.”1 The model of the company man—the full-time, permanent employee who worked his whole life for a single employer and then retired with a gold watch and a comfortable pension—reached its peak in post—World War II society, at the launch of the baby boom. And then things began to get complicated. The digital revolution brought advances in computing and telecommunications, including the now-omnipresent Internet, making it easier to automate and reengineer tasks. International trade agreements broke down historical barriers to the exchange of goods 15

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and services. By the 1990s, legendary management guru Peter Drucker had coined the term outsourcing to refer to the contracting of processes to others who could do them better and more cheaply. Another term, globalization, came to signify the shrinkage of time and space that had historically separated people around the world and the increasing ease with which people and organizations were able to interact. We’re still in the midst of this transformation, and haven’t settled on what to call it: The digital age. The postindustrial society. The gig economy. Today’s world includes wild inventions that would have sounded like science fiction to a worker on Henry Ford’s assembly line: Rather than take jobs as cab drivers, for example, some people download an application from an online transportation network company, Uber Technologies; connect directly via smartphone with their fares in hundreds of cities worldwide; and earn income driving these fares in their own vehicles. Another online mobile marketplace, TaskRabbit, matches freelance laborers with customers who need help with everyday tasks, such as cleaning, delivery, and odd jobs. It isn’t that the company is disappearing from the world—it’s still the dominant force for production and employment. But its dominance is fading. In the face of such competition, from a growing number of people who attach themselves to companies for new and different reasons, The Company is morphing into something other than a lifelong benefactor that calls the shots and signs the paychecks. More and more, working people aren’t looking for patronage; they’re looking for opportunities to learn, grow, and become happier versions of themselves. The age-old terms used to denote success—climbing the corporate ladder and breaking through the glass ceiling—are beginning to sound quaint, remnants of a time when people aimed their ambitions and passions in a single direction. Flourishing in the work environment—becoming more energetic, engaged, focused, and happy—has always been important, for obvious reasons. But in the old world order of the hierarchical company, it was possible for a person to work his or her whole life in a steady state of modest achievement and marginal competence, in a strictly prescribed role and physical space, completing tasks without flourishing.

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Obviously, that was never the way anyone would have preferred to live, but our own studies of the working environment have led us to conclude that even if a person wanted to, it’s not really possible anymore. Today’s organizations can no longer afford to underuse talent and initiative or to think of the word entrepreneur as a term that applies to an elite corps of innovators. The world—and in particular the working environment—has become disaggregated as the stable, cocooning environment of the company is disappearing. Just as companies themselves have had to become more agile and responsive to the rapid pace of change, so too must employees become more entrepreneurial, figuring out for themselves how to make the most of themselves, both at work and in their personal lives. As a result, self-leadership—10X leadership—is becoming essential for the success and well-being of everyone, not just those at the top of the corporate hierarchy. As we’ve ventured out into the world of work, we’ve observed an increase in boundarylessness, the disappearance of traditional barriers both within and among organizations—and we think, although this world may be intimidating when you first approach it, it has far more potential to bring people joy than any of the socioeconomic models that preceded it. We’ve seen this boundarylessness emerge in three interrelated areas: fluidity of people, fluidity of roles, and fluidity of information.

FLUIDITY OF PEOPLE Our grandparents were most likely to remain in the same workplace their entire lives. This was considered prudent, wise, and the right thing to do. Today, such loyalty is unusual and is perceived by many as unnecessary, even unwise, akin to stagnation. Research from talent agency and outplacement service Lee Hecht Harrison shows that most of us can expect to have at least seven to eight career changes over the course of a working life. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average worker stays at each of his or her jobs for a median of 4.2 years; younger workers of the millennial generation (born between 1977 and 1997) change jobs even more often.2 Most midcareer employees today will have changed jobs between 10 and 15 times by the time they retire.3

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Those now entering the workplace for the first time could work at up to 35 jobs during their productive years.4 The question these younger workers most often ask each other isn’t Where do you work now? It’s What are you working on now? For our purposes—determining what makes people flourish as leaders—the most important takeaway from this trend is that lifelong financial security and a stable, clearly defined role, the cornerstones of employee loyalty for so long, are now off the table for many people. This is true throughout entire organizations, from the shop floor to corporate headquarters, and as a result worker loyalty is, understandably, more transient than in the gold watch era. Given the enormous costs of identifying and retaining talent, this is a potential nightmare for today’s organizations, who are charged with answering the question, What kind of work experience are people seeking when they join an organization in the postindustrial world? For once, it may be helpful to look to the previous century for insight, to the hierarchy of needs first proposed in 1943 by American psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow’s hierarchy is most often depicted as a pyramid: The most fundamental human needs— survival and physiological needs, such as the air, food, water, and shelter needed to survive—form the base of the pyramid (Figure 2.1). As these basic needs are met, people move on to the middle sections of the pyramid to satisfy more complex social needs, such as safety, love, and belonging. The most abstract emotional and spiritual needs— self-esteem and self-actualization—occupy the top of the pyramid. By self-actualization, Maslow envisioned a culminating state of being fully alive and finding deep meaning in life. We see a remarkable synchronicity between the evolution of work and Maslow’s hierarchy: Up to roughly the middle of the nineteenth century, people tended to look for work that would satisfy their physiological needs—food and shelter were enough. As wealth began to accumulate throughout the Western world, around the turn of the twentieth century, workplace safety became more of an issue, and workers who had the option, either individually or as part of labor unions, began to demand better working conditions. As safer and better-paying jobs became more plentiful, particularly in the

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Figure 2.1

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Self-Actualization Pyramid

post—World War II era, people began to look for a workplace where they also enjoyed a sense of friendship and connection. This marked the birth of the company man who joined a tribe such as IBM or General Motors and enjoyed a sense of camaraderie with fellow employees. Once the need for belonging was sufficiently satisfied, employees set their sights on the next level, seeking respect, praise, and recognition from their peers—and especially from their bosses. Berating employees, drill sergeant style, became outmoded, and managers were sent to sensitivity workshops and seminars to learn how to treat their employees respectfully, to focus on the praiseworthy, and to treat workers with dignity. Given the transitory nature of work today, workplaces make an effort to provide a respectful environment for employees—certainly compared with the workplaces of a few decades ago.

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As more of us have come to expect this kind of recognition at work, we increasingly seek self-actualization—to continue to learn, grow, and experience personal fulfillment. This is at least part of the reason we see so many people changing jobs so often: Once they feel they’ve mastered a particular role, once their learning curve flattens out, they move on to a position with a steeper curve. We spend most of our waking hours at work, so it’s not surprising that we look for work that will satisfy the full spectrum of our needs. Empirical studies of Maslow’s hierarchy have found the array of human needs depicted in his model to be more complex than he’d imagined—for example, some studies have suggested needs aren’t satisfied in a discrete progression, from food to self-actualization—but in the 1960s and 1970s an American researcher of Maslow’s hierarchy, Clayton Alderfer, validated the idea that once a certain need is met, people move on to satisfy others. Where we once looked for work to keep our families fed, sheltered, and clothed, we’re now looking for careers that will provide us opportunities for growth, fulfillment, meaning, and purpose. The principles of the 10X leadership program we present in this book are focused on helping both individuals, to find these opportunities for fulfillment and construct work environments and habits that will help them achieve growth and find purpose, and organizations, in this people-fluid world, to become places where people want to stay because they can pursue their highest aspirations.

FLUIDITY OF ROLES In their 2013 book, The Rise of the Naked Economy, Ryan Coonerty and Jeremy Neuner, founders of the coworking company NextSpace, use their own story to illustrate the new work environment that’s emerging as the trappings of the industrial economy are stripped away. In 2008 Coonerty, then mayor of Santa Cruz, California, and Jeremy Neuner, the city’s economic development director, were talking over strategies to grow the city’s economy and create jobs. Several big corporations had left the city in recent years, taking hundreds of jobs with them: Wrigley in the mid-1990s, Texas Instruments in 2001, and Lipton in 2002.

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At the time, the great recession had already begun to emerge. Business was slow and the flow of capital was at a crawl. The housing bubble was about to burst. It no longer made sense, Coonerty and Neuner thought, to lure another big, lumbering machine to the West Coast and begin the next cycle of hiring and layoffs. It made more sense to try to lure as many talented, innovative thinkers as possible, to launch their own businesses and create working opportunities—which would be, unlike the predictable job and revenue numbers a new corporate citizen would bring, potentially unlimited. Coonerty and Neuner opened their first NextSpace coworking location in downtown Santa Cruz in June 2008, and the timing was uncanny: The U.S. economy soon suffered a full-on collapse, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and many working people found, as their traditional jobs disappeared, they needed to reinvent the roles that had thus far been defined for them by others. In the downtown space, would-be entrepreneurs came together from all over the country, from different and seemingly unrelated sectors, and invented things in combinations that would have been unimaginable, or at least highly unlikely, just months earlier. In their book, Coonerty and Neuner cite the example of a nutritionist who connected with a former computer science professor, a graphic designer, and a corporate attorney to create a mobile app that advises people with diabetes about what to buy in grocery stores.5 Among this ad hoc group of four, it’s easy to imagine each team member as a leader, guiding the development of a specific project component. This team-based model of work is changing the types of employees who do it. There’s a distinct trend away from the full-time worker and toward the free agent. Traditional employment, while still the norm, is quickly giving way to contingent employment: the use of temps, independent contractors, part-time workers, and other specialists who, although they may work full-time, may not work full-time for a single employer for very long—or may not work for a single employer at one time. Business environments are changing so quickly now that it’s no longer possible—or at least no longer worth the time, effort, or expense—to codify the protocols and standard operating procedures of the corporate machine. Not long after they’re written down,

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the circumstances that produced them change. Roles aren’t as clear or as narrowly defined as in the past, nor are they as stable over time—and as a result, employees have to be more fluid, flexible, and broad-minded. Companies need employees, no matter where they might rank in the traditional corporate hierarchy, to generate new ideas. The rote tasks that can be programmed and performed within narrow parameters—product assembly, data processing, sorting, and calculating—are increasingly done by machines. Interestingly, as workers and their defined roles have gone the way of the nomad, so too has the way leadership often works within organizations. In the industrial world, a person’s authority was institutional, derived from his or her position. People did what a manager or supervisor directed them to do because she outranked them; to disregard or disobey was insubordination and carried the very real risk of being disciplined, or perhaps even fired. But in the role-fluid postindustrial world, leadership often looks more like it did in many preindustrial tribal societies, such as the Great Sioux Nation, whose seven bands roamed North America’s Great Plains. Although the bands did gather each summer to select their highest-ranking leaders at the meeting of the Seven Council Fires, the smaller groups of extended families chose their chiefs informally. There were no appointments or elections; leaders were chosen because of their wisdom, strength, and obvious love for the community. The authority of these chiefs derived simply from the willingness of people to follow them; none had the power to tell others what to do. When a chief no longer inspired trust or respect—if he made a major mistake, or if somebody emerged with better or more inspirational ideas—there was no impeachment or recall or no-confidence vote. People just stopped listening. They either found someone else to listen to or began making their own decisions. We’ve grown accustomed to assuming a person’s title and position make him or her a leader. But in the world of social media, of Facebook and Twitter, leadership can be defined as “having followership,” and nomadic workers increasingly have a choice: If they’re not inspired, or interested, or they don’t see an opportunity for learning or growth, they’ll move on. Even full-time employees—particularly

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younger ones—expect to have more choices in defining and adapting their roles. To thrive in today’s world, everyone—not just the designated leader of an organization—needs the versatility to move freely and comfortably among departments, job descriptions, and geographic locations. In the disaggregated, boundaryless world, we find an increasing number of role-fluid organizations, where creativity, innovation, learning, and growing are no longer a luxury reserved for the industry’s elites; they’re a necessity for individuals at all levels of an organization—billions of people, worldwide. Our 10X approach to leadership focuses on enabling these role-fluid workplaces to maximize success, cultivating the qualities people need to flourish.

FLUIDITY OF INFORMATION More than 2,500 years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus became famous for his insistence that the only constant, the fundamental essence of the universe, was ever-present change. This has never been more obvious than today, when new tools—broadband communications; cloud computing; social media; online collaboration tools; and the computing power to collect, organize, and mine data from unlimited sources—enable businesses to change at a rate that’s now accelerating beyond the ability of formal organizational structures to adapt. Heraclitus used the metaphor of the river to illustrate his idea of constant change: You can’t step into the same river twice because it flows, bringing different waters to you every moment—and you, yourself, are not the same person the second time you step into the river; you’re new, with different knowledge and history. If we look at the language we use to describe information in the boundaryless digital age, we see that the river has become too limited a metaphor. When we search the World Wide Web, we surf an oceanic expanse of information whose currents can pull us in any direction. When we type our terms into a search box, we enter an endlessly expanding cyberspace that now reaches beyond our solar system, in the form of data streamed to and from the New Horizons probe that passed Pluto in the summer of 2015.

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This information explosion is both a blessing and a curse. Those who are able to harness this vast and turbulent flow of information are able to get things done in never-seen-before ways. With the ability to work from almost anywhere in the world—and sharing the opinion that e-mail is on its way to becoming as archaic and outdated as the office memo—employees collaborate in virtual workspaces, launching improvements to their software products dozens of times a day, while billions of people sleep. In today’s world, this way of working is an imperative. Organizations today need to grow and learn and reinvent themselves constantly. The availability of information, its transparency and the ease with which it flows, mean that when a company releases a new product, that company—and its competitors—are already working on the next version, with new improvements. A single product or service, no matter how ingenious or groundbreaking, no longer allows a company or its employees to set the controls to autopilot. From our perspective, this is a gratifying development: What leader has ever experienced joy on autopilot? More than 400 years ago, when the English philosopher Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “Ipsa scientia potestas est” (“Knowledge itself is power”), he demonstrated an eerie foreknowledge of the scientific revolution that would introduce the industrial age: To learn and understand new information was to master emerging technology and control your outcome. The information age, on the other hand, returns us to the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, who wrote—over 2,000 years ago—“The more you know, the less you understand.” It’s no longer possible to master the ocean of information swirling around us, and even if it were, knowing isn’t enough. The key to extracting power from information lies in the ability to synthesize large amounts of data, by recognizing patterns, extracting the essentials, and finding meaning and direction amid the ambiguity and chaos. This is precisely what has always been vital for leaders to be able to do—but in the past there was far less information, and far fewer people were required to synthesize this information. The traditional metaphor of the organization as machine was never perfect. For one thing, it ignored the essential fact that machines

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were unaffected by their external environments, which was never true of organizations. The model worked for a while, anyway, in the industrial age, and businesses continue to apply some principles of scientific management. But the metaphor hardly applies at all anymore. In the 1990s, through the work of people such as systems scientist Peter Senge, it began to shift. Senge, who wrote The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, viewed the organization not as a machine, but a living organism, with interrelated subsystems that work together to make up an entire system. An organism reacts to its environment constantly, adapting and even renewing itself: Cells die and new ones are born. And even when an organism dies, it may survive in a different form, having passed its DNA—an information capsule of sorts—on to the next generation and continuing the circle of life. Some of the companies we’ve worked with have undergone these kinds of transformations, renewing themselves by assuming a more organic structure. Sainsbury’s, the second-largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom, was founded in 1869, a single shop on London’s Drury Lane owned by John James Sainsbury. Sainsbury’s was an early innovator, offering a range of its own-label product lines and a focus on the quality of customers’ shopping experiences. A century and a quarter later, in the 1990s, the company suffered a major slowdown and a loss of market share. Throughout its growth in size and reach—there were now hundreds of stores throughout the United Kingdom—Sainsbury’s had become slightly top-heavy, with a concentration of leaders at company headquarters. Meanwhile, the customer focus that had made Sainsbury’s famous had dropped off a bit, with store employees having difficulty keeping shelves stocked. The company began to right the ship in 2004, in part by shifting its focus from headquarters—where 750 positions were trimmed—to the shop floors, where it recruited 3,000 new workers to improve the quality of service. Jon Hartland, Sainsbury’s nonfood operations director, has spent 30 years working for what he calls a “big, proud traditional company,” and he’s seen it cycle through success and struggle. A key to Sainsbury’s

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current run of success, he said, has been its adoption of a less formal, more fluid definition of leadership. Sainsbury’s is more flexible, modular, and team based. “Today the separation between the chief executive and the shop floor has been collapsed dramatically,” he said. In 2015 the company introduced an internal social network that allowed for direct flow of information among all levels of the organization. “People are talking to our CEO, Mike Coupe, all the time, from part-time students to people like myself who’ve been in the business for many, many years,” said Hartland. “We have a ‘tell Mike’ culture—if you have a great idea, you can just say: ‘Why don’t you try doing it this way?’ There are more open and freely engaged teams, and fewer directors. We’re four times the size we were 30 years ago, and we’ve got fewer than half the directors.” Many of Sainsbury’s managers work with mobile and modular teams, moving from store to store to help support staff in more than 1,200 retail locations. Di Blackburn, an operational skills manager for the company, oversees a team (and subteams) of 34 people who design and deliver training where it’s needed most. “I like to think of myself as a conductor,” she said. “I have a team working over here, a team working over there. I’m field based, so I can work anywhere from Scotland down to Cornwall and London.” It is precisely this type of change that was introduced throughout Sainsbury’s that provides the fluidity of information necessary for today’s business. One of the essential tenets of the theory of evolution—a tenet that applies to both the natural world and our manufactured world—is that when an environment changes, only those who adapt will survive. In today’s world, where change is constant, only those who build the capacities to adapt constantly—to grow with, or ahead of, the times—will survive and flourish. ▪ ▪ ▪ If you find the rapid changes described above intimidating, you’re not alone. A lot is happening, and it’s happening fast. In the chapters that follow, we’ll show you the many reasons why we’re not scared—why we’re really excited about the changes, in fact. In breaking down old barriers, the new disaggregated world does,

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of course, create much uncertainty. But we think it also creates unprecedented—boundaryless—opportunities for human development, for growing into the kind of joyful, influential people—the 10X leaders—most of us hope to be. What do these 10X leaders look like in the disaggregated world? In our experience—Tal’s work at Harvard and around the world, where he’s lectured on happiness and fulfillment, and Angus’s work at McKinsey, where he’s developed leadership programs in collaboration with the leaders of the world’s biggest corporations—we’ve come to a stunning realization: Most people don’t know what it means to succeed and lead. Most aren’t reaching their full potential, or achieving lasting fulfillment, because their formula for success and well-being is almost always completely wrong. Like the inefficient, clunky machines of old, many continue to suffer from outdated ideas of what it means to be a good leader—and why it matters at all. Our first step in building a program that would help people become happy and successful was to identify the flaws in this formula—the demonstrably wrong, but somehow persistent, myths and misconceptions about happiness and leadership—and what it will mean, in the emerging boundaryless world, to be a 10X leader.

CHAPTER 3

Myths of Happiness and Leadership Making the Case for SHARP

hen we first met more than five years ago, our conversation returned again and again to the disaggregation of the world’s social and economic structures and the effect this volatility was having on organizations and people. That conversation, and the many that followed, were spirited, invigorating—and revelatory. We realized a few important things, which led us to create Potentialife and write this book:

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• Today’s disaggregated world creates space and offers individuals new opportunities and challenges: In an era in which people increasingly move from gig to gig, rather than job to job, leadership behaviors enable them to find and cultivate experiences that will allow them to grow and flourish. With the lifelong loyalties of the gold watch era on the wane, everyone must be an opportunity seeker. While this may seem like a lamentable development for organizations that want to retain talent, it clarifies a simple truth: Opportunities for flourishing and influence—for the joy of leadership—within the organization must be more attractive than those outside it. • Our interactions have repeatedly shown the feeling of being happy and fulfilled and the ability to lead—to inspire others and make a meaningful difference—to be so strongly associated as to be virtually inseparable. Whether an organization’s people are happy, capable, and energized is far more important to a company’s success than the logic of its organizational chart 29

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or the discipline of its lines of authority. An organization full of passionate people, full of purpose, is a leadership organization, focused squarely on fulfilling its mission and achieving its goals. The losing organizations of the future will be those that dismiss this idea and try to reimpose the old order, seeking control, alignment, and compliance—which will inevitably suffocate the opportunities for expression and innovation the disaggregated world has created. • Because leadership behaviors are a significant driver of productivity and performance, both personally and in teamwork, and because the old hierarchical structures are eroding, leadership is no longer a trait that stops being important at the level of middle management. For an organization to succeed, it’s likely that most, if not all, of its people are going to have to lead at some point. • The reason the joy of leadership is elusive to so many in the disaggregated world is that we’re often stuck in the past. Many of us share outdated or simply wrong ideas, both about what makes an effective leader and about what makes people happy. We’ve discovered that before it’s possible to develop a clear understanding of what our two fields of expertise—joy and leadership—are, it is imperative to explain clearly what they aren’t. Before we can help people learn and grow as leaders, it’s important to clear their minds of a few enduring myths.

MYTH: GOOD LEADERS FOCUS ON ELIMINATING OR OVERCOMING THEIR WEAKNESSES We’ve all been through the progress report, or performance review, in which the teacher or manager sits us down and gives us the list of things we need to improve, as if this were the most important takeaway. The traditional thinking is that people progress in life, and in their careers, by working on these weaknesses and making constant improvement. Our own observations over the years coupled with a growing body of research suggests otherwise: Although no one should ignore his or her weaknesses, because energy is a limited resource, it’s unwise and

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counterproductive to focus too much of that energy on remediating deficiencies. To do so is to put yourself in a hole that you may have trouble climbing out of. Peter Drucker was among the most prominent thought leaders to turn away from the idea that the best way to grow is to shore up your weaknesses. “One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone something one cannot do at all,” he wrote in his classic book chapter, “Managing Oneself.” “Only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.”1 Plenty of behavioral research and surveys back up the idea that people perform better when they focus on the things they’re good at and enjoy doing: They’re more creative, flexible, and adaptable.2 They’re more confident, more satisfied, and find more meaning in their work.3,4 They grow and develop more quickly. A 2009 Gallup poll of more than 1,000 U.S. employees found that they felt far more engaged in their work when they used their strengths to achieve outcomes. Overall they are happier, have more energy, and feel healthier. And managers who focus on the strengths of team members experience better team performance and greater overall success.5 With these facts in mind, we developed a 10X leadership program that will help people and organizations create tasks and roles that match the strengths of individuals, rather than try to repair individual weaknesses to fit the defined tasks and roles of the organization.

MYTH: PEOPLE ARE HAPPIEST AND MOST PRODUCTIVE WHEN THEY ELIMINATE STRESS FROM THEIR LIVES We all think we know what it means to say we feel stressed out, but it took scientists a while to find a decent explanation of what stress is, and to measure its affects on the mind and body. Endocrinologist Hans Selye was the first to offer a definition: stress was a “nonspecific” response of the body “to any demand placed on it.” Our definition has evolved somewhat; we now think of stress as a demand that exceeds the body’s natural regulatory capacity, and we know that its effects are, in

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fact, pretty specific and involve changes in neurochemistry that stimulate certain abilities and processes. Stress is, simply put, the body’s response to a challenge. Acute stress is often thought of as triggering the fight-or-flight response, in which the body adapts as if to confront a threat: The pulse and respiration rate increase; fat and oxygen are released into the bloodstream to fuel a sudden burst of activity; pupils and blood vessels dilate, and the person experiences tunnel vision. This is the first in a three-stage model Selye developed that he called general adaptation syndrome. The last stage of the model, Selye said, could be one of two things: recovery, in which the body’s compensations have allowed an organism to overcome a threat, or exhaustion, in which the body’s resources are depleted in the continued presence of the threat. Perhaps less well-known are the studies demonstrating that short-lived bursts of moderate stress can have a salutary effect on the mind and body. The purpose of our fight-or-flight response, after all, is to protect us. In 1975 Selye introduced a model dividing stress into eustress—stress that enhances mental and physical functions—and distress, which can lead to anxiety, withdrawal, or other disorders. American folklore is rife with tales—many actually well documented—of “hysterical strength,” in which people in sudden emergencies experience surges of fight-or-flight hormones and, in bursts of superhuman strength, are able to lift heavy objects, such as automobiles. Nobody would argue that such experiences are good for a person’s health, but research shows that short-term, low-level stressors can stimulate the production of brain chemicals—and even new brain cells6 —that can boost productivity and concentration, increase the body’s immune response,7 motivate people to succeed, and make people more resilient over the long term.8 In addition, several decades’ worth of research points to well-documented strategies for moderating stress with recovery and keeping it within the beneficial range: the cultivation of positive outlook and self-confidence,9,10,11,12 social support,13,14,15 rest and physical activity,16,17 and meditation or mindfulness training.18,19,20,21

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We believe in the power of moderate stress punctuated with periods of recovery. The 10X approach helps people and organizations develop long-term strategies to channel stress into energy and inspiration.

MYTH: PEAK EXPERIENCES ARE NECESSARILY RARE, A PRODUCT OF SPECIAL AND EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS Abraham Maslow introduced the term peak-experience as an umbrella term “for the best moments of the human being, for the happiest moments of life, for experiences of ecstasy, rapture, bliss, of the greatest joy.”22 When people are asked when they last enjoyed a peak experience, they often refer to a time when they were deeply moved by a work of art, experienced absolute unity with their lover, or were struck by a creative idea with profound personal or professional implications. Some (not all) women describe natural childbirth as a peak experience, and some describe reaching a significant personal milestone. For most people these are rare, extraordinary moments. And yet, Maslow believed that, especially for self-actualized individuals, these moments could happen in the midst of ordinary surroundings— while waiting for the train, making dinner for the family, or working in an office, for example—which is exactly what we find in 10X leaders. These leaders experience numerous peak experiences, often for prolonged periods, and sometimes daily. Just as 10X leaders can create and sustain peak experiences, so can you. Research on peak experience demonstrates that we can create these experiences and enjoy them more frequently in our daily lives. One of many to study the idea of peak experience is the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who came up with the concept of flow, a mental state of effortless concentration in which a person works toward a clear goal. During this “optimal experience,” as he called it in his groundbreaking 1990 book, Flow, people feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.” The peak experience is achievable, Csikszentmihalyi says, “when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives.” He writes that “When we choose a goal and invest ourselves

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in it to the limits of concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows.”23 We help produce 10X leaders by showing them how to taste this joy—how to step back, breathe, simplify, and increase the likelihood that they’ll perform at the height of their powers. Not just on rare occasions, but day in and day out.

MYTH: THE MOST IMPORTANT TOOLS FOR A GOOD LEADER ARE POWER AND CONTROL As we pointed out earlier, the institutional basis for authority has weakened at many organizations, as the command-and-control style of decision-making has proved too slow and inflexible for today’s world. A person who uses power and control to manipulate underlings is pushing people, not leading them. A growing body of organizational research indicates that this style of leadership often becomes destructive for organizations—organizational psychologist Bennett J. Tepper at The Ohio State University, in 2007, estimated that abusive supervision was costing U.S. companies about $23.8 billion annually.24 Other researchers have pointed out autocratic leadership’s direct effects on work performance indicators, such as absenteeism and turnover, and even on subtle undermining or resistance behaviors.25 Many researchers, in turn, have documented the effects of destructive leadership on individual workers: It increases stress, job dissatisfaction, and exhaustion26 and even harms employees’ family relationships when they bring this unhappiness home.27 On the other hand, the benefits of leadership models that involve greater interaction and rely on the strength of relationships— democratic leadership, authentic leadership, ethical leadership, and transformational leadership, for example—have been well substantiated. These benefits are obvious everywhere you look in today’s world. On June 1, 2010, a year before his death, Apple CEO Steve Jobs appeared for an onstage interview at the D: All Things Digital

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conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, and claimed his multinational technology company was organized like a start-up. He and his employees spent hours each day just talking, developing ideas, and solving problems. “We have wonderful arguments,” he said. “If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.”28 A 10X leader encourages great people to present the best ideas, and our program helps people cultivate these kinds of stimulating, healthy, productive relationships.

MYTH: THE KEY TO FULFILLMENT LIES IN SEEKING AND FINDING THE MEANING OF LIFE Finding the meaning of life suggests that we spend a great deal of time and effort looking for that thing that will fulfill us, the ultimate goal and purpose. In the context of the workplace, it is about finding our dream job. And once we find the dream job, we have arrived—we can live happily ever after. When American psychologist Julian Rotter developed the concept locus of control in 1954, he differentiated between people who had an internal or external locus (Latin for place or location): A person with an internal locus believes she’s in control of her own life. A person with an external locus believes his life and decisions are controlled by chance, luck, or environmental factors over which he has no influence. If you’re waiting for an employer to design the dream job that will supply you with meaning and purpose, and to somehow connect you with that job, you’ve conceived the external locus for yourself. And you might be waiting a long time. Approaching your work with an internal locus, on the other hand, means you’re actively engaged in supplying meaning and purpose for yourself—you’re seeking and discovering, rather than waiting. The difference between these two approaches is stark enough that it has the potential to completely transform lives and careers.

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It’s an important revelation: It’s usually not about the job. It’s about you. It’s not always easy to find what we call the why of work: Why am I getting out of bed to do this? It’s not always easy to find meaning and purpose, particularly in entry-level jobs or rote tasks. But most tasks contribute in some way to a grander objective that serves people in a significant way. A 10X leader is able to shape her work experience in a way that allows her, at the end of the day, to think, I was meant to do this, more often than simply shrug and think, It pays the rent. In her work, Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Yale University’s School of Management and lead author of a 1997 study, describes this difference in outlook as the difference between seeing work as a job and seeing it as a calling. People who see their work as a calling work harder and longer, simply because they view their work as rewarding.29 It’s an approach rooted in the idea of cognitive reframing, the psychological technique of identifying our negative perceptions of ideas and events and recasting them in a positive light that opens the door to better experiences and well-being. Wrzesniewski is among a number of organizational researchers investigating the possibilities for, and consequences of, an approach called job crafting, in which employers and employees work together to design work that’s meaningful and purposeful. Research shows that approaches such as job crafting—discovering and pursuing a greater sense of meaning and purpose in work—can improve performance, strengthen the bond between a person and an organization, and give workers a greater sense of satisfaction and well-being.30 Our 10X approach is designed to help people actively discover meaning in their work, and commit themselves to a more purposeful life.

MYTH: ACHIEVEMENT AND SUCCESS LEAD TO HAPPINESS AND FULFILLMENT When he was teaching a course on positive psychology at Harvard, Tal conducted an informal study among his students: He asked them

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whether they were somewhere between happy and ecstatic on the day they received their acceptance letters from Harvard. Most students responded with an enthusiastic yes. Tal then asked the students whether they believed, when they received their acceptance letters, that they would now be happy—or at the very least, much happier than they had been until that moment— for the rest of their lives. Again, most students answered that they did. After all, for most of them, getting into Harvard had been a dream come true. They might not have enjoyed school up to that point—the constant pressure to excel, to be elected to leadership positions in school government or clubs, and to make a varsity sports team—but it had all been in service to a cause that would presumably ensure a lifetime of achievement (and consequently, happiness). They were told, and truly believed, that getting into a top university would set them up for life, and that once this goal was achieved, their stress and struggles would disappear. Tal’s final question to the students was whether they were happy today. Most students said no. They’d failed to predict the impact of their success, as many of us do. In his 2006 best seller Stumbling on Happiness, Harvard social psychologist Daniel Gilbert reveals the systemic misperceptions people have when imagining a future state of happiness. In his research, he asked assistant professors who were being evaluated for tenure how they would feel when they found out whether they’d received it. Not surprisingly, the professors predicted they would be significantly happier if they got tenure. But in follow-up surveys conducted six months after the tenure decision, there wasn’t any difference in reported happiness among those who had and hadn’t received tenure—both groups had readjusted their expectations for the future and reverted to their original levels of happiness.31 Gilbert’s conclusion from this and other studies was that successes and failures lead to temporary, rather than permanent, shifts in our levels of well-being. Research such as this, as well as most of our observations, interactions, and personal experiences, have confirmed the idea that the common perception—Success (the cause) leads to happiness (the effect)— is in fact a misperception. In fact, the relationship is the other way

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around: Happiness (a cause) leads to success (an effect). Psychologists Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, Ed Diener, and many others have consistently demonstrated how happiness leads to better relationships, better marriages, higher income, better performance, higher levels of resilience, and better physical and mental health.32 This isn’t a new idea—it’s everywhere in the writings and teachings of Eastern and Western thinkers alike. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, scholar, and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, who travels the world teaching what he calls “the art of mindful living,” has distilled it for us: “There is no way to happiness,” he says. “Happiness is the way.” You might be thinking: Fine. But what if I don’t know the way? The good news is that science says you can find a way. “Happiness,” says Daniel Gilbert, “can be synthesized.” Investigators such as Gilbert and Lyubomirsky, have shown us how it’s possible—and shown that it’s really not that complicated, unless we continue to insist on making it so.33 In her book The How of Happiness, Lyubomirsky establishes that fully 40 percent of a person’s level of what we call happiness is determined not by genes or by circumstances, but by the choices he or she makes.34 The 10X leader lives knowing that the discovery of fulfillment and happiness is the path to success—and throughout the rest of this book, we offer discrete strategies for finding and staying on that path.

BECOMING SHARP “If we want to know how fast a human being can run, then it is no use to average out the speed of a ‘good sample’ of the population; it is far better to collect Olympic gold medal winners and see how well they can do. If we want to know the possibilities for spiritual growth, value growth, or moral development in human beings, then I maintain that we can learn most by studying our most moral, ethical, or saintly people.” —Abraham Maslow35

We began the design of our 10X leadership approach by examining each of the above myths in turn and doing some reframing of our own: If these ideas were provably wrong, what was the right

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way to become an effective leader? How do we boost happiness, and consequently success? We turned our attention to how the most fulfilled and successful people have done it. Instead of looking at the average, as most research does, we took a page from Maslow’s book and looked at the Olympic-level performers in leadership, and over time we discovered the differentiators that make 10X leaders and organizations stand out. If you look closer at the myths listed in this chapter, you’ll notice each of the first five reveals a misperception related to one of the performance multipliers—strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose—we focus on in our leadership program. Thus, out of a study of what most people get wrong about leadership and success, and what a handful get right, that the strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose (SHARP) framework was born. SHARP synthesizes the science, and reveals the seeming magic, behind the productivity, well-being, and ultimate success of 10X leaders. In the chapters that follow, we’ll revisit each of the myths in this chapter as we show how understanding and implementing SHARP can help realize the potential for flourishing that exists within each of us. Our examination of the sixth and final myth in this chapter, about the relationship between achievement and happiness, led us to what we view as the radical idea behind everything we do at Potentialife: The best way to lead, and to succeed, is to be happy—and not the other way around. We’re about to show you both why this is and how you can prove it to yourself.

PART II

WHAT 10X LEADERS DO

CHAPTER 4

Strengths Making the Most of Your Gifts

“Joy is strength.” —Saint Teresa of Calcutta

Some years ago, before he was a best-selling author, Tal was an undergraduate at Harvard, where every student was required to take a writing course. His first writing class, with an instructor we’ll call Hilda, was miserable. When he went to her office to discuss his first paper, she lit into him, zeroing in on his weaknesses: “You write in a childish voice,” she said. “Your writing is unfocused and lacks clarity. We’re going to work on these issues this semester.” It sounded like a threat. And boy, did they work on those issues. Hilda’s focus on Tal’s shortcomings was relentless. Her intentions were good, but Tal hated the class. It was a meat grinder, a series of remedial exercises offering no clue that he might have anything to offer as a writer. More than anything, it was a course in discouragement. Tal worked hard that semester, but his writing improved only a little. For his second writing class there was a new instructor, Maxine. When they met to go over his first paper—a paper no different from the many he’d written the previous semester—Tal was surprised by her question: “Where,” she asked, “is your voice? You’re so passionate and engaged in class. You’re knowledgeable and widely read. In our discussions you bring in so many ideas, from so many different fields. But you bring none of that richness into your writing.” 43

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Rather than order Tal to go back and fix his mistakes, Maxine gave him a new set of instructions for the next essay: “I want to hear your voice. I want your passion and your knowledge.” This, Tal now recognizes, was where his writing career began. By focusing on his strengths, Maxine made it possible for him to take the first steps to becoming a published and acclaimed author. It’s important to point out that Tal never disagreed with Hilda’s assessment. He simply preferred Maxine’s view, which presented him the opportunity to grow. Where Hilda saw childishness, Maxine saw unrefined passion; where Hilda saw a jumble of ideas, Maxine saw a breadth of knowledge, a good memory, and an ability to make surprising associations. Throughout his second semester, Tal worked with Maxine to make his writing voice more like his classroom voice—passionate and polished—and to express his array of knowledge coherently. After Tal’s first semester, writing was a chore he hoped he’d never have to do again. After his second semester, he couldn’t stop writing. He’s now published eight books (including this one), and he’s at work on several more. Writing is his purpose and his pleasure—and he never would have known it had Maxine not identified his strengths, and insisted that he work to improve them. This is the difference a strengths-based approach can make. Likewise, Angus’s career trajectory has led him increasingly toward the strengths he loves to use to develop people’s leadership skills. When he first joined McKinsey, his goal was to lead his clients to success and get elected as a partner—and when he finally achieved the goal of partnership, he was elated; it was the culmination of years of hard work. After a few years, however, Angus began to feel burned out, exhausted both mentally and physically. His relationships with family members were suffering. He was losing enthusiasm for his clients, for his team members, and for the work overall. Something had to change. To stay at his job, Angus knew he would have to make it more a reflection of himself—of the things he was good at and cared about. What he liked most, and was best at, was working with people and developing their potential. So he began spending more time coaching individual team members, teaching

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younger people how to build their own relationships with colleagues and coworkers and how to develop their own leadership potential. Over time he found he was able to hand over work he found draining— logistics and detail-oriented tasks—to people with a knack for and interest in such things. The more he worked from his strengths, Angus found, the more his colleagues and clients valued his contributions—and the more he found himself in roles where his focus was sharing knowledge and developing teams and leaders. Angus’s path to this role wasn’t triggered by a sudden epiphany; it was an incremental journey that began when he did a little bit of mentoring and coaching as a young associate. Over time, as he received validation—internally and externally—this work became a more significant part of what he did. Eventually it became the defining attribute of his career. Both Tal’s and Angus’s early experiences, then, disproved the first myth mentioned in Chapter 3: Good leaders focus on eliminating or overcoming their weaknesses. They knew, intuitively, that it was false—and together they continued to encounter evidence that proved it so.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE DAMAGE CONTROL MIND-SET “The same man cannot well be skilled in everything; each has his special excellence.” —Euripides Gallup Inc., an organization most Americans recognize for its public opinion polls, has evolved into one of the world’s largest management consulting firms, with expertise in measuring and understanding human behavior. Gallup is a world leader in applying the strengths-based approach. One Gallup poll asked people in dozens of countries, “Which would help you be more successful in your life—knowing what your weaknesses are and attempting to improve your weaknesses, or knowing what your strengths are and attempting to build on your strengths?”

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In every country, including the United States, respondents who chose to focus on their strengths were a minority.1 Interestingly, those for whom strengths was more important were more successful. Gallup’s Q12 survey is a set of 12 simple questions widely used throughout the world, among organizations of all sizes and from all sectors, to help predict employees’ motivation and engagement at work. Each question is aimed at a key indicator of business success. When the organization reviewed responses to one Q12 question—“At work do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?”—it discovered this strengths-focused minority was far more successful: Those who strongly agreed were 38 percent more likely to be working in a highly productive business unit and 44 percent more likely to be working in a unit that had high customer satisfaction ratings. Gallup went on to prove a cause and effect relationship between the strengths-based approach and success: Its consultants taught managers to help employees identify and develop those strengths, and output and job satisfaction increased significantly as a result. Unfortunately, Gallup results indicate that only about 20 percent of people surveyed globally believe their strengths are being used every day2 —and the higher up you go on the organizational ladder, the less likely you are to find people who use their strengths. For most of us, there’s a lot of room for improvement. In the 1980s, Gallup shifted from polling to more structured psychological interviewing. This new era was led by Donald Clifton, the man the American Psychological Association recognized as the father of strengths-based psychology. As a graduate student in the 1950s, Clifton realized the field of psychology had focused almost exclusively on problems and pathologies. He dedicated his life to studying human success and began crafting the assessments that helped match people and work environments. It was Clifton, more than any other, who discovered that the key to success was whether people were able to leverage their natural strengths in their careers. In their 2001 best seller Now, Discover Your Strengths, Clifton and coauthor Marcus Buckingham wrote: “The real tragedy of life is not that each of us doesn’t have enough strengths, it’s that we fail to use the ones we have.”3

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We think this really is tragic: so much unrealized human potential, all because so many people are focused on the things they—and other people—don’t do well. The time we spend in remediation would be so much better spent stoking the fires already flickering within us. In “Managing Oneself,” Peter Drucker said it best: “It takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.”4 It’s much easier to develop existing strengths than to work on weaknesses—and the payoff is dramatically better. In their 2012 book, How to Be Exceptional, John H. Zenger, Joseph R. Folkman, Robert H. Sherwin, Jr., and Barbara A. Steel recounted a study that affirmed Drucker’s observation: Their firm studied 360-degree feedback assessments—multirater evaluations of specific leadership competencies—of more than 24,600 leaders. The firm found that no matter how much effort the leaders spent on correcting weaknesses, their efforts would lift them only to the midpoint on the overall measure of effectiveness. Even those who consistently ranked as good at a majority of the competencies didn’t climb into the top half of the bell curve—but when leaders excelled (were at or above the ninetieth percentile) at three to five of the listed competencies, they were likely to be ranked as one of the organization’s top-tier leaders.5 Further research by Zenger and Folkman confirmed that those working on strengths achieved roughly twice the gain in overall leadership ratings as those working on weaknesses—and that those gains extended to other competencies. Working on weaknesses had no such effect.6 Many of the great leaders and performers of our time have shown an intuitive understanding of the principles Zenger, Folkman, and others demonstrated. The late Anita Roddick, founder and for many years CEO of The Body Shop, is widely regarded as one of the most innovative, visionary, and influential British business leaders of all time. But by her own admission, Roddick wasn’t much of a businessperson; in fact she was weak in many of the skills critical for day-to-day management of a company, such as financial management and administration. She didn’t spend much time trying to improve in these areas. Through her magnetism and idealism, she attracted people who were good at these

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things and shared her vision of a sustainable, ethical cosmetics business. Their supplementary abilities freed her to focus on her strength: sharing her ideas with the rest of the world. Throughout his 20-year career, soccer star David Beckham, who retired in 2013, was twice runner-up for the International Federation of Association Football World Player of the Year, and in 2004 was named by the International Federation of Association Football as one of the world’s 100 greatest living players. But Beckham admits he began with more weaknesses than most international players, and even after he’d become arguably the most famous player in the world, plenty of critics wanted to focus on what he couldn’t do. The great George Best, who played for Manchester United in the 1960s and 1970s, offered this assessment: “He can’t kick with his left foot, he can’t head a ball, he can’t tackle and he doesn’t score many goals. Apart from that he’s all right.”7 Beckham was slower than most offensive players, and he became great by focusing on technique. He had great positioning skills—he often beat defenders because he was simply in a better spot—and an excellent shot, a powerful cross, and crisp, accurate passes. He’ll long be remembered as one of the game’s great free-kick specialists, as millions of kids around the world try to bend it like Beckham and duplicate his spectacular form. Beckham reportedly spent hours practicing these free kicks, long after other players had left practice. Imagine what would have happened had Roddick, instead of focusing on her vision of human rights, justice, and environmental sustainability, had tried to master spreadsheets, or to train retail employees. Imagine Beckham’s career if he’d spent hours trying to run faster, or to master the left-footed cross. It seems unlikely that very many people would recognize their names today. As Clifton and Buckingham wrote: “The point . . . is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development . . . damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.”8 That’s the tragedy of damage control: Before you’ve even started to work, it dramatically lowers the ceiling for your performance. It forces you to shoot for competence, rather than greatness.

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But as Clifton and Buckingham point out, avoiding failure is a necessary baseline. Zenger and Folkman agree that when a weakness becomes what they call a “fatal flaw,” it has to be addressed: “As more leaders shift their development to this strengths-based approach,” they wrote in 2013, “we still advise them to work on a major weakness when it is so apparent that it has a devastatingly negative impact on their effectiveness. The good news is that since they are starting from such a low base, they can show dramatic gains in overcoming a potential fatal flaw.”9 The strengths-based approach doesn’t imply that you should avoid dealing with your weaknesses; it asserts that you should shift the balance of your efforts toward developing your strengths. A manager with great interpersonal skills, like Roddick, has to know enough about administration that she could at least find her way around financial statements and understand the possibilities—and limits—of her vision. A socially awkward manager in the high-tech sector with great programming skills has to develop some competency in dealing with other people so that his or her interactions don’t get in the way of achieving the company’s goals. Beckham didn’t ignore his shortcomings—his lack of speed or left-footed skill—but he worked to keep himself in top physical shape, to get the most out of these limitations. How do you know how much effort is sufficient for managing your weaknesses? There isn’t an easy or precise answer, unfortunately. A good rule of thumb is that you should invest enough effort in your weaknesses so that they don’t hold you back and divert energy from building on your strengths.

PASSION STRENGTHS AND PERFORMANCE STRENGTHS: DISCOVERING YOUR PEAK POTENTIAL ZONE A problem for many of us in traditional work environments is that our jobs aren’t defined by our strengths—rather, what we do is defined by the job. As a result, not only do we not have opportunities to use our strengths, but also sometimes our strengths have atrophied to the point where we’re not really aware of what they are anymore. Consequently, many people’s strengths lie undiscovered and unexplored, and unearthing them is the first step toward flourishing.

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In figuring out the best way to apply your talents in the workplace, it’s important to recognize and distinguish between two types of strengths: performance strengths and passion strengths. Performance strengths are simply the things you’re already good at, or that you have the greatest potential to become good at. If you’re not sure what these are, you can shake them loose with a few simple questions: What are my strengths? What are my natural talents? What are the activities that seem most natural when I do them? What do I tend to do well in the work I do now, and what have I been most successful doing in the past? What kinds of tasks do I find easiest to learn, either at work or elsewhere? Are you good with numbers? Language? Planning and strategic thinking? Are you effective in front of people, or are you better behind the scenes? Your performance strengths are the skills and abilities that enable and give you the potential to succeed. When you exercise your performance strengths, you feel as though you are doing precisely what you should be doing. By passion strengths, we mean the things that light a fire under you, that drive you to use your talents. The questions that will reveal this to you are simply: What gives me strength? What excites and energizes me? What do I love to do, and what did I love doing in the past? What are my passions, either at work or in other domains? Does mapping out a strategic plan for a workgroup give you a feeling of excitement and anticipation—are you eager to see how your ideas play out? Does listening intently to another person give you a sense of

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connection and shared purpose? Do you find working with numbers fascinating? Are you passionate about speaking to a large audience, or do you feel happiest when you’re in small, intimate groups? When you exercise your passion strengths, you feel as though you are doing precisely what you want to be doing. We’ve all had days when we wake up and dread going to work, because we know we’re going to be doing something that drains us—say, when the annual inventory rolls around and we know we’ll be in the warehouse with everyone else, trudging from shelf to shelf. Tasks such as these are often unavoidable—but they wouldn’t be quite so debilitating if we were able, more often, to get up and work on the things that energize us, that make us think: Wow! I would be so inspired, so much happier at work, if I could do more of that.

SHARPening Moment: Strengths • Identify both your performance and passion strengths, as described in this chapter. • Think of a time when you were in the Peak Potential Zone, meaning you were using both performance and passion strengths. What happened as a result? What kinds of successes do you think you could achieve if you were to spend more time in your Peak Potential Zone? • Try to imagine a way to create what Bandura calls “mastery experiences” for yourself, either at home or at work, to build competence and confidence and create both a more joyful work experience and measurably better work outcomes. • Identify your biggest weaknesses. Without dwelling on them or spending too much time trying to turn them into strengths, how might you minimize their negative impact at home and at work? How might you be able to spend less time doing the things you don’t love to do, without affecting the quality of your work?

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In 2003, Jim Citrin and Richard Smith, partners at the executive research firm Spencer Stuart, reported on a study they’d done through in-depth interviews and surveys of 2,000 executives. Only about 9 percent of respondents felt they were in jobs where they did what they were good at, and felt passionate about their work. However, when asked to describe an extraordinary executive they knew, most of the survey respondents named a person who was both highly competent and passionate about his or her work. In other words, these extraordinary individuals brought together their performance and passion strengths. It’s important to recognize the implications of Citrin and Smith’s research, which they discussed at greater length in their book, The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: First, to achieve our full potential, we need to focus on both strengths and passions, and second, the vast majority of us don’t, even at the executive level.10 There’s a lot of untapped potential. Unlocking this potential is one of the primary goals of our 10X approach. We guide people in examining and comparing their performance strengths and passion strengths—and most important, in discovering where the two overlap, in what we call the Peak Potential Zone, as shown in Figure 4.1. To find the “sweet spot” where your performance and passion strengths meet is to find where you’re most likely to fulfill your potential for success and well-being. To use an extreme example: If you were 7 feet tall and had the uncanny gift of remarkable hand–eye

Figure 4.1

Peak Potential Zone

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coordination (a performance strength in basketball), but didn’t really enjoy sports or care much about the game of basketball, becoming a great player would be unlikely, no matter how much coaches and teams pursued you and urged you to capitalize on your talents. On the other hand, if you loved the game of basketball to distraction, and would spend every spare moment in the gym if you could, your fire and dedication would never take you to the highest levels if you simply didn’t have much of a game. One of Tal’s greatest passions is music—classical music, songs from the 1960s and 1970s, and much of today’s popular music. Listening to it fuels and strengthens him; when he puts on his headphones and closes his eyes, it’s as if he’s transported to another world. He’s unable to imagine his life without music. But Tal doesn’t have much of a game, musically. He can’t sing. He can’t play an instrument well. For his sake, and for the sake of everyone around him, he didn’t choose a career in music. Music for him is a passion strength but not a performance strength. Tal is good at research—it’s a performance strength. He’s good at designing behavioral studies, conducting them, and writing up the results afterward—and as good as he is, he’d be even better if he invested more time and effort in the field. But he simply doesn’t enjoy it. Just thinking about collecting and analyzing data, and then synthesizing it in an academic paper, is exhausting. He had the potential to launch a distinguished career in research after he earned his PhD—but it wasn’t a passion strength for him, and he decided to apply his talents elsewhere. Then there’s teaching. Tal’s good at it and it energizes him like almost nothing else in his life. He travels constantly around the world, from city to city, and this travel often disrupts his sleep schedule. He often arrives for an engagement feeling exhausted—but as soon as he is in front of an audience and begins to talk, he swells with energy and excitement to share his ideas and knowledge with the group. When passion and talent feed each other like this, they result in a drive to excel, to become great at what you’re good at. Tal often watches his presentations on video, to look for ways to learn and grow, and he knows—and others have told him—that he’s getting better and better.

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When he’s teaching, Tal is in his Peak Potential Zone. It’s where he feels he’s bringing his best self to the world and doing what he should be doing and wants to be doing. Discovering your Peak Potential Zone is potentially life altering, but it takes a certain amount of discipline and maturity. You might be a gifted musician, and you might love to play the guitar. Does it mean you should quit your job and start booking gigs? Probably not. Such epiphanies, in which people make an abrupt career change and become fabulously successful, make for entertaining and inspiring stories (most of them fictional)—but human lives are complex and usually require a subtler approach. Most of us will benefit differently, and more incrementally, by trying to find our Peak Potential Zone. It’s a process that offers insight and awareness, that awakens us to opportunities for developing our talents and pursuing the things we feel most passionate about.

THE MASTERY EXPERIENCE: BUILDING SELF-CONFIDENCE Exercising skills in your Peak Potential Zone can be addictive—in a positive sense. Once you bring passion to your work, you’ll find yourself wanting to do more. Karen Stefanyszyn, head of leadership and culture for Aviva, a multinational insurance company, has built her leadership training on the strengths-based approach—which she compares to “letting the genie out of the bottle—it won’t go back in. Once you have realized the things you’re good at and you love to do . . . it’s impossible to go back to a life where you’re not doing that. And who would ever want to?” Just as your passions and strengths can constantly feed and rekindle each other to create success, a lack of awareness or appreciation of your strengths—a lack of self-confidence—can feed the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure and drudgery, which can further lower your self-confidence. Let’s use an example that, although hypothetical, probably sounds familiar: When Alice, a 10-year-old math whiz who loved playing with numbers, entered kindergarten, it was clear to her teachers that she wouldn’t need much help with math. But Alice’s language skills

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were just okay. She didn’t make a lot of grammatical or spelling errors, but because she didn’t enjoy writing, her assignments were often flat, achieving the bare minimum. She was also a reluctant reader, though she scored around the average on comprehension tests. Most schools would probably focus more time and resources on Alice’s mediocre language skills, and the result would probably be a modest improvement in her reading and writing. But the ceiling would be pretty low, because Alice just didn’t enjoy it, nor was she particularly gifted in it. Moreover, in this school, Alice would probably fall far short of fulfilling her potential in math. Without opportunities to build on her strengths, she probably wouldn’t excel to the extent she might have if she’d been allowed to pursue her passion. The more important result would be a likely blow to Alice’s selfconfidence. By shining a klieg light on her weaknesses, and ignoring what she both enjoyed and was best at, her teachers would unwittingly feed this negative cycle of low confidence and mediocrity. The problem here is that self-esteem, and especially low selfesteem, doesn’t respect boundaries. It’s unlikely Alice would cheer herself up by reminding herself that, despite her average performance in English, she still has great potential in math. Studies by several psychologists have established the phenomenon of overgeneralization, in which people expand the negative implications of failure far beyond a given scenario.11 Alice’s self-confidence would likely deteriorate across the board, and her performance, both socially and academically—and perhaps even in math—would suffer as her faith in her abilities declined. This research suggests that if the school had instead focused—not exclusively, but primarily—on Alice’s promise in math, she would have improved in that area, and might have overgeneralized in the other direction: Being happier and feeling more accomplished, she might have improved in English as well. As Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter has said: “You don’t build self-esteem by patting people on the back and telling them they’re wonderful. Confidence is a much more complex phenomenon that comes from experiencing one’s strengths in action.”12

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If we can manage our weaknesses to the point where they don’t prevent us from exercising our strengths, we can build selfconfidence through experiences that validate our strengths. Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura, in articulating what’s known as his theory of self-efficacy, calls these “mastery experiences”: events in which we perform effectively, or become noticeably better at something, and experience success. Studies by Bandura and others suggest mastery experiences increase our self-confidence,13 which in turn improves performance and the likelihood of future mastery experiences—a virtuous cycle, as shown in Figure 4.2. The experience of failure, on the other hand, makes us more likely to perform badly again the next time around, which will lower confidence in a vicious cycle of negative reinforcement, as shown in Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.2

Virtuous Cycle

Figure 4.3

Vicious Cycle

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The more easily controlled of these two variables is whether a person succeeds through mastery experiences—rather than whether he can first establish high self-confidence—so we start there in our 10X leadership approach. If Alice were encouraged to build on her strength in math, for example, she would likely become more confident, which would improve her chances of becoming a better student overall. A friend of ours, “Bob,” whom we coach informally from time to time, is a computer programmer who has worked for the same software company for the last decade. In each of his first eight years on the job, at the annual performance evaluation, his bosses delivered a variation of the same message: Bob, your skills are great, and your knowledge is vast, but your programs are sloppy. You make a lot of mistakes, and the documentation isn’t very accurate. Every year, Bob would leave the evaluation thinking he should probably find another line of work, but he never got around to it. He continued to work on these weaknesses, struggling to reach competency. One day a colleague in the company’s troubleshooting department—a separate entity from programming—went out on medical leave, and Bob, looking for a change, stepped in. He found he was good at it. He had a gift for tracking down the programming flaws of others and coming up with solutions. He loved playing detective and coaching other programmers on how to solve problems. As it turned out, Bob wasn’t just good; he was better than anyone else in the company. So he switched to a permanent position in troubleshooting and within two years was running the entire department. He was much happier after that. He looked forward to getting up and going to work every morning—and he even looked forward to the annual performance review. It all started with an accidental mastery experience that placed him squarely in his Peak Potential Zone. To spend more time in your Peak Potential Zone, it is important that you spend time reflecting on what your passion and performance strengths are, and then seek input from friends and colleagues who know you well. This way, you can design and schedule mastery experiences that will help keep you where you should and want to be. The key is to increase the amount of time you spend there, even slightly. Small changes can make a big difference.

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LEADING WITH STRENGTHS As he grew his career in positive psychology, Tal connected much of his own history—and particularly those two early writing courses at Harvard—with the work of people like Clifton. As Maxine, his instructor, had pointed out, Tal was once two different people. As a classroom student he was bold, curious, engaged, and full of knowledge and insight. But as a young writer, perhaps in part because of bad experiences that focused on his weaknesses, he was timid and afraid of making mistakes. In Now, Discover Your Strengths, Clifton and Buckingham wrote: “Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has ‘the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built.”14 By focusing on his strengths as a writer, Tal continues to improve as well as derive much joy from writing. If he’d gone in another direction, casting a critical eye on his weaknesses and devoting most of his energy to managing them, he would merely have prevented failure. As we mentioned, a lack of self-confidence in oneself—our own lowered expectations—can establish the self-fulfilling prophecy of mediocrity. But so can a lack of imagination on the part of those with whom we work. Whether or not an employee is able to use his or her strengths at work is in large part due to the expectations and decisions of organizational leaders. A series of studies has demonstrated that leaders and authority figures play a major role in the successes or failures of the people under their supervision—in bringing people’s hidden strengths to the surface. In 1965, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted an experiment in a California public elementary school: They told teachers that about 20 percent of the school’s children, whose names were on a list they received, should be expected to be “intellectual bloomers”—to experience a spurt in intellectual development— based on their results on the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition. That’s what Rosenthal and Jacobson told the teachers, anyway. In reality, there was no such thing as the Harvard Test of Inflected

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Acquisition; the children had all taken a standard IQ test to establish a baseline. In addition, the names on the list of soon-to-bloom children were chosen at random. The list was an indiscriminate 20 percent sample of the entire school population. When Rosenthal returned at the end of the year, he learned the students in the random sample labeled bloomers had significantly outperformed their classmates in all subjects, from language arts to mathematics. More amazingly, when he administered another IQ test to students, he found that the IQs of the bloomers had increased significantly over the course of the year. IQ, or a person’s intelligence quotient, was believed at the time—and had been believed for decades—to be a measure of innate intelligence: You were born with a certain inherited IQ, and would die with that same IQ. Rosenthal and Jacobson proved that students’ IQ could actually be increased significantly with high expectations. The investigators, understanding they had created a new reality, called their result the Pygmalion effect,15 named for the mythical Greek sculptor who, finding no woman in the world who met his strict standards, carved his own woman out of ivory—and, with the goddess Aphrodite’s help, brought this statue to life as his living soul-mate. Harvard professor J. Sterling Livingston replicated Rosenthal and Jacobson’s findings in the workplace: Managers were told that their employees had been given a test to identify potential and were then given the names of those who had done best—but as in Rosenthal and Jacobson’s experiment, the names had been chosen randomly. In his write-up of the study, titled “Pygmalion in Management,” Livingston noted two interesting things: First, managers’ expectations had a huge impact on the performance and career progress of their employees. Second, managers’ own self-perceptions—what they believed about themselves—had a subtle mirroring effect on what they believed about their subordinates; if they were confident in their ability to develop and inspire people, they would expect more of their workers, who generally responded by meeting these expectations. But if managers doubted themselves, they tended to expect less, and to receive less.

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“The superior managers’ record of success and confidence in their own ability give their high expectations credibility,” Livingston wrote. “As a consequence, their subordinates accept these expectations as realistic and try hard to achieve them.”16 In 2006, leadership researchers Bruce Avolio and Fred Luthans summarized a century’s worth of studies on leadership development, and they found that “The largest developmental impact was raising positive beliefs instilling in them the conviction that they were better at a performance task than they thought.”17 The single most reliable indicator of how successful an employee will be, in other words, is the extent to which somebody believes in her. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind, wrote that we need to stop asking, How smart is the student? and start asking, How is the student smart?18 The question presumes everyone is smart—we’re just smart in different ways. We have different strengths. Our role as teachers and leaders is to help identify and encourage those strengths.

CONNECTING THE DOTS: A NOTE ON COURAGE, PATIENCE, AND SERENDIPITY In the workplace, where deadlines press, serendipity can be frustrating. There’s no fixed protocol or timeline for bringing strengths to the surface; their discoveries are often the accidental collision of preparation and opportunity—or a series of such collisions, perhaps over a period of years. In his 2005 commencement address to Stanford University graduates, the late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told the story of his days as a floundering student with no interest in anything with a practical use. He dropped out of college for a while and then vowed to take only courses that interested him. The first he signed up for was a class in calligraphy. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” he said. “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”

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Jobs stumbled onto the founding of Apple Computer 10 years later, thinking he and his partner, Steve Wozniak, would make inexpensive computers for hobbyists. “When we were designing the first Macintosh computer,” he said, “it all came back to me . . . it was the first computer with beautiful typography.”19 Jobs would later make a point to list the names of his engineers inside the housing of each computer Apple produced—because, he said, “artists sign their work.”20 Now, 40 years after the company’s founding, Apple’s products still are renowned for their elegance, simplicity, and seamlessness. Steve Jobs’s legacy didn’t happen overnight—it happened as he became more immersed in the world of technology and began to see the connections between the emerging world and the work of the old masters. He followed his interests, tried new things, and, as he put it, started to connect the dots. His proven talent for design, and his passion for it, collided with the world of gray boxes envisioned by the greatest technological thinkers of the day and changed the course of the industry. “Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college,” Jobs said. “But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.”21 Connecting the dots for an individual requires time, an open mind, and the courage to try and fail. But how do good leaders connect the dots when it comes to creating a team, if the connections are so often accidental, and might not make sense for another decade? We think that, just as leadership is a privilege to be earned, rather than a title to be given, it’s also an art, rather than a science. And part of the artistry of strengths-based leadership is the ability to create conditions in which these fortunate accidents can happen. Strength-focused leaders increase the probability of such accidents by building diverse teams—diverse in cultures, perspectives, strengths, passions, and ages—that, although they may not seem a natural fit at first, have the potential to fall into place like the pieces of a puzzle. Just as a professional sports team needs a suite of specialists, a work team needs to be composed of varied and complementary skill sets—but of course, their roles, at first, will be far less obvious, and company leaders sometimes make the mistake of combining people with similar strengths. A work team at an accounting firm, for

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example, need not—should not, certainly—be composed entirely of individuals who have great numerical skills but fall short on people and organizational skills. Such a group possesses indispensable strengths, but its weaknesses are likely to hold it back. The leader of a diverse team, instead of making a new project into a punch list of individual assignments, can take a looser approach. He or she can look at the skill set and try to find the best fit for a certain task but can also create the possibility for innovation, asking: Who wants to tackle this? It may not be clear why a team member wants to take on a certain task until later. The strengths-based approach goes explicitly against the approach many leaders use to assemble work groups: Often, managers choose people they think are well rounded and versatile. But as Buckingham and Clifton warned, in Now, Discover Your Strengths: “When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp.”22 Leading with strength means understanding the difference between a well-rounded individual—whose versatility guarantees competence but not excellence—and a well-rounded, multifaceted team composed of sharp individuals who complement one another. It supports the idea of people being great at some things, even at the expense of other things. In the Cotswolds region of England, at the Sainsbury’s supermarkets he runs in Cheltenham and Gloucester, John Taylor tries to create a culture in which team members are encouraged to bring their strengths to bear on the stores’ everyday functions. When he saw one of his employees, a college student working nights in the store bakery, didn’t seem to be particularly engaged in his work, John asked whether everything was okay. The student told John he was frustrated. The software the store was using to manage its waste required employees to enter data—codes for expected shelf life and freshness—manually for every product in stock. It was clunky and inefficient and left too much room for error. “This kid was 18,” John told us, “but he was studying computers, and he had a business he’d set up on the side, building websites for people. He said: ‘I could build you a better system over the weekend. Are you interested?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ And the system

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he built is one of the systems we use now. It’s far more effective and easier for our colleagues to use.” A strengths-based leader looks beyond the immediate objectives of a given work unit and embraces the spirit of the “teach a man to fish” aphorism: The larger goal is to rise above mediocrity and cultivate curiosity, boldness, and a team with strong perspectives and opinions. As a leader who has studied and begun to master your own strengths, you’ll be able to guide your team members, awakening and directing their passions. They’ll likely achieve bigger and better things—and they’ll likely experience more joy, spending their days doing what they love and are good at.

Workplace Tactics for Strengths-Based Leadership The work of Clifton, Bandura, Livingston, and others suggests several ways in which team leaders—formally recognized or not—can identify and encourage the strengths of other team members. The people we’ve worked with have used a variety of methods for bringing out the best in themselves and others, including: • Teaching the Science: As with all the strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose (SHARP) performance multipliers, the first step in helping team members use their strengths to become happier and more effective is to make team members aware of the principles of strengths-based leadership and the science behind it. We find it’s often useful, after introducing the concept of strengthsbased leadership and the Peak Potential Zone, to reinforce this awareness over time, with daily or weekly insight nuggets or videos that will expand their understanding of the science and introduce them to people who are happier, and growing into expanded roles at work, because they’ve focused on developing their own strengths. (continued)

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(continued) • Discouraging the Damage Control Mind-Set: This goes for all stages of teamwork—deemphasizing weakness-focused questions during recruitment, for example, and helping existing team members identify when they’re spending too much time focusing on their weaknesses. In one-on-one meetings, or performance reviews, ask team members how they might compensate for these weaknesses: Is anyone else good at those things? Is there an app for that or any other resource that might help reduce the time spent on weakness fixing? Work with people to spend more time on the things they are good at and love to do. Likewise, when planning learning and development activities, make sure the emphasis is on how colleagues can continue to build their strengths. • Finding Peak Potential Zones: As we’ve mentioned, building diverse teams with complementary skill sets and perspectives can create the conditions in which strengths can emerge spontaneously. But we’ve seen team leaders use several tactics to more explicitly help coworkers discover their strengths: Identifying strengths can begin during recruitment, by simply asking strengths-focused questions, such as: “Tell me a time when you were at your best.” Recruitment is also a good time to be identifying strengths that will help build on a team’s collective strength. The direct approach is best. Have team members identify their passion and performance strengths through personal reflection (a brief set-aside time to identify personal strengths and how to use them more), through team discussions, and with strengths assessments, such as the VIA Survey or Gallup’s StrengthsFinder tool. • Encouraging Mastery Experiences: We’ve watched work groups develop a team-based Peak Potential Zone map that not only identifies individual strengths but also lists recommendations for how those strengths could be better used.

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Other groups have instituted a passion-sharing ritual: Once a week or month, one team member demonstrates one of his or her passions to the others, if possible in the context of work. As a team leader, you can create opportunities for mastery experiences in ways that are both structured—a strengths-based challenge, for example, in which team members experiment with discovering a signature strength, or with using it in a new way—and unstructured, much like Google’s 20 percent time. In its 2004 IPO letter, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote that they encouraged their employees to spend the equivalent of a workday each week on something that wasn’t assigned. Likewise, you can encourage team members to think about problems that can be solved or improvements that can be made in the way your organization does business. How might their strengths be used to address those issues? What solutions can they come up with? • Creating the Pygmalion Effect: Creating a new reality for your team isn’t as devious as it sounds. It’s a leader’s responsibility to identify and develop potential—and as research by Rosenthal, Jacobson, and Livingston suggests, sometimes the only way to identify potential is to prompt it. If you say to your team: “I know that together we don’t have a lot of experience in X, but I also know this team has several people who will be great at it,” you might be surprised at what percolates. You can help encourage the development of new strengths by working as a team—the Peak Potential Zone map mentioned above, for example, could include additional strengths the team wishes it had. As Livingston points out, it’s important to keep expectations, and accountability, high: Team members should be aware of their responsibility in playing to their strengths. • Making a Focus on Strengths a Standard Operating Procedure: The focus on strengths needs to be part of the (continued)

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(continued) entire organization’s culture, not just an insular focus on individual and team performance. The ultimate purpose of the strengths-based approach is to develop more joyful and effective leaders who will pursue collective goals with passion. When resourcing projects, assigning sales leads, or offering other services, be careful to match colleague strengths with client strengths. Make sure performance reviews are strengths based, and use regular rewards—both formal and informal—to celebrate the ways in which colleagues and teams are using their strengths. When people exit the team, spend time in their exit interviews talking about what worked during their tenure, as well as areas for potential improvement.

CHAPTER 5

Health Injecting Energy into Life and Work

“Managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal.” —Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz Most of us would be happy to have accomplished in a lifetime what Donal Skehan had achieved by the age of 30. Years ago, as a young vocalist whose band had recorded a couple of number one hits in Ireland, he began to leverage his stardom to build a career focused on his first love: cooking. He started his own blog, Good Mood Food, in 2007; made guest appearances on culinary television shows; gave live cooking demonstrations; and finally launched his own weekly show, Kitchen Hero, in 2011. By 2015, Donal had published five books, launched his own YouTube channel—which has since grown to more than 500,000 subscribers—and begun a new show for Food Network UK, Follow Donal, which began with a four-part series chronicling Donal’s explorations of the culture and food of Vietnam. It was all going really, really well—until, in Vietnam, it suddenly wasn’t. “I was doing my dream job of TV presenting,” Donal said, “and going to all these amazing places, doing these great things. We were having great success. But I’d come to a point of just absolute exhaustion. We were pretty much working all the time. I hadn’t had a weekend off for about six months. It was just insane. I knew something had to give.” 67

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If you’ve seen Donal on TV or the Internet, you know he’s unusually telegenic—good-natured, spirited and fun to watch. But he’d hit a wall. Weakened and bone weary, he came down with an infection that landed him in a Vietnamese hospital. “It was just a combination of a lack of sleep and not getting time off,” he said. “It took me about three weeks to get over it, because my immune system was down from working so hard. I had to take two rounds of antibiotics. Your body should be able to recover from something as simple as that fairly quickly.” Donal and his production team had plenty of time to do what needed to be done in Vietnam. Time wasn’t the problem. In Vietnam, they discovered something that surprised them all: Donal’s seemingly boundless supply of energy had reached its limit.

MANAGING ENERGY, NOT TIME In their best-selling 2003 book, The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz presented a provocative argument: The concept of time management many self-help and management gurus touted, they said, was outdated and useless. Managing energy, not time, was the key to high performance. It makes sense: Time is a limited resource. It can’t be managed. There will always be 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week. As Donal discovered in Vietnam, energy is also a limited resource. But—as Donal discovered with the help of Potentialife’s 10X leadership program—it can be managed. A 10X leader is able to boost positive energy by regulating its two determinants: depletion and restoration. Donal’s case would seem to lend credence to the traditional thinking about stress: It’s the enemy of health and the cause of debilitating fatigue. And we don’t mean to dismiss this idea out of hand. Studies by the American Psychological Association and the Center for Creative Leadership indicate that the majority of Americans—both employees and corporate leaders—perceive work as a significant source of stress. Stress can cause accidents, mistakes, absenteeism, and turnover. The American Institute of Stress estimates that U.S. industry loses more than $300 billion annually to stress.1 According to the United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive, 45 percent of all sick days

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reported in the United Kingdom in 2015 and 2016 were due to stress.2 Multiple studies have suggested stress is a major contributing factor to chronic disease, such as heart and liver disease. Fatigue is also an expensive drain on the economy; a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine reported that about 38 percent of American workers experienced fatigue—and that workers with fatigue cost employers more than $136 billion annually in lost productive time.3 So, yes: Stress and fatigue are big problems, for employees and organizations alike. But we suggest a more nuanced explanation for how this happens: Stress causes fatigue, and results in health problems and economic loss, when it’s chronic and unrelieved. In other circumstances, stress can be exactly what a person needs. You might have noticed this is an idea in direct contradiction with the second myth introduced in Chapter 3: People are happiest and most productive when they eliminate stress from their lives. But we’ve reached this conclusion based on a growing body of peer-reviewed research. Evidence continues to mount in support of Hans Selye’s concept of eustress—the idea that short bursts of stress can actually make you stronger, more capable and more resilient. In 2013, for example, a research team led by scientists from Stanford University and the University of California–Berkeley discovered that the brain stem cells of laboratory rats, when subjected to bursts of acute stress, proliferated into new nerve cells—and that upon maturation, these new cells improved mental performance. One of the study’s coauthors, Dr. Daniela Kaufer of University of California–Berkeley, said in an interview: “You always think about stress as a really bad thing, but it’s not. Some amounts of stress are good to push you just to the level of optimal alertness, behavioral and cognitive performance.”4 Although many studies have detailed how chronic stress, lasting weeks and months, can weaken the immune system, another Stanford research team, led by Firdaus Dhabhar, reported in 2012 that exposing laboratory rats to mild stress caused a massive mobilization of several types of immune cells into the bloodstream—boosting, rather than weakening, the body’s immune response.5 Stanford psychologist Alia J. Crum studies the ways in which people’s mind-sets—the ways they perceive, organize, and interpret

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information—can alter their objective reality. One area of focus for her has been stress. Crum and her coauthors, in introducing “Rethinking Stress,” a study published in 2013, wrote of their intention “to question whether this focus on the destructiveness of stress—this ‘stress about stress’—is a mindset that, paradoxically, may be contributing to its negative impact. Our research suggests that improving one’s response to stress may be a matter of shifting one’s mindset.”6 These findings have been borne out in the anecdotal research Loehr and Schwartz performed more than a decade ago, when they studied several highly successful athletes and generalized their findings to the broader population: “In the living laboratory of sports,” they wrote, “we learned that the real enemy of high performance is not stress, which, paradoxical as it may seem, is actually the stimulus for growth. Rather, the problem is the absence of disciplined intermittent recovery. Chronic stress without recovery depletes energy reserves, leads to burnout and breakdown, and ultimately undermines performance.”7

ON DEPLETION AND RECOVERY: THE ENERGY CREATION ZONE The idea that acute stress can be beneficial may be disorienting to those who are used to thinking of stress as bad. But understanding the difference between the effects of acute and chronic stress is potentially liberating. It becomes obvious that stress shouldn’t be the focus of someone who wants to be happy, healthy, and more productive: The focus should be on the amount of energy one is able to apply to life and work. When we talk about depleting and restoring energy, we use the simple analogy of working out in the gym—stressing your heart, muscles, and lungs, making them tired, makes them stronger. But if you work out too hard, or for too long, and don’t allow yourself enough time to rest, you can become burned out—or even injured. The problem isn’t the stress—it’s the insufficient recovery from stress. In the 1960s, Derek Clayton was one of the top long-distance runners in the world, but he had difficulty making the Australian

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national teams at the 5,000- and 10,000-meter level. He began to train for these races by running marathons—26.2-mile races—and, when he found his times in the marathon were stellar, he began to compete in marathons. Clayton was famous for training harder than any other longdistance runner; he typically ran between 140 and 170 miles a week, sometimes more than 200 miles, each mile in under 6 minutes. He was a good marathoner, but not among the best; his personal best was 6 minutes short of the world record. Australian coaches attributed it to his build—he was over 6 feet tall and fairly muscular for a runner; he often looked huge next to his competitors. Because of the intensity of his training, Clayton often injured himself, as he did in 1967 while training for the Fukuoka Marathon in Japan. He was unable to run for an entire month, and by the time he was ready to train again, the race was only a week away. He decided to simply take it easy for the week and use Fukuoka as a practice run for his next race. To everyone’s amazement, including his own, Clayton shattered the world record of 2 hours and 12 minutes at Fukuoka. He’d become the first person ever to run a marathon in under 2:10. Two years later, in 1969, a similar thing happened: He got hurt before the Antwerp Marathon, sat out for a while, trained lightly when he resumed, and then decided to use the marathon as a practice run—and broke his own world record by more than a minute. The record lasted another 12 years. Interestingly, Clayton didn’t seem to learn much from these two races. He continued with the same training schedule, and he was often injured—and often seriously enough to need surgery. In his career he had four operations on his Achilles tendons, two on his knees, and one on his heel. He ended up retiring at the relatively young age of 32. “Unfortunately, I didn’t heed my injuries, I challenged them,” he wrote in his memoir, Running to the Top, published in 1980. “Now I would show an injury the respect it deserves. I would rest it, exercise it, and if need be, stop running until it healed. Such an attitude during my competitive years might have kept me off the operating table a few times.”8

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But even as he acknowledged the role his training had in his injuries, Clayton didn’t appear to understand how his world records happened—that more training didn’t always translate into faster times. He broke world records because after intense cycles of training, his body rested and became stronger and more durable. Fortunately most of the running world had been paying attention—including the trainer Angus used to help him through his running regimen after his weekly routine had begun to feel like a chore. Angus had been running the equivalent of a 10K race, a few times a week, for years. The routine had helped him to feel fit and energized. But he was beginning to feel drained. The trainer suggested that Angus vary his pace with intervals of walking, jogging, and sprinting—and Angus discovered that not only was he more fit, but he was also covering the 10 kilometers faster than ever and feeling invigorated, rather than exhausted, at the end. He’d learned to alternate periods of stress—sprinting—with periods of recovery—walking or jogging. The lesson from this story translates not only to the workplace but also to life at home; many people talk about maintaining their work–life balance, as though work is the thing that causes stress and life is the part of the day in which you recover from stress. But for most people, both can be a cause of stress—as well as an opportunity for recovery. Research by Loehr, Schwartz, and others shows that successful people who are also healthy and energetic punctuate their intense periods of productivity with periods of recovery, both at work and outside of work. These people are operating in what we call the Energy Creation Zone (ECZ): They focus on balancing depletion and recovery to generate more energy, rather than on trying to manage their time. This applies to both home and work. In her important book Restore Yourself, Edy Greenblatt points out that most people see work and life as two opposites that need to be balanced. Instead, she suggests, we should look at an additional continuum between depletion and restoration. In this way an activity, whether at home or at work, can be either depleting or restoring. To lead a healthy and happy life, finding the right balance between

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depletion and restoration is no less important than finding some form of work-life balance. There will always be times when we’re stressed by deadlines or at risk of exhaustion from overwork. But if we shift our thinking toward restoration, the small changes can accumulate to make a huge difference in our levels of well-being and success. The 10X leader, in addition to working from his or her strengths and passions, is also full of energy and vitality—and this energy doesn’t come from some inexhaustible inner dynamo. It’s a resource—physical, mental, and spiritual—managed by attentive, disciplined people who’ve learned to practice a bit of self-awareness.

IN THE ECZ: LESSONS FROM THE BLUE ZONES National Geographic magazine has been around since 1888, and among the more than 1,400 issues published since then, the third-best-selling issue circulated in November 2005, when writer/explorer Dan Buettner wrote the cover story, “The Secrets of Living Longer,” profiling a handful of communities, located in different parts of the world, where an unusual number of people lived to be 100 years or older. In 2008, with input from some of the world’s leading experts on aging, he published his book The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. In his book, Buettner describes four such places—though he’s since discovered a few more Blue Zones—where lifespans are longer and people tend to live full, happy lives to the end. On the island of Okinawa, Japan, for example, the locals are three times more likely to reach the age of 100 than Americans, and are five times less likely to develop heart disease. The Italian island of Sardinia has the world’s largest documented percentage of people who have lived past the century mark—in one village, Buettner’s team found seven centenarians out of a population of 2,500, a rate 14 times greater than in the United States. On Costa Rica’s tiny Nicoya Peninsula—in a part of the world not known for long life expectancy—a 60-year-old man is twice as likely to reach the age of 90 than his counterparts among many of the world’s richest nations.

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The fourth Blue Zone surprised many people: The town of Loma Linda, in San Bernardino County, California, where people live an average of eight to 10 years longer than other Americans. Despite the environmental hazards they share with other people in Greater Los Angeles, the people of Loma Linda have far lower rates of cancer and other chronic diseases. Why do people in the Blue Zones live longer and have fewer health problems? The most obvious thing these communities have in common is that they are relatively small and follow traditional lifestyles—Loma Linda is a community with a high concentration of Seventh-Day Adventists, a religious sect with a distinct set of cultural practices—and they often marry within the group. It would be easy to argue, then, that the secret is genetic—except that scientists have studied Blue Zone community members who left to live elsewhere, and concluded that genes are only about 25 percent accountable for how long we live. The rest is determined by our lifestyle—where and how we choose to live. So Buettner’s team studied the residents of Blue Zones, and he found several more things they had in common: • A Healthy Diet. This one is no surprise. A healthy diet is a known contributor to good health and longevity. People in the Blue Zones eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, very little meat (Seventh-Day Adventists are strict vegetarians who don’t smoke or drink alcohol), a variety of nuts, and whole grains. Along with Sardinia’s mountain villagers, people on the Greek island of Icaria—another Blue Zone since discovered by Buettner’s team—eat what’s widely known as a Mediterranean diet, rich in olive oil, whole grains, fruit, and a little fish. Icarians drink raw goat milk and red wine teeming with antioxidants. Their rate of cardiovascular disease is half that of Americans, and dementia is virtually unknown among them. At the same time, these people aren’t extreme in their beliefs. Most eat meat or fish, but moderately, and they avoid—or more accurately, most don’t have access to—highly processed foods. In Okinawa, locals remind themselves to eat until they’re 80 percent full—which helps them avoid the

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extremes of too much or too little. Research has established that overeating, especially of processed foods, is an energy depleter that can leave you fatigued. • Regular Physical Activity. Almost without exception, residents of the Blue Zones are physically active. The Seventh-Day Adventists of Loma Linda, who view the body as a temple, usually schedule regular exercise—often at the campus fitness center at Loma Linda University, which is open to the community. In the more rural Blue Zones, villagers walk daily to work, to do errands, or to visit friends; they often work in the garden or perform a range of similar activities that require the expenditure of energy. • Lots of Rest. Residents of the Blue Zones sleep the 8 to 10 hours experts say is optimal for revitalizing our brains and bodies. In the rural villages of Icaria and Nicoya, people take time out of the day to nap or to relax and connect with friends.9 We’ve all been there: the deadline, the unexpected changes or additional requirements, the all-nighter. It happens now and then. Sometimes the only answer to a problem is to keep working until it’s solved. If it seems to happen all the time, though, it’s probably a sign that time and energy—both limited resources, and only one of them renewable—are being wasted. Researchers Drew Dawson and Kathryn Reid established nearly 20 years ago that workers who were moderately fatigued were either as impaired, or more impaired, than those who were legally drunk.10 Dr. Charles Czeisler, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has said the evidence base for the hazards of sleep deprivation is now as clearly established as was the case against tobacco 50 years ago. Sleep deprivation increases your risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, metabolic syndrome,11 mental illness,12 and some cancers.13 It has a direct impact on your ability to perform both mentally and physically.14 A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2014 found that long-term sleep loss was associated with permanent brain damage in rats.15

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Czeisler describes sleep as the third pillar of health, along with exercise and eating well. These three pillars are energy restorers—and lifespan extenders—for people in the Blue Zones, and evidence is mounting that they make a critical difference in the workplace. A 2012 study led by Brigham Young University health science professor Ray Merrill found that employees with unhealthy behaviors—particularly poor diets—were causing substantially higher levels of lost workplace productivity, a conclusion supported by several other studies in the past decade, both in the United States and abroad. To Donal Skehan, this was one of the most disconcerting things about the period in which he got so busy that he lost touch with all he’d once loved about his work. On screen, he would passionately walk viewers through the preparation of one beautiful, satisfying dish after another. “But as a cook,” he said, “I wasn’t eating really good food. It was ridiculous. We were eating petrol station sandwiches, and other stuff you should just stay away from, because of time constraints.” Merrill’s study also found that employees who had difficulty exercising during the day were 96 percent more likely to have increased productivity loss16 —which, while an astonishing number, makes sense given what we’re learning about the link between exercise and physical and mental energy. In his book Spark, Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey details the ways in which physical exercise builds the “cellular machinery” of the brain. Studies of the brain—both brain imaging and cognitive studies—have repeatedly shown the direct benefits of exercise on the brain. According to Ratey, who calls exercise “Miracle-Gro for the brain”: “First it optimizes your mindset to improve alertness, attention and motivation; second it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third it spurs the development of new cells from stem cells in the hippocampus.”17 Sleep research, likewise, is backing up an assertion made decades ago by the great Winston Churchill, who was an avid napper. “Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day,” he once said. “That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one—well, at least one and a half, I’m sure. When the war started,

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I had to sleep during the day because that was the only way I could cope with my responsibilities.”18 Researchers have since established that a short nap—as brief as 15 to 20 minutes—can revitalize us, improve our mood, and boost cognitive functioning; it’s like starting fresh halfway through the day. Buettner’s Blue Zone research isn’t remarkable for the basics of what it points out: It’s not an earth-shattering revelation that eating well, exercising and getting enough rest are good for us. What’s eye-opening about the body of research is just how big a difference these changes—even small changes—in diet, exercise and sleep can make, both for individuals and organizations. To benefit from this knowledge, you don’t need to completely overhaul your life—as Buettner points out in his book: “You don’t have to do it all . . . know that whatever you choose, chances are you’ll be adding months or years to your life.”19 As the people of the Blue Zones illustrate, you’ll also be adding life to your years—living better, as well as longer.

SHARPening Moment: Health • Identify your biggest energy depleters—unhealthy eating? working late? skipping lunch? endless meetings? Being late to appointments?—and restorers. Other than a long vacation, what has worked for you in the past to make you feel energized and capable? • Identify strategies to put yourself in the ECZ: Minimize the influence of energy depleters at home and at work, and make energy replenishers into regularly scheduled events in your weekly calendar. • Remember that depleters and restorers, as we describe them in this chapter, refer not only to physical energy but to mental and emotional energy as well. When generating new possibilities for yourself, be sure you consider all the angles: (continued)

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(continued) strengthening your body, your mind, and your social and familial support network. If one of your depleters is a feeling of isolation, all the physical activity in the world won’t be enough. As Barbara Fredrickson has shown, the most effective restorers of happiness and emotional energy are often other people.

THE REPLENISHING ROLE OF POSITIVE EMOTIONS Social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has spent her career documenting the value of positive emotions. “Through experiences of positive emotions,” she wrote, “people transform themselves, becoming more creative, knowledgeable, resilient, socially integrated, and healthy individuals.”20 Additional research, including studies by University of California–Los Angeles physician Steve Cole, have established the link between happiness and health: Our immune system is stronger when we’re happy and weaker when we’re upset or depressed. Happy people live longer and better. An increase in positive emotions is a key determinant of the amount of energy we bring to our work. Answering the following questions is therefore important: How can you maximize your positive emotional energy? What is it that tends to deplete that energy? What restores it in a way that would allow you to thrive like residents of the Blue Zones? Buettner’s team recognizes several commonalities among Blue Zone residents that can’t be tied directly to the machinery of the human body. The long-lived residents also had strong social supports to help them maintain high emotional and spiritual energy: They tended to belong to an organized religious congregation, lived their lives around a strong family core, and were tied to a network of close friends. They also lived with a strong sense of purpose for their life and work.

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The emotional benefits of these circumstances—and the unhappiness that can result from their absence—are hard to overstate. Clearly, as we know from the Blue Zones, other research, as well as our own lives, relationships are a major source of positive emotions. However, not all of our interpersonal relationships are restorative. Our positive emotions are probably at their peak when we’re spending time with people who bring us up rather than down, with whom we enjoy healthy rather than toxic relationships. Often, our depleters and restorers are seemingly small events that, cumulatively, color our lives. One of Tal’s big depleters is being late to an appointment, or being anxious because he’s almost late. Rather than try to manage his time with maximum efficiency, scheduling everything like clockwork and arriving at the last possible minute, Tal has decided to reduce this negativity by arriving early. He makes sure he has something to do—he’s a Type A personality, after all, who’s not going to just sit there—by bringing a book with him. It’s a small adjustment that makes a big difference in his level of happiness. Of course, it’s impossible to eliminate unpleasant emotions—and certainly, these emotions are sometimes necessary, given the circumstances. As Lyubomirsky and her colleagues point out, with remarkable understatement: “In some situations, positive affect is not the most functional response.” Unpleasant emotions, while inevitable, may have less of a depleting effect on our energy if we’re able to express them to a trusted other—a therapist, family member, or colleague.21 Research by social psychologists James Pennebaker and Laura King has demonstrated that even those who don’t particularly feel up to sharing unpleasant emotions with a group can relieve some anxiety by writing about them privately. Conversely, one of the best ways to enhance positive emotions and restore energy is to write about positive experiences. It’s an approach that mirrors the work of psychologists Hadassah Littman-Ovadia and Dina Nir, who asked study participants to write down three things, every night, they looked forward to the following day. Those who did were less pessimistic, felt more energized, and experienced fewer unpleasant emotions.

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Expressions of gratitude can be particularly restorative if they’re shared with someone else. A letter of gratitude, or an expression of appreciation to another, contributes in a big way to happiness, and the future of the relationship, whether it’s personal or professional. Studies by Emmons and McCullough demonstrated that writing down things for which we are grateful each night before going to bed leads to higher levels of happiness and optimism, as well as to better performance and improved health. Such gratitude is an important element of success in the workplace, where the only list we regularly consult is the to-do list. But Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor, has shown that employees who remind themselves of the progress they’ve made during the day, whether completing a report or calling a potential client, are happier, more productive, and more creative. How many of us take time at the end of a day to appreciate our own accomplishments, or the many things we’ve accomplished over a whole week? Appreciating what we’ve done is not only gratifying, but it also leads to better performance.

MANAGING TEAM ENERGY: SETTING THE TONE, SETTING THE PACE As we’ve worked with organizations of all kinds around the world, we’ve seen this principle—that pleasant or unpleasant emotions either fuel or deplete one’s emotional energy—transfer almost indistinguishably to groups. Every organization or team we’ve worked with has a distinct emotional tone, and while it’s often difficult, in the limited time we spend with these people, to determine how that tone is set, the responsibility for setting it ultimately belongs to leadership. Frederickson and others have laid the groundwork for us, proving that people who feel positive emotions are more motivated, more creative, and harder working. They’re better learners, more adaptable to the pace of change in today’s world. They’re healthier, and they miss work less often. They have better cohesion with their coworkers and are more committed to the organization as a whole. So how do we set the tone that leads to such results? Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of examples of how not to do it. A few years ago,

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Angus was working with a large communications company that had just expanded by acquiring another company, which was in the midst of launching a new service line. The managing director of the acquired company and his team had been working on the launch for years, and it was a big deal to them; there were posters and flags and video screens announcing the new service all over the warehouse. The CEO of the acquiring company decided that the day of the launch announcement was a good time for a visit. After the managing director made the announcement, the CEO stood up and told the assembled crowd, in a really nasty tone of voice: “You will absolutely not launch this on such a large scale. I don’t care what you’ve announced. I’m cutting this back.” He threw a small coin on the floor. “Instead of this,” he said, gesturing to the posters and pennants and video screens all around him, “the launch is going to look like this.” Then he pointed to the coin on the floor. For Angus, it was a rare chance to witness an unmitigated failure of leadership: The CEO had publicly humiliated the managing director, and in less than a minute, had transformed the exuberance of more than 400 people into toxic anger. The merger, unsurprisingly, did not go well. In the 1990s, a group of Italian researchers discovered that individual neurons in the frontal and parietal cortexes of macaque monkeys fired both when the monkeys grabbed an object and when the monkeys watched another primate grab the same object. It seems a simple discovery—but another neurologist, V. S. Ramachandran, has since called these neurons, known as mirror neurons, “the neurons that shaped civilization.”22 Follow-on studies have shown that mirror neurons exist in humans, too, and that they’re not limited to the motor cortex. They also mirror the emotions and sensations of the people with whom we’re interacting.23 Mirror neurons help explain the phenomenon of emotional contagion—the way pleasant or unpleasant emotions tend to spread like a virus among group members. We’re automatically and unconsciously tuning in to the actions and emotions of others. We don’t have to think about what others are doing or feeling. We just know.

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This is a powerful bit of knowledge for a leader, because followers mirror the emotions and actions of a leader more strongly than they do other group members. Fostering the positivity you want mirrored in a team can be tricky, however, as you probably also want team members to mirror a firm grounding in reality. Fostering positivity doesn’t mean living in denial, operating on blind faith, or ignoring problems—it means you and your team members will be able to see, and work together to pursue, a good outcome to a difficult situation. As Tony Schwartz puts it: “Here’s the paradox: The more you’re able to move your attention to what makes you feel good, the more capacity you’ll have to manage whatever was making you feel bad in the first place.”24 When you do that, the positive impact will be felt throughout your department or organization. This was a hard-won lesson for Donal Skehan—who, despite a career doing what he loved, ended up anxious, exhausted, and sick. After his stint in the Vietnamese hospital, he went through the 10X leadership program to spend some time reflecting on the things about his work that brought him joy. As a television personality, he’s often seen as a handsome but solitary on-screen face, but in reality he’s a business owner, the leader of a production team that travels around the world with him. Together, he realized, they had fallen into the rut of chasing one job after another, which drained the work of any enjoyment. “Certainly one thing that I picked up from the program was the importance of celebrating our successes,” he said, because everything was just rolling on to the next thing. We might have done an amazing nationwide tour of 25 venues, and then we were on to the next thing, rather than saying: “Hang on a second. We’ve just done 25 nights on tour. And people turned up for us. Let’s celebrate that. That’s amazing.” And then team morale was boosted, because we were actually saying: “This is brilliant. We’ve done this. Now what are we going to do?” The phenomenon of “rolling on to the next thing” raises an important point about managing the energy of a team. Loehr and Schwartz, to illustrate their point about energy management, compare

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long-distance runners—“gaunt, sallow, slightly sunken and emotionally flat”—to sprinters—“powerful, bursting with energy and eager to push themselves to their limits.” We—and particularly Angus, a pretty good long-distance runner himself and, as you’ll soon see, not at all emotionally flat—think this analogy might be a bit underbaked. But we agree with the point Loehr and Schwartz are making about the advantage sprinters, so to speak, have in the workplace: “No matter how intense the demand they face, the finish line is clearly visible 100 or 200 meters down the track. We, too, must learn to live our own lives as a series of sprints—fully engaging for periods of time, and then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back into the fray to face whatever challenges confront us.”25 The research proves several things: People are more likely to work well together when they take care of their bodies, minds, and souls—following periods of intense, demanding activity with intervals of rest and recovery. They generate positive emotional energy both by reflecting on their own attitudes, bringing positive energy forth from within, and by modeling these attitudes for the people around them. The 10X leader also understands that time is a fixed resource, a dead weight; by itself, it does nothing but drag you across the calendar. The 10X leader focuses on the energy that allows his or her team to perform to its potential during the time they have—on providing their bodies and minds the fuel and refreshment they need to flourish.

Workplace Tactics for Building and Restoring Positive Energy • Teaching the Science and Building Awareness: Establish a healthy, energy-generating culture as early as possible. When recruiting colleagues, include the interview question “What gives you energy, and what takes your energy away?” When orienting new colleagues to the team or (continued)

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(continued) organization, introduce them to the importance of healthy behaviors such as eating nutritiously, sleeping, exercising, and practicing mindfulness. It’s important to maintain awareness of the importance of health and the concept of energy recovery and renewal. It may be helpful to periodically tap into Tony Schwartz’s Energy Project (https://theenergyproject.com/key-ideas). Discussions centered on the times people felt full of energy, or felt depleted, can be a helpful start; it’s important for team members to be able to name a few—two or three— occasions at work or home when they felt energized and on top of life—and why. The why is an important first step toward developing rhythms and ways of working that keep a team’s energy elevated. To maintain positive energy and healthy behaviors, team leaders can discuss progress made and successes at the beginning of each week or review meeting, both in one-on-one meetings and as a group. Concern for health and well-being should be built into planning and evaluation, as well. Team leaders can plan work by first checking in with the emotional and psychological needs—the energy depleters and restorers—of team members and building these insights into performance contracts and measurements to sculpt an approach tailored to these requirements. When reviewing and rewarding colleague performance, team leaders should make the distinction between high performance and sustainable performance— discussing not only what they’ve achieved, but also how they’ve achieved it, focusing on the benefit of healthy behaviors to make their performance consistent and sustainable. • Reducing Depleters: A team should learn and be constantly aware that excessive working hours are often ineffective hours, due to fatigue. This, too, should simply be part of an organization’s culture, codified in guidelines and general

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rules that employees should leave the office by, say, 5 pm; should avoid work (including e-mails) on the weekends; and should have a scheduled day—every other Friday, for example—for working at home. Organizational leaders can be role models in this regard, establishing clear work/ nonwork boundaries. The assumption that taking breaks equals slacking off should be challenged, and regular breaks should be built into the workday. They can be more than just breaks, however: Lunchtime walk and talks, runs, brief meditation sessions, or low-stakes guest presentations—all of which should be optional, to allow employees to restore their own energy as they see fit—can be made available. When planning work schedules and projects, team leaders should ensure that every colleague has breaks during the day, regular weekends away from work, and annual vacations. • Encouraging Energy Creation and Restoration: It’s important to educate team members about healthy eating, but it’s also important to encourage it in the workplace as well as at home. Healthy foods and snacks should be made available in cafeterias, in break rooms and vending machines, and during meetings. Busy people often fall into a self-defeating cycle: They understand exercise helps restore their energy at work, but they often cite work as a primary reason for not exercising. To the extent possible, exercise should be incorporated into the workday. In addition to going to the gym regularly, it means having standing or walking meetings, instead of sitting around the conference table. Team members who are traveling should be allowed time in their schedules to exercise and recharge. Colleagues should be encouraged, both individually and in team discussions, to develop and adjust their exercise programs to reach specific health goals. (continued)

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(continued) • Building Emotional Energy and Social Support: Hardworking team members may lose touch with the activities that have restored energy and brought them joy, and they should be encouraged to reconnect with hobbies or other interests outside of work. They might enjoy giving a short presentation to the team about one of their passionate outside interests and what it means to them. This can be one activity in an overall strategy to build a positive and playful workspace, such as the Google Garage, a common area where employees come together to learn and discover and create—bringing in color, light, and elements of fun and games. Laughter should be encouraged and modeled. Leaders should encourage or work with their colleagues to actively plan family/friend time into their schedules and to incorporate social time into their exercise plans—walking the dog with another family member, for example, or teaming up for their lunchtime walks. Social support can be built into the planning phase with designated health buddies who help target health goals and keep each other on track.

CHAPTER 6

Absorption Revealing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary through Mindful Engagement “Einstein didn’t invent the theory of relativity while he was multitasking at the Swiss patent office.” —David Meyer, cognitive psychologist, University of Michigan1

Kevin Glynn has always enjoyed being just slightly stressed out. In 2010, as a university student of law and business, Kevin traveled to New York City for an internship with the financial firm Raymond James. “I liked the hustle and bustle of the New York Stock Exchange and the Mercantile Exchange,” he said. “It’s a high-paced, aggressive, competitive industry. I was drawn to that.” After returning to his studies Kevin began working for the multinational banking firm Goldman Sachs. He continued his studies, earned his business and law degrees, and went to work full-time on the firm’s high-yield and distressed debt sales desk. All told, he spent four years at the firm. “The skills and the mentorship I acquired at Goldman were brilliant,” he said. But the more he learned, the more he began to yearn for his next adventure. In 2015, near the end of his second year of full-time work, Kevin—who had always been something of an entrepreneur, starting three of his own business ventures while in college—signed up for our 10X leadership program.

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One of the things Kevin hoped to achieve was to develop skills that went beyond sales—but interestingly, one of the first things the program helped him to see was that his salesmanship could be improved. “I was sitting on the sales desk,” he said, “and what I’d usually do is pick up the phone and start telling someone about the market: ‘I’m generally seeing clients sell bonds today, with the retail sector being the biggest mover. This is what you should do.’ And as I was going through the program, reflecting on the way I was doing things, I started to think: ‘This isn’t working. There’s no engagement. There’s no listening.’” Kevin realized he wasn’t fully in the moment during these interactions. He’d fallen back on a set of rote behaviors and had lost touch with one of the crucial performance multipliers we’ve identified in great leaders: absorption. At Potentialife we work with people to cultivate mindful absorption in their work and relationships, giving them the tools they need to move from this kind of passivity—waiting for good things to happen—to an active, mindful engagement that boosts performance and satisfaction. Research on engagement has established that it leads to better results, both for individuals and for organizations. In 2008, the organizational consulting firm Towers Perrin launched a global engagement study, a survey of 90,000 employees working in midsized and large organizations in 18 countries. After reviewing its responses, Towers Perrin examined the impact of engagement on company performance. The organizations with employees who reported a high level of engagement in their work, the company found, had dramatically better financial results—on average, almost 20 percent more operating income than the previous year, compared with a more than 32 percent decrease among organizations whose employees reported low levels of engagement. There were similar correlations among other performance measures, including growth rates, earnings per share, and gross and net operating margins. These organizations, however, were a distinct minority. Of the 90,000 employees surveyed, only one in five reported being fully engaged at work.2 Gallup’s State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders, published in 2013, contained some

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grim findings: Among 350,000 American workers, 70 percent were either unengaged (“checked out,” putting in time without much energy or passion) or actively disengaged from work (acting out on their unhappiness by undermining the work of others), costing the United States an astonishing $450 to $550 billion annually.3 What does engagement mean, though? For our purposes we rely heavily on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, which we introduced in Chapter 3. “A person in flow,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, “is completely focused. There is no space in consciousness for distracting thoughts, irrelevant feelings. Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. The sense of time is distorted: hours seem to pass by in minutes . . . whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake.” We’ve all had an experience like this: reading a book, watching a performance, cooking a meal, talking to a friend, or playing tennis and being so completely engrossed that we lose track of time. The benefits of flow are significant, leading to both peak experiences and peak performance. In other words, being in flow captures the essence of what we mean by the joy of leadership—we love what we do while doing it well. Flow, Csikszentmihalyi said, is far less common than it can be. In 1997 he began citing results of Gallup surveys that asked adults a simple question: Do you ever get involved in something so deeply that nothing else seems to matter and you lose track of time? The results—numbers that have held up in ensuing Gallup surveys in more than 140 countries—were mixed. Only about 15 to 20 percent of respondents experienced such a level of involvement every day. About the same percentage said they’d never experienced it. Not very encouraging numbers—but we take a glass-half-full view: The remaining 60 to 70 percent said they experienced this level of absorption occasionally—once a week, or every few months.4 There is, clearly, plenty of potential for experiencing more flow. Why is absorption so difficult for today’s adults? In Part One of this book, we outlined three drivers of the disaggregated working world: fluidity of people, fluidity of roles, and fluidity of information. It would be reasonable to assume that fluidity would lend itself well to flow—except that the fluidity we describe is turbulent and multidirectional, and Csikszentmihalyi’s flow is unswerving and intensely focused.

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The modern workplace—in which the term multitasking was born—seems perfectly designed to disrupt flow, to destroy our ability to give undivided attention to things that matter. Offices are often cubicle farms, open environments in which workers are bombarded by conversation and noise. And who in the cubicle farm hasn’t experienced the phenomenon of prairie dogging, when everyone in the office suddenly stands to peer over the tops of their cubicles to locate the source of a sudden outburst or loud noise? Because of the trend toward fluidity of people, more of us avoid the cubicle farms, working at home or on the road, with all the distractions of home or travel. If you can remember a time you were on the telephone with a colleague or client, and you weren’t looking at something else—the computer screen, your other telephone messages, or a spreadsheet—you’re unusual. In many jobs, constant interruptions create a state of constant distraction. A 2013 workplace study by Rachel Adler and Raquel Benbunan-Fich found an average of nearly 87 interruptions per day— 22 of them, on average, external interruptions; the other 65 selfinflicted.5 A study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California–Irvine, and Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke of Humboldt University in Germany, found that knowledge workers are interrupted, on average, every 3 minutes, and that it takes an average of 23 minutes for a person to get back on task after an interruption.6 About 18 percent of the time, according to Adler and Benbunan-Fich, the interrupted task isn’t revisited at all for the rest of the day.7 The modern workplace—and often, the nature of modern work itself—often encourages mindlessness, a disconnection from the activity at hand and difficulty pinpointing the most important of the many things competing for our attention. As Mark and her colleagues and others have established, this mindlessness can significantly degrade the quality and quantity of the work we produce and our ability to work with other team members. Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has studied the impact of mindlessness and mindfulness on the performance of leaders, and her research shows that many people, when engaged in performing a task, instinctively adopt patterns of thinking and behaving based on past

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experience. In Mindfulness, first published in 1989, she concludes that because the world is constantly changing, we need to be acutely and continuously mindful, actively paying attention to what’s happening at a given moment. According to Langer, the mindless following of routine and other automatic behaviors leads to boredom, mistakes, pain, and a course of life that seems predetermined—not what anyone would want personally or for his or her organization. When Kevin found himself repeating the same sales pitch to people over and over, he became aware of the need for some crucial adjustments. After spending some time with us, he made a few simple changes, and—as you’ll see in a bit—his life is completely different now.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MINDFULNESS The studies by Adler and Benbunan-Fich and Mark and colleagues seem to present a nightmare scenario, suggesting almost nothing is getting done in the modern workplace—but again, we choose to see much potential for improvement. If 65 out of 87 of our daily interruptions are self-inflicted, that means fully three-quarters of them are under our control. If we can learn to be mindful, we can learn to experience flow much more often. Mindfulness training is rapidly becoming an important area of experimentation for companies—including Deutsche Bank, Procter & Gamble, AstraZeneca, and General Mills—that aim to improve performance at work. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, is one of the pioneers in this new field of study and training. In his book Full Catastrophe Living, he writes: “All of us have the capacity to be mindful. All it involves is cultivating our ability to pay attention in the present moment.”8 Kabat-Zinn compares mindfulness training to an orchestra’s members taking the time to ensure that they’re in tune: The greatest orchestras in the world don’t just dive in and begin playing Beethoven and Mozart, even though they have the greatest musicians and the finest instruments. They take the time first to attune to themselves, and then to one another. Interestingly, one of Langer’s most famous studies of mindfulness, reported in 2008, involved an orchestra. She and her colleagues

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asked classical musicians to perform a piece of music in two ways: First, the musicians attempted to recreate a successful past performance with which they were satisfied. Then they received a set of instructions for playing mindfully, incorporating new and subtle nuances to their performance. Langer’s team found two things: Not only did orchestral musicians prefer to create a new and slightly different performance, but when recordings of each performance were played for an audience unaware of the distinction, the mindfully played pieces were judged as superior.9 “In more than 30 years of research,” Langer writes in Harvard Business Review, “we’ve found that increasing mindfulness increases charisma and productivity, decreases burnout and accidents, and increases creativity, memory, attention, positive affect, health, and even longevity. When mindful we can take advantages of opportunities and avert the dangers that don’t yet exist. This is true for the leader and the led.”10 These two findings by investigators—(1) most of the distractions and interruptions we experience every day are within our power to control, and (2) mindfulness and flow can be cultivated and learned—seem to disprove the third myth we introduced in Chapter 3: Peak experiences are necessarily rare, a product of special and extraordinary events. Actually, those opportunities are all around us. We simply need to get better at recognizing and acting on them.

FLOW 101 Csikszentmihalyi’s years of research, in which he studied and interviewed artists, athletes, inventors, business leaders, and others, has led him to conclude that flow can be enjoyed by anyone in almost any activity. He’s come up with three conditions people can create to increase the likelihood of reaching a state of flow. First, one must be committed to a clearly defined goal: to play a piece of music, to write an annual report, or to deliver a speech in front of a room of people. It doesn’t really matter what the goal is, or whether it will one day be replaced by another goal. What matters is that in any given moment, the direction we’re headed is unambiguously clear, and we’re comfortable with it.

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Second, it’s critical that one operates under a clearly defined set of rules while pursuing that goal. Just as the goal is unambiguous, so also must the rules be—otherwise one may lose focus or become distracted while trying to interpret them. This is one reason why many people enter flow so easily, and can spend hours that pass like minutes, when playing video games. Chinese game designer Jenova Chen, who has written about the applicability of flow theories to video game design, created a downloadable game he called flOw, based on Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas. In flOw, players guide an aquatic microorganism through the ocean depths, consuming other organisms and evolving in the process. Many players found flOw addictive. In its first four months online, it was downloaded more than 650,000 times.11 In online forums, players debated why they found the game so hard to stop playing. “There must be something wrong in playing the whole morning,” wrote one player. “It has no guns, blood or explosions, but something kept me glued to my seat for a long, long time.” Another said: “For some reason I can’t stop playing it. It doesn’t make much sense, since I can’t imagine why I would continue to play it, but it’s almost soothing to play.”12 The choice of the word soothing would have piqued the interest of Csikszentmihalyi, who has described flow as “meditation in action.” Csikszentmihalyi’s third condition for creating flow is that the goal we set should be neither too difficult nor too easy. The activity we’re engaged in should be challenging, but manageable. Not all goals are likely to help us enter this state. If it’s too easy, we’re likely to get bored. On the other hand, if the goal is unmanageably difficult, and the activity too challenging, we’re likely to get anxious. It’s important to create goals that help us hit that sweet spot between boredom and anxiety. “The best moments,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, “usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”13 One of the foremost pioneers in goal-setting theory, the organizational psychologist Edwin Locke, decades ago linked higher performance to goals that are specific (I want to earn $1,000, rather than I want to earn a lot of money) and hard to achieve. Harvard professor Richard Hackman asserted that ideally, teams’ goals should be ones that we have only about a 50 percent

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chance of attaining.14 Years after becoming the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong admitted that in the summer of 1969, just before the Apollo 11 mission, he estimated the chances of a successful moon landing to be about 50 percent.15 How do you create the three conditions that are so important in providing flow? We put together a handful of concrete tactics for creating mindfulness and flow—for entering what we call the Mindful Engagement Zone, in which we’re constantly orienting our focus to the present moment and enjoying all the personal and professional benefits that come from being engaged and absorbed in our work and the people around us.

TOOLS FOR MINDFULNESS AND FLOW In her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher points out that there is no attention center in our brain and in fact that our brains are hardwired for distraction, or what she calls “bottom-up attention.” Because of our survival instincts, we’ve evolved to notice bad smells, loud noises, brightly colored objects, and sudden movements. It’s a reactive state that leaves us at the mercy of what’s happening around us. But surviving in today’s world requires a more refined set of attention skills. “Top-down attention” works differently. It’s a proactive decision to focus on the things we want to pay attention to. Attention, Gallagher says, is a finite resource and requires us to focus on things that are more positive or productive.16 Top-down attention is a mindful choice made by people who are focusing on what’s positive and generative, rather than nonproductive wastes of time. Can we increase our ability to practice top-down attention? Research suggests almost anyone can, though people clearly vary widely in their innate talent for focusing on what they believe to be most important. Mindfulness is achieved by regulating one’s attention, a practice that can be beneficial if it’s practiced for as little as 3 minutes a day. The psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, author of the book Mindsight, is one of the leading practitioners of mindfulness training today. “Just as people practice daily dental hygiene by brushing their teeth,” Siegel writes,

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“mindfulness meditation is a form of brain hygiene—it cleans out and strengthens the synaptic connections in the brain.”17 The actual practice of mindfulness training looks a lot like what we call meditation. For some reason the word meditation is off-putting to some, evoking visions of people in the lotus position, chanting mantras—a practice that, it should be said, helps millions of people in both the East and West become more mindful. But the essence of meditation is simply learning to focus. It’s a practice often done alone, but it’s also done in classrooms or gyms, in groups, or with a leader or facilitator. It can be done at your desk or in your office, in a few minutes carved out of your day. It’s often a planned exercise, but it can also be performed when we find our minds wandering or distracted. Some use cues—red traffic lights, the beginning of a meal—to begin a mindfulness session, which can help make it a habit. Chade-Meng Tan, a former executive at Google, introduced workshops, modeled on Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction, to Google employees. In his book Search Inside Yourself, and in talks he delivers around the world, Tan compares meditation to biceps curls: When your attention wanders, and you bring it back, your “muscle of attention” grows stronger.18 The most basic and widely practiced form of meditation is breathing meditation, rooted in the scientific knowledge that shallow breathing is one of the reactions to the stress of modern life. To disrupt this anxiety response, which resembles the fight-or-flight response, we can take a few deep, mindful breaths and shift to what Herbert Benson, founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institutes at Massachusetts General Hospital, calls the “relaxation response.”

The Relaxation Response In the 1970s, the American cardiologist Herbert Benson devised what he called the relaxation response to activate the parasympathetic nerve system and regulate stress-related fight-or-flight hormones in the bloodstream. One of the simplest forms of (continued)

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(continued) meditation, the relaxation response involves four basic requirements: a quiet environment; a mental device, such as a word or sound repeated silently or aloud, or an object that can be stared at continuously; a passive, “let it happen” attitude; and a comfortable position. As outlined in Benson’s book The Relaxation Response, the basic technique is as follows: 1. Sit quietly in a comfortable position. 2. Close your eyes. 3. Deeply relax all your muscles, beginning at your feet and progressing up to your face. Keep them relaxed. 4. Breathe through your nose (if possible). Become aware of your breathing. As you breathe out, say the word, “one” [or any soothing word or sound with no inherent meaning], silently to yourself. For example, breathe in . . . out, “one,” in . . . out, “one,” etc. Breathe easily and naturally. 5. Continue for 10 to 20 minutes. You may open your eyes to check the time, but do not use an alarm. When you finish, sit quietly for several minutes, at first with your eyes closed and later with your eyes opened. Do not stand up for a few minutes. 6. Do not worry about whether you are successful in achieving a deep level of relaxation. Maintain a passive attitude and permit relaxation to occur at its own pace. When distracting thoughts occur, simply acknowledge them and return to repeating “one.”19

Another form of meditation, studied by Oxford psychologist Mark Williams, involves focusing on the physical sensation of an unpleasant emotion—anger, sadness, envy, or anxiety—as a means to lowering its intensity and eventually overcoming it. If, for example,

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you experience anxiety prior to a meeting or presentation, rather than analyzing the emotion, focus on the body part—the clenched jaw, the tight throat, or the queasy stomach—where you’re feeling that anxiety. Breathe into that part. It’s not an easy thing to do, especially when the unpleasant emotion is strong, but it’s not about total extinguishment of unpleasant feelings or distractions—it’s about flexing our attention muscles and shifting our minds to a point of focus. One way to make it easier to focus is to cultivate a positive frame of mind: Positivity researcher Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues offered employees at a high-tech company a seven-week course in meditation that focused on generating positive emotions toward themselves and the people close to them and then expanding those positive feelings toward those outside their circles. Many of the employees reported that the 20-minute daily session didn’t just make them feel better while they were doing it; it improved their lives—their relationships, their health, their confidence, and their job performance and job satisfaction. It wasn’t solely meditation that could do this, however; participants who spent 20 minutes listening to their favorite music enjoyed similar benefits.20 Setting aside a few minutes a day to boost positivity and focus can have a surprising effect. As Winifred Gallagher writes: “The people who are in a positive emotional state see much more—their peripheral vision is larger. They literally see what we call ‘the big picture,’ and not only visually, but also psychologically. They are in a better position to consider options; they have more choices; they can make better decisions.”21 After working with us for a while, Kevin Glynn decided to try a little bit of mindfulness training at the start of every day. “It was only about 10 minutes,” he said. But it gives you a starting point. If I did that, and then worked out at the gym, it would really set me up for the day. It gave me a grounding point for the interactions that were coming that day, and it readied me to be slightly more absorbed in my work—not thinking about the next 20 minutes or the call I have in an hour’s time, the e-mails I should be sending: “Look, my inbox is up to 50, and it should be 10.”

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Another proven way to improve focus and absorption, as Langer’s orchestra study suggests, is to perform tasks we do routinely or regularly in a way that shakes things up a bit, to avoid what Langer calls the “predetermined life.”22 Csikszentmihalyi, in his book Finding Flow, uses the example of Rico Medellin, an assembly line worker whose job required him to perform the same task—confirming the quality of a video camera’s sound system—600 times a day. While most of us would find that boring, Rico loved his job, even after five years. Medellin turned his job into a game, a competition with himself, to see if he could beat his record for how long it took him to perform his task. Over a period of five years, like a long-distance runner training to shave seconds off his time, Medellin spent hours thinking of ways to improve his performance—and ultimately reduced the time it took to complete his task from 43 to 28 seconds. He received bonuses for his efficiency, and recognition from his superiors, but mostly, he said, he enjoyed the personal challenge. He had taken a job that others would regard as pure drudgery and turned it into a flow experience.23 Virginia Postrel writes extensively in her Bloomberg View column and elsewhere about how volatility in politics, culture, social science, and technology is shaping our future. In her book The Future and Its Enemies, she argues that what we, Tal and Angus, call “disaggregation” is a decentralized, dynamic force for positive change in the world. She celebrates Csikszentmihalyi’s idea that flow is, in a sense, a kind of play that combines “tension and joy.” About Medellin, she writes: “Responsibility and discipline are not what makes him special. To satisfy his bosses and the Puritan ethic, Medellin need only show up for eight hours a day and do each assigned task in forty-three seconds. To satisfy himself, he must do much more.”24 Because we study not just flow but also leadership, we should probably interject here, for just a moment, to look a bit more closely at a workplace in which a person repeats the same task 600 times a day. We don’t know much about Medellin, where the factory was, or what else went on there—but based on this limited context, we wouldn’t describe Medellin’s work as what Csikszentmihalyi calls an “optimal experience,” one that engages his passions and allows him to thrive. It looks to us, actually, as though Medellin were merely coping. Certainly, the world needs assembly line workers—but it

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seems unlikely that even Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, would have asked someone to do the same thing 600 times in one workday. There are more clues, in Csikszentmihalyi’s tale, that the factory might have benefited from better leadership. For example, Medellin’s improvements literally made no difference to anyone but himself: “Reducing the time to do his job did not improve production,” Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “because the line still kept moving at the old speed.” To have capitalized on Medellin’s success, certainly, would have required a thoroughly innovative approach, perhaps one that completely changed the way the assembly line worked—but it doesn’t seem as though anyone other than Medellin was up to the task. All his managers could think to do, apparently, was offer him bonuses, but we can’t help but wonder what those bonuses were for. Medellin was clearly hungry for something more. We think a 10X leader, or even a merely competent one, would consider Medellin’s own assessment of his job—“a whole lot better than watching TV”—far from optimal. We think flow, in the disaggregated world, is a way to channel one’s talent and energy, not simply to tame boredom, but ideally to explore dynamic, unpredictable systems that include ourselves. We think a good leader would, at least, experiment with putting someone as exceptional as Medellin to work on a bigger, thornier problem. Medellin, too, seemed to appreciate this in Finding Flow: “Because he sensed he was getting close to his limit in the present job,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, “he was taking evening courses for a diploma that would open up new options for him in electronic engineering.”25 To satisfy himself, as Postrel says, Medellin needed to do much more. Kevin Glynn faced a thorny problem when his daily sales began to feel more driven by process than by content. Like Medellin, he set a goal for himself. “Absorption, for me, is being engaged with people,” he said. So I turned the sales call completely on its head. Instead of starting with the market updates, I started with: “How is your day? What do you want to do today? What are the biggest pain points you see in your portfolio?” And just by

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making that small adjustment, I found I was really listening to them, engaging with them, absorbed. It was like watching a movie. You see it sometimes in improvisation acting classes—it’s not what you do or say, it’s how you react to the other person’s speech and actions. I found it to be very, very valuable in sales.

SHARPening Moment: Absorption • Think back to times when you were in what we call the Mindful Engagement Zone, utterly absorbed in a task. What circumstances did these flow experiences share? What happened as a result of them? • Identify distractions and other circumstances, both at home and at work, that interrupt and interfere with your efforts to be fully engaged and absorbed in other tasks or in your ability to relate to people who are important to you. Can you see ways to avoid these distractions or to minimize their negative influence? • Given the tools presented in this chapter, imagine ways you might increase your focus on what’s important: scheduled intervals of quiet meditation or centering, for example, to clear your mind of distractions. If your work often involves interacting with other people, try to practice, as Kevin did, mindful engagement with another person’s thoughts and feelings, getting out of your own head and into the other person’s movie. • As you design your own flow experiences, think carefully about the flow enabler Csikszentmihalyi identified: a clearly defined goal, pursued under clearly defined rules, that’s neither too difficult nor too easy. With this in mind, how might you create flow, even while performing seemingly mundane tasks, as Rico did?

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LEADING WITH MINDFULNESS The truth Kevin had stumbled upon is a truth that’s been emerging over the past few decades in leadership research. Many of our ideas about what makes a good leader are rooted in an outdated and incomplete idea of charisma—the rare, almost magical ability to arouse enthusiasm and loyalty. Charisma is often seen as a kind of divinely bestowed aura, a powerful magnetism that fosters influence and persuasiveness. Research, however, suggests it’s not magic: Charisma is learned, precisely because it’s so closely tied to mindfulness and focus.26 Think about it: You’re at a cocktail party, meeting one new person after another. Whom would you find more magnetic and charismatic? The one whose eyes are darting around the room, looking for someone else? The one constantly checking a cell phone? Or the one whose eyes are locked intently on you, who seems to be hanging on to your every word? To be a charismatic person doesn’t mean you’re invisibly pulling others into your sphere. You’re extending yourself. You’re absolutely present for others and their thoughts and feelings. You’re modeling mindfulness and absorption. One of the first modern thinkers to propose this idea was Robert Greenleaf, an AT&T executive who began, sometime around the mid-twentieth century, to suspect that American industry’s authoritarian model of leadership wasn’t working. Most of history’s greatest leaders, he observed, spoke and acted as servants—Moses, Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Greenleaf’s idea of servant leadership became influential, adopted by great business leaders, such as Anita Roddick and Jim Burke of Johnson & Johnson. According to Greenleaf, one became a servant leader “through a long arduous discipline of learning to listen, a discipline sufficiently sustained that the automatic response to any problem is to listen first.”27 A servant leader listens first and talks later. Several investigators, including Israeli psychologist Osnat Bouskila-Yam, have demonstrated the benefits of servant leadership:

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Employees who feel heard and understood, whose managers are mindful listeners, experience less stress, are healthier, and miss fewer days of work. When working in teams, employees who listen well to each other are more productive and better at problem solving. If you’ve been in a leadership position, you’ve probably encountered a situation where it was clear somebody needed help—and felt the instinct to rush in and provide the practical advice that would solve the problem. But the model of servant leadership makes our first obligation to provide the space for others to talk about their perspective and experience—it requires us to curb the impulse to think about our response while other people are talking, or to jump in with unsolicited advice, no matter how good the advice may be. Research by Tom Tyler, a professor of law and psychology at Yale University, has shown that simply allowing a person or group to speak, and to give voice to their ideas regardless of the outcome, is likely to make them feel they’ve been treated fairly. But listening in a way that achieves results is more than just letting the other person talk. Carl Rogers, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, wrote with coauthor Richard Farson about the importance of what he called “sensitive listening” in the therapeutic relationship. Research illustrates that active, sensitive listening is good for the speaker—making him more emotionally mature, open to new experiences, less defensive, and less authoritarian—but also for the listener herself. “Besides providing more information than any other activity,” Rogers and Farson wrote, “listening builds deep, positive relationships and tends to alter constructively the attitudes of the listener. Listening is a growth experience.”28 Di Blackburn, of Sainsbury’s, believes the work she did on achieving focus—on listening—during the 10X leadership program made her not only a better manager, but a better sister, wife, and mother as well. “I’m a very enthusiastic person,” she said to us. And I have a tendency to really want to share what I want to share—and that may mean I’ll interrupt, not necessarily listen well or be present in the moment . . . it would mean nothing for me to have my phone tucked under my jaw, doing some ironing while I was chatting to somebody.

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I’ve actually weeded a whole garden while talking to my sister, a whole flowerbed. And I used to think that was great—that was getting things done. But it really wasn’t. So through the program I practiced a couple of things. One was literally just: Stop. Get a cup of tea. Sit down and really, truly listen to your sister. And you know, I enjoyed that conversation so much more than I would have done before. But probably the most valuable result was my sister saying to me: “Di, you’ve really changed. I love our conversations. I never want to lose that.” And now I just love chatting to her on a Sunday. It’s really quite heart-wrenching, what a difference it’s made for her and for me. In her book The Zen of Listening, Rebecca Shafir suggests one method for effective listening that resonated with Kevin: forgetting about yourself and “getting into the other person’s movie.” We become effective listeners, she says, when we bring the same level of absorption we bring when we’re watching a film, with its attendant conditions: uninterrupted, undivided, and genuine interest and empathy in the characters and the world they inhabit, and a commitment to remaining for the allotted time—which usually, after a good film, seems to have flown by.29 Kevin became good enough at getting into other people’s movies, at actively listening, that he came to think of himself as a really good salesman—and with the help of Potentialife and his mentors at Goldman Sachs, he was also developing a number of other skills. “Four years of mentorship and learning,” he said, “combined with a nine-month accelerated course in becoming a better leader, created the perfect storm for me. I’d always wanted to create my own company, and the Potentialife program focused a lot on skills I now realize I needed in terms of hiring and inspiring people.” Kevin decided, in 2016, to start his own business with his best friend, who started working at Goldman Sachs on the same day as Kevin—and who, like Kevin, loves dogs. Their company, Butternut Box, delivers fresh, home-cooked food to family dogs throughout the United Kingdom. “In everyday life, so much is about sales,” Kevin said. “Selling yourself, your business, your product, negotiating to get the best prices and interacting with manufacturers and employees. And I’m

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trying to become better and better—not well rounded, but sharper at my sharpest strength, sales. That’ll be my purpose for the next year, to hone that skill and keep trying to get better.” “Over time,” wrote Winifred Gallagher in Rapt, “a commitment to challenging, focused work and leisure produces not only better daily experience, but also a more complex, interesting person: the long-range benefit of the focused life. As Nicholas Hobbs puts it, the secret of fulfillment is ‘to choose trouble for oneself in the direction of what one would like to become.’”30 We can experience more flow working in a bank or a dog food provider, we can hone our listening skills while speaking to our sister or making client calls, we can practice meditation while sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat or while sitting at our desk, but whatever we do, if we want to fulfill our personal and professional potential, we have to choose to focus, to be present, to be mindful.

Workplace Tactics for Mindful Engagement • Establishing a Culture of Mindfulness: Colleagues should be introduced to the concepts of mindfulness and flow during recruitment, and these ideas should be regularly reinforced during orientation, work meetings, and one-on-one consults and performance reviews. Leaders can build mindfulness training into regular team exercises and facilitate discussions that establish team norms guiding behaviors that maximize mindfulness and flow. Teams should discuss how mindfulness—being present and really listening to each other and to clients, for example—has contributed to recent successes. Work should be designed and contracted in a way that explicitly enables focus and flow—colleagues, for example, shouldn’t expect immediate answers to e-mails or interrupt one another during designated periods of focus.

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• Reducing Distractions: Begin by identifying the sources of distraction: As a team, discuss the question “What stops us from being mindful?” Together, develop rules or guidelines for dealing with the obvious ones: establishing quiet zones; discouraging conference calls in open-plan areas; project scoping that helps team members streamline their lists of commitments and to-do lists; assigning 90-minute time slots for uninterrupted work; and keeping phones and laptops from meetings (the “screen off, mind on” rule). Leadership in reducing distractions involves modeling behaviors, such as limiting e-mail and social media checks. Leaders and team members should learn to recognize signals, both subtle (wearing headphones) and unsubtle (Do Not Disturb signs), that colleagues are not to be interrupted. Good preparation for work and meetings ensures that time pressure will be less of a distraction. It also involves coaching and counseling: Team members should be encouraged, for example, to turn off mobile phones and avoid checking e-mails when spending time with family, to remain more engaged. • Fostering Mindfulness and Flow: Team members should be shown directly, and encouraged to discover for themselves, the practices that encourage mindfulness and flow: Meetings can regularly begin with a 60-second mindfulness or breathing exercise to get everyone into the room, so to speak. Teams should be led through a basic meditation exercise such as the relaxation response, and encouraged to include intervals of decency between tasks and meetings to allow them to reflect and plan for the next activity. Individuals and teams should receive some form of recognition or reward for moments of mindfulness each week. (continued)

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(continued) In planning and assigning work tasks, leaders should remain alert to the conditions Csikszentmihalyi identified as necessary for establishing flow: a set of clearly defined goals, to be pursued under clearly defined rules, that are neither too difficult nor too easy. Team members, likewise, should be encouraged to establish a clear set of goals that meet these requirements. One of the best ways to model mindfulness is to practice active listening and servant leadership with team members, both in meetings and in one-on-one discussions: Signal your attention with body language (nodding, eye contact), and hold back with input until you’ve heard people out. For deeper conversations, find a quiet location that allows you to focus properly.

CHAPTER 7

Relationships Forming Authentic and Positive Bonds

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” —Bill George

evin Glynn’s decision to leave a steady job and start his own business was difficult, but one key factor made it easier: Kevin’s best friend, who’d been by his side throughout his four years at Goldman Sachs, agreed to make the jump with him. Today they’re business partners.

K

Gallup’s Q12 survey, the 12 questions designed to predict business success, include this one: Do you have a best friend at work? At first glance, the question may seem squishy and irrelevant. Gallup researchers concede it’s often the subject of intense debate; several clients have asked to have it removed from their employee surveys. Gallup considered removing or changing the question, but chose not to, for a simple reason: It’s amazingly good at predicting team performance. A yes answer consistently differentiates between highly productive work teams and mediocre ones. Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace management and well-being, and coauthor Rodd Wagner wrote: “Something about a deep sense of affiliation with the people in an employee’s team drives him to do positive things for the business he otherwise would not do.” 107

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Perhaps more surprisingly, this one question, when analyzed company wide, is a powerful predictor of corporate performance in a variety of measures, including profitability, workplace safety, customer loyalty, and even inventory control.1 This finding is in direct contradiction with the fourth myth identified in Chapter 3: The most important tools for a good leader are power and control. Follow-on research has yielded other fascinating correlations: Employees with a best friend at work are better able to manage stress—not that they don’t experience the same amount of stress as everyone else, but they’re better able to deal with negative stress because they’re not alone. Having a best friend at work also correlates with higher levels of job satisfaction and, as a result, lower turnover. People want to stay in a place where they’re having a good time and enjoying strong social connections. For many of us, of course, our best friends are outside of work—but that doesn’t mean our relationships with coworkers are unimportant. Jane Dutton has researched and published widely about the intersection of psychology and business performance. Dutton has discovered that even casual relationships—even momentary encounters between workmates, such as a brief chat in the break room—can, if they’re positive, significantly enhance work performance. In a 2004 interview published in the Journal of Staff Development, she said: “Interactions constitute an organization’s social fabric, the lived values and norms of how things are done within the organization. That social fabric in turn either increases or decreases the capacity of individuals to collaborate, to create new things, to facilitate information sharing, and to adapt. There’s a deep connection between these small everyday interactions and an organization’s overall performance.”2 Every year the financial news and opinion website “24/7 Wall St.” compiles a list of the Worst Companies to Work For, and the results, almost invariably, point to toxic relationships between organizational leaders and employees. One of the 2016 survey respondents, a former employee at one of the companies on the list, wrote: “Corporate leaders don’t truly respect or care about their employees. They only care about making money off of them.”3 Research also indicates that social relationships are a powerful indicator of individual health. As we pointed out in Chapter 5, the

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long-lived residents of the Blue Zones tended to have strong family and social ties, which shouldn’t be surprising: If, as Gallup’s research indicates, relationships help relieve harmful stress, it follows that connecting with others may actually lower the risk of stress-related disorders related to cardiovascular function, insulin regulation, and the immune system. Several researchers have shown that caring behaviors boost levels of oxytocin—known as the “tend and befriend” hormone—and reduce levels of the fight-or-flight hormone, cortisol.4 A team of researchers led by Courtney Detillion of The Ohio State University even discovered that animals heal faster from wounds when they’re together, rather than when they’re apart.5 Brigham Young University professors Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Timothy Smith and Bradley Layton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill examined data from 309,000 people and found that a lack of social ties is associated with depression, late-life cognitive decline, and earlier death. In fact, low social interaction increased the risk of premature death from all causes by 50 percent, the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. This means, astonishingly, that a lack of close relationships is a stronger predictor of early death than either obesity or physical inactivity.6 A growing number of researchers are suggesting that the quality of our relationships may be the single most important contributor to our health and longevity. Relationships, of course, also contribute to our psychological well-being. Psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman wanted to understand what it was that distinguished the happiest people from the rest. What they found was that the happiest individuals enjoy good, intimate relationships with people they care about and who care about them. These relationships can be romantic or they can be friendships. The key is to have one or more people in your life you can share the good times with and who can give you emotional support in difficult times. As the ancient proverb goes: “Friendship doubles joy and halves grief.” So the real question is whether we develop the potential of the relationships in our lives. And the answer to this depends on whether we make them a priority. There is much research showing that people whose primary objective is to make money are unhappy. There is, of course, nothing wrong with wanting material success, but when striving for it comes at the expense of relationships—when making money becomes the top priority—then that is a heavy psychological

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price to pay. In the words of Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University: “Social relationships are a powerful predictor of happiness—much more so than money. Happy people have extensive social networks and good relationships with the people in those networks.”7 On the global level, there’s a lot of research out there about how happy different countries are, and more and more countries are looking at Gross National Happiness, GNH, as a measure of a country’s health in addition to GDP. Some of the countries that consistently appear high on the rankings are Denmark, Colombia, Australia, Israel, and the Netherlands. Why are these among the happiest countries in the world and not other nations? When researchers asked this question they came up with a clear answer. The one common denominator in all happiest countries in the world is that people there feel that they have strong social support—there is an emphasis on relationships, as a priority. Despite being the richest country in the world, the United States has never been high up on the world happiness rankings—a phenomenon Richard Easterlin, a professor of economics at the University of Southern California, became famous for pointing out in a 1974 article titled, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence.” The short answer: Not really. The United States, alongside other countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Singapore, has become richer without improving well-being overall, a circumstance now known as the “Easterlin Paradox.” Sadly, modern life puts up many roadblocks to building strong relationships. The number one reason people give for not investing in their relationships is that they don’t have time. This is another way of saying that, on the whole, our priorities have changed, greatly to our detriment. Another challenge is that our relationships are becoming less real, as virtual encounters increasingly replace actual meetings. And although there are numerous benefits of the technologies that allow us to connect electronically, this is not enough. Ed Hallowell writes in the Harvard Business Review about what he calls “the human moment,” which he defines as an authentic interaction that involves complete emotional and intellectual attention. As he puts it,

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“To make the human moment work, you have to set aside what you’re doing, put down the memo you were reading, disengage from your laptop, abandon your daydream, and focus on the person you’re with. Usually when you do that, the other person will feel the energy and respond in kind. Together, you quickly create a force field of exceptional power . . . . I have given the human moment a name because I believe that it has started to disappear from modern life—and I sense that we all may be about to discover the destructive power of its absence.8 Imagine if more of our encounters had this particular quality! To create this force field of exceptional power, we need a real connection. Having 1,000 virtual friends is no substitute for having that one intimate friend. Facebook is no substitute for face-to-face interactions. The amount of time we spend interacting with others through screens explains the increase in loneliness levels—which, among other things, is associated with depression and heart disease. As John Cacioppo, loneliness expert, notes, the greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are. As appealing as online interactions are, we sometimes need to disconnect to connect. Given the clear evidence that real relationships contribute so much to individual health and happiness, and to organizational success, why not make them more of a priority in the workplace?

RELATIONSHIP ENABLERS: AUTHENTICITY AND POSITIVITY It probably seems that it might be easier to form positive relationships out in the world, where you have, theoretically, billions of people to choose from, and where friendships often develop naturally, almost effortlessly. In contrast, the working environment is a much smaller sample of humanity and is likely to contain a few people with whom you can’t imagine yourself being compatible. And yet, given the long hours most of us spend in the workplace, your happiness and the success of your organization largely depend on your ability to form healthy relationships. How can you do that? In addition to making relationships a priority and creating opportunities for real connections, the two key elements researchers found to be indispensable to healthy relationships are authenticity and positivity.

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By authentic we mean the strict dictionary definition: “not false or copied; genuine; real.”9 You can pretend to enjoy someone’s company—but you’re probably not fooling anyone. You’re more likely to form a constructive relationship if you can take the two necessary steps toward authenticity: first, knowing yourself, and second, being yourself. In his book On Becoming a Leader, the late Warren Bennis, founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, wrote: “Until you truly know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses, what you want to do and why you want to do it, you can’t succeed in any but the most superficial sense of that word. You are your own raw material. When you know yourself, you are ready to invent yourself.” It’s not always easy to be yourself. Wanting to please others, wanting to maintain authority, the demands of your role, and pressures from above to conform can all get in the way of being authentic. It takes a fair amount of poise and courage to trust and follow our internal compass—but it’s necessary if we want to lead and relate to other people effectively. “Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself,” Bennis wrote. “It’s precisely that simple, and it’s also that difficult.”10 Bill George, a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and the former CEO of medical device manufacturer Medtronic, conducted in-depth interviews with 125 highly successful corporate leaders, and after reviewing 3,000 pages of interview transcripts, his team—like thousands of researchers before him—was unable to produce a dependable profile of the ideal leader. The only conclusion he was able to reach was that leaders succeed by being true to themselves—by drawing on their own unique combination of experience, passion, and skill.11 Of course, being authentic won’t do you much good if you’re authentically mean-spirited. Positivity—kindness and concern for the well-being of another—is critical for enjoying healthy relationships. One of the leading researchers on relationships, John Gottman, is best known today for the models he developed to predict whether a marriage would succeed or end in divorce. Gottman engaged hundreds of couples in conversation and categorized them according to carefully defined criteria of how positive and respectful they were toward each

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other in their interactions. After doing so, he predicted which couples would stay together and which ones wouldn’t. His predictions were 94 percent accurate 15 years later. Respectful, positive conversations were an almost perfect predictor of the success of the relationship. In an article he later was interviewed for in the Harvard Business Review, Gottman argued that these types of interactions are just as important to success in the professional realm. “It sounds simple, but in fact you could capture all of my research findings with the metaphor of a saltshaker,” he said. Instead of filling it with salt, fill it with all the ways you can say yes, and that’s what a good relationship is. ‘Yes,’ you say, ‘that is a good idea.’ ‘Yes, that’s a great point, I never thought of that.’ ‘Yes, let’s do that if you think it’s important.’ You sprinkle yeses throughout your interactions—that’s what a good relationship is.”12 It’s important to note that Gottman isn’t saying you should never say no—avoiding conflict at all costs is, by definition, inauthentic. But to thrive, the relationship has to lean strongly toward the positive—to say yes often, when it’s possible. It’s also worth pointing out that being authentic poses a challenge on those rare occasions when you find you genuinely dislike someone—if who you really are, your truest self, is a person who finds someone else really irritating or even infuriating. But there’s this: In the workplace, you probably have no choice but to interact with that person. Forming a positive relationship might be more difficult than you’d like, but it’s important to remember that people, no matter how simple they may seem, are complicated and multifaceted. They have families, hobbies, and things they care about that can reveal parts of themselves you weren’t aware of. You may not enjoy it at first, but you’ll have to do the work of discovering things about this person that you can authentically relate to. And you may discover, as common sense and research into the seeming magic of mirror neurons and oxytocin suggest, that your positivity evokes something in that challenging person that you find . . . likeable. Seek and you shall find! We illustrate the effect of combining authenticity and positivity with a simple matrix that gives us four different modes of relating to others, as shown in Figure 7.1. Everyone spends some time in each of the modes depicted, and it’s neither possible nor helpful to type yourself as one of the four.

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Optimal Relating

We think it’s more useful to ask yourself: How much time do I spend in each of these zones? Look at the top left: When we’re high on authenticity, but not necessarily pleasant, we’re acting as drivers, trying to push others into action. This can happen when we’re highly motivated and task oriented, but when we’re in this mode we’re not paying much attention to the emotional welfare of others. We’re just trying to get things done. At the opposite end of the spectrum, at the bottom right, we’re high on positivity and low on authenticity. We’re being nice, but we don’t mean it. We call this type the pleaser, but depending on one’s position, it’s a posture that can also manipulate. This mind-set places the highest priority on being liked and gaining approval, even if it means hiding ourselves. We’re in pleaser mode when our words are chosen primarily in terms of what we think others want to hear. When you’re low on both authenticity and positivity (bottom left), you’re detached both from your own sense of self and the needs of others and therefore unlikely to be kind or constructive. We’ve found it to be an unusual state of mind, because there’s no advantage to being both false and mean—but we all have our moments. We’re at our best when we’re both authentic and positive (top right), bringing the best of both worlds to our relationships with others. This is the benefactor mode, in which we’re concerned about both the

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end and the means: We want to get things done, and we care about how they’re done. In benefactor mode we empower other people to achieve things. We call this top-right square the Benefactor Empowerment Zone and encourage people to orient themselves in this direction whenever possible. You’re in this zone when you’re being true to yourself and interacting with benevolence. In this way, you’re bringing out the best in both yourself and others. So although we all spend time in each of the four zones, an important question to ask is: How can I spend more time in the Benefactor Empowerment Zone?

RECOGNITION AND GRATITUDE Do you have a best friend at work? is just one of the questions on Gallup’s Q12 survey that touches on workplace relationships—in fact, half of them focus on an aspect of interpersonal relationships: In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work? Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages your development? At work, do your opinions seem to count? In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress? These questions are more sharply focused on the how of relationships—specific types of interactions, practical approaches that encourage individual achievement and growth. The fact that half the evidence-based Q12 questions deal with relationships is a clear indicator that a successful organization—profitable, productive, with a committed workforce and satisfied customers—ensures that its employees feel valued and supported. Most large companies and organizations understand this and have some type of formal recognition plan. Unfortunately, many tend to be impersonal and focus on the wrong things: years of service or the

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completion of specific tasks or projects. They also tend to take the form of onetime tokens—restaurant gift cards, plaques, pins, trips, cash bonuses—that bear little resemblance to the kind of recognition we value most from the people we care about the most. A few years ago Bersin by Deloitte, a human resources advisory firm, published The State of Employee Recognition in 2012, an examination of employee recognition programs at 384 companies nationwide. The results were eye-opening: U.S. companies spent an estimated $46 billion on these programs, but few produced measurable business results. Only about 17 percent of surveyed employees indicated their organizations strongly supported recognition. Also, 70 percent reported they were not recognized at all, or just once, annually, at a ceremony that often involved many other employees. This distinction—between a program that emphasizes formal expressions of recognition and a culture of recognition, of which the formal program is merely a component—is the key to unlocking the potential of recognition. Companies with effective recognition programs had more than 30 percent lower voluntary turnover rates than those with ineffective programs and performed better in terms of productivity and customer service.13 What’s the difference between effective and ineffective recognition? For negative examples we often refer to what earlier we called the gold watch era, in which loyal employees were offered tokens of gratitude upon retirement. For much of the industrial age, relationships between managers and employees—or even among employees themselves—didn’t matter much and were even viewed by many as counterproductive. But one industrial age study accidentally offered a glimpse of the future of performance management. In 1939, a group of Harvard Business School professors studied Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne Works plant, outside Chicago. The team wanted to study the effect of light levels on productivity, so they increased the lighting on the production floor. As they’d predicted, employee productivity went up—but that was the team’s only unsurprising result. When they reduced light levels back to normal, productivity continued to go up. And when they lowered the light even further, to levels that were lower than the initial ones, they were amazed when productivity continued

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to increase. The researchers were baffled until they later spoke with the employees: The increased output, they learned, had nothing to do with the lighting. The incentive to work harder was the fact that researchers were paying attention. The employees felt that somebody cared about what they were doing, and that their work mattered. The groundbreaking Hawthorne study explains the importance of recognition. So how do we create a recognition-rich culture that yields such results for an organization, for a work team, or even within a one-on-one relationship? By recognizing others and their work authentically and positively—to acknowledge their contributions, openly and honestly, whenever possible. As Mark Twain once said: “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” In the best organizations, employees don’t have to wait for anywhere near two months, or for a formal performance review—to receive (or to give) compliments. Compliments are only valuable, however, when they’re specific and work related. It’s nice, we guess, to hear Nice tie, or Good job. But it’s much nicer to hear Great job on that report, Ann. You illustrated a bunch of different ideas in a single graphic, in a creative way that made it easier to understand how they’re all related. I loved the graphic. It really brought this issue to life. Complimenting in this way not only makes a person feel appreciated. It can also help steer the person toward future success. Moreover, the relationship between the giver and the receiver of the compliment is strengthened, making it more resilient. Donald Clifton, the Gallup CEO we introduced in Chapter 4, teamed up with senior scientist Tom Rath in 2004 to write the book How Full Is Your Bucket? The book introduces the metaphor—simple, but validated by research—that we all walk around with an invisible bucket, which holds our positive thoughts, and an invisible dipper, which we use to either fill or empty other people’s buckets. In 2012, JetBlue Airways launched an employee recognition program called Lift that used social media to make recognition less formal, more generalized, and spontaneous. The use of social media empowered employees and managers alike to fill one another’s buckets. It also enabled people to be recognized in real time—and significantly, for that recognition to be viewable by every employee who was active

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on the system. JetBlue’s then chief people officer, Joanna Geraghty, said: “Simply saying thanks has such an incredible impact because people like to be recognized. People like to be called out for good work they are doing, for living the values.” Follow-up surveys, administered just four months after the launch of the Lift application, indicated that it had increased employee satisfaction 88 percent.14 As we mentioned briefly in Chapter 5, one of the most powerful ways of filling our own and other people’s buckets is through expressing gratitude. The easiest way to do this, of course, is to simply tell someone we’re grateful, but research has shown that written expressions of gratitude have a greater impact.15 Martin Seligman, considered the father of positive psychology, tested the impact of several means of expressing gratitude on more than 400 subjects. By far the most effective—for both the giver and receiver of gratitude—was the “gratitude visit,” in which a person wrote and personally delivered a letter of gratitude to someone who’d never been properly thanked for his or her kindness.16 An employee may see her day-to-day work as uninspiring, her professional life as unsuccessful. But a letter of gratitude from a colleague can help her realize what a difference her work has made and how successful she really is, generating positivity in three ways: awakening or reminding the writer of her feelings of gratitude and the reasons for them; illuminating the recipient’s own understanding of how much she is valued and appreciated; and reinforcing a point of contact, a connection, for the flow of future positive emotions within the relationship. As we’ve pointed out, employees are more engaged when they’re able to use their strengths—and research further indicates they’re more likely to feel engaged in their work when they’re recognized for what they’re doing well. A 2009 Gallup study of worker engagement, for example, presented more than a thousand employees with two statements and asked them to select the one with which they most agreed. Thirty-seven percent of respondents agreed with the statement: My supervisor focuses on my strengths or positive characteristics. Among these respondents, 61 percent described themselves as engaged in their work. Only one percent described themselves as actively disengaged.

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A much lower percentage—45 percent—described themselves as engaged when they agreed with the statement: My supervisor focuses on my weaknesses or negative characteristics. The majority of these employees were either not engaged or actively disengaged. Gallup created a third category—ignored—for those who didn’t agree with either statement. Among these, an astonishing two percent felt actively engaged in their work, whereas 57 percent were not engaged. Fully 40 percent were actively disengaged.17 Employees want to matter. As the American philosopher William James said, more than 100 years ago, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” There may be many reasons why organizational leaders are reluctant to express gratitude to employees: Leaders may think it makes them look weak. They may think employees will stop trying to correct their shortcomings. They may feel awkward or embarrassed, or think the other person will feel embarrassed. They may have been promoted within a hypercompetitive culture of criticism that focuses on correcting failure. Or they may be incredibly busy and not perceive recognition and gratitude as a top priority. The overwhelming body of research we’ve studied at Potentialife has led us to offer this advice: Instead of ignoring the people you work with, ignore these reasons for ignoring them, which have repeatedly and exhaustively been proved wrong. You, your colleagues, and your organization are more likely to succeed when you recognize and express thanks for the best in yourselves and others. We know, based on our own work and an abundance of empirical evidence, that when you appreciate the good, the good appreciates.

SHARPening Moment: Relationships • Reflect on your positive relationships: family, friends, and workmates. How does each strengthen you, and make you not only happier, but also more effective? At work, can you point to concrete successes that have resulted from having positive relationships with coworkers or clients? (continued)

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(continued) • Imagine how you might expand this circle of positive relationships: Are there missed opportunities, in your interactions, for being more authentic and positive with others, maximizing your time in what we call the Benefactor Empowerment Zone? • Try to envision ways you might use specific approaches mentioned in this chapter—expressing recognition and gratitude, giving active constructive response (to both failure and success), encouraging feedback, and creating psychological safety, for example—to build on positive, trusting relationships. In the context of your own interactions at home and at work, how might you implement these methods?

RESPONDING TO SUCCESS AND FAILURE Recognition and gratitude are the fundamental building blocks of positive relationships. As we’ve pointed out, these relationships are key to good leadership—which is, at its core, about working with other people to get things done, no matter where you stand in the organizational hierarchy and no matter how formal or informal your role is. Just as important to the continued health of these relationships is the way we react to news, both good and bad. You might think the way you respond to success is no big deal, if you’ve already built a positive relationship with your coworkers—but the work of Shelly Gable, a psychologist at the University of California–Los Angeles, has shown it’s not that simple. Your response to success can, ideally, lead to future success; at worst, it can strangle it in its crib. Gable and her colleagues have shown, in fact, that how we respond to positive events, such as a person sharing his or her accomplishments with us, is a better predictor of relationship success than how we respond to negative events—and that the most empowering way of

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Figure 7.2

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Matrix of Responses

responding is what the article calls active constructive responding, or ACR.18 A matrix (Figure 7.2)—much like the one we used to illustrate authenticity and positivity (see Figure 7.1)—illustrates the point. Let’s illustrate the different responses with an example. Say a colleague, Dinah, has just come up with a new way of conducting inventory that could reduce both the time and expense of getting it done. It’s a problem several people on the work team have been asked to analyze, and she’s the first to have put together a plan. She comes to us, all excited, and tells us about it. The worst response we could give is at the lower left, the passive destructive response. We might turn away, avoid eye contact, or change the subject. Or we might make a quick criticism of the idea—say, that it’s not quite detailed enough to be useful—and then begin to talk about the work other people are doing. At top left is the active destructive response, which isn’t much better—here we find something to attack or critique, and focus on that, in a response that is entirely and vigorously negative: “That sounds like it’s going to take a lot of training, and I don’t know that in the end it’s going to save us much time. I would have looked for a simpler approach.” The underlying cause of the two forms of destructive responses could be personal insecurity and feeling threatened by

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others’ success or a general reluctance to recognize others positively for one reason or another. The passive constructive response, bottom right, is at least positive. We might smile or say something innocuous, such as, “Good news. That’s nice,” and then move on to other things. Although not as bad as a destructive response, being passively constructive fails to make the most of a positive event. Ideally, we’d find a way to give the active constructive response, depicted in the upper right quadrant. We’d maintain eye contact, smile, and take a real interest in Dinah’s ideas. We’d show enthusiasm, match her excitement, ask more questions, and reinforce the positive aspects of her plan—for example, saying, “That looks really promising. Tell me exactly what you have in mind,” and then proposing to share it at the next team meeting. Even if you don’t think it’s a flawless plan, you can remember the strengths-based approach—developing its strengths and managing its weaknesses—when considering it against other options. And you’ll have encouraged Dinah to do more and better thinking. ACR is gradually becoming recognized and adopted as an important tool for improving relations within organizations, including the U.S. Army. The approach isn’t about mindless ego stroking; it’s about authentic engagement with a positive idea, appreciating it and keeping the excitement going. The response has to be genuine—even if we’re not as excited about the topic to the same degree as the person sharing it, we need to acknowledge and encourage his or her enthusiasm. ACR creates what Fredrickson and Joiner call “upward spirals” of positive emotions—extending the sharer’s enjoyment beyond the discovery or event itself, and building positive capacity so that the relationship will be better able to weather negative events.19 When things do go wrong, often spectacularly, our response to those failures is critical to the health of our professional relationships. At more senior levels, a leader’s response to failure can affect the entire organization’s future performance, as has been established in studies by Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School. When she was a doctoral student, studying with Richard Hackman, Edmondson designed a study to test his model of effective teamwork—to see whether teams that scored high on Hackman’s effectiveness scale were less likely to make medical errors.

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It was important research because—according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University—medical errors cause 251,000 deaths in the United States every year, the third most likely cause of death after heart disease and cancer.20 After years of data collection and analysis, Edmondson had results that were statistically significant—but not in the way she’d expected. Groups that met Hackman’s conditions for effectiveness made more mistakes, rather than fewer. It was a shocking result, one that contradicted decades of research, and it stumped Edmondson for a while. She had difficulty believing her results had produced such outliers, and after serious reflection, she arrived at a revised hypothesis: That the good teams didn’t make more mistakes—they merely reported more mistakes. Back at the hospital, Edmondson tested the new hypothesis and discovered that the less effective teams did, in fact, commit more errors but tended to conceal all but the most egregious ones that could not be concealed—such as those that caused the death of a patient. The most effective teams did, when all was accounted for, make fewer errors.21 Tal—who was an undergraduate at Harvard, studying with Dr. Hackman when Edmondson was working on this study—had a déjà vu experience a few years ago, when the CEO of a large company brought him in as a consultant to help solve a serious problem: His employees were constantly lying to him. Dishonesty was a “sinister cancer,” the CEO said, that was growing at an alarming pace throughout the company. Tal picked a few employees at random and talked to them individually. It didn’t take him long to figure out what was going on: Every time an employee said something the CEO didn’t like, that employee would be berated, often in front of others. To save themselves from this humiliation, they began to conceal things from him or simply to stop telling the truth—and instead of the upward spiral modeled by Gable and colleagues’ ACR, relations plunged into a sharp downward spiral; when, occasionally, the CEO found out someone had lied to him, he became livid and castigated the person even more brutally. Successful teams, Anita Tucker and Amy Edmondson have discovered, enjoy psychologically safe environments—they know no team member is going to be embarrassed if he or she speaks out, asks for help, or admits failure. When each team member feels comfortable failing,

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the whole team can learn and improve. Learning can’t take place if mistakes are concealed and most people are unaware of them—in such cases, it’s more likely that errors will be repeated.22 It’s easy to create psychological safety when things run smoothly; it’s more challenging when they go wrong. Angus is glad he didn’t know Tal when he was a younger man with a shorter temper. In his early years at McKinsey, he could be hard on his teams. When under stress and pressed for time, he could really blow his cork—and this happened a lot. It happened once when he’d assigned a team to prepare a draft report for a client, based on an outline he’d left with them before he’d gone on a long trip overseas. The team worked on a tight deadline, often working late, and when Angus reconnected with them to review the draft, he didn’t see what he was expecting. Angus, to everyone’s horror, exploded and literally tore the draft into pieces. They hadn’t done as he’d asked. He’d left them an outline—why hadn’t they followed the outline? They were going to have to start over. It was hopeless. Fortunately for Angus, one of his team members was a French engineer who was used to working for difficult bosses, and who, unlike Angus, was apparently schooled in the ways of psychological safety and ACR. The day after Angus’s rage had driven everyone out of his office, he found an envelope on his desk. Inside was the outline Angus had originally given the team—and which, Angus now realized, they had followed. Drawn over the outline was a giant smiley face. Angus knew he’d screwed up. In a moment of jet-lagged anger he’d wrecked the team’s psychological safety. They’d lost their motivation, their creativity, and their willingness to take risks with him—and he was the one who was going to have to work hardest to regain it all. Angus isn’t proud of this episode, but it was an event that helped him grow as a leader. In the 1980s, the Israeli air force instituted a no blame policy, encouraging pilots and squadrons to report errors and near misses. Removing the threat of punishment created a safe organizational environment in which learning could take place—instead of punishment, correction and preventive action were emphasized. Five years into this new policy, the reporting of errors had increased—but the

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accident rate had been reduced by 50 percent.23 One of our favorite sayings is: Learn to fail, or fail to learn. As leaders we need to embrace this kind of openness to failure toward ourselves and toward those with whom we work. Another important reason for organizational leaders to create psychological safety is so that they don’t lose their own awareness of what’s going on. Daniel Goleman coined the term CEO disease to describe how people in the organization tend to withhold (usually unpleasant) information from a leader. As a result, writes Goleman in Primal Leadership, there is “an acute lack of feedback . . . Leaders have more trouble than anybody else when it comes to receiving candid feedback, particularly about how they’re doing as leaders . . . the paradox, of course, is that the higher a leader’s position in an organization, the more critically the leader needs that very feedback.”24 If leaders don’t receive the facts about their team’s performance, or honest feedback on their own performance, they’re unlikely to grow in their roles—and they won’t receive this feedback unless they make it clear it’s safe for employees to speak up. A psychologically safe environment is the antidote to CEO disease. To cultivate relationships that are built for success, it is necessary to appreciate good news through ACR and to tend carefully to bad news while ensuring psychological safety. ACR helps amplify positivity, while psychological safety contributes to the levels of authenticity. And it is through the constant and consistent spread of positivity and authenticity that individuals, relationships, and the entire organization flourish.

Workplace Tactics for Establishing and Maintaining Positive, Authentic Relationships • Establishing an Atmosphere for Good Working Relationships: When recruiting colleagues, include interview questions that probe for a “we vs. me” focus in their approach to work. When orienting new colleagues, introduce them to the evidence and research that demonstrates (continued)

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(continued) the importance of relationships, collaboration, and building networks beyond the immediate team, as well as the ideas of experimenting, making mistakes, and learning from them. Performance contracts should include goals focused on this kind of experimentation: stretching, failing, and learning. The importance of healthy relationships should be regularly reinforced. One useful tool is a group exercise that prompts team members to discuss one good relationship in each of their lives: what each person brings to the relationship that makes it so good. Among the qualities mentioned, the team can select the top two or three that will govern how they relate to one another. • Encouraging Positivity and Authenticity: Healthy working relationships, and the behaviors that characterize them, should be modeled by leaders. Fully focus on the team—both the work they’re doing and the concerns they raise—by using the techniques for deep listening and ACR mentioned in this chapter. Make a point to examine— perhaps even in collaboration with team members, if you know them well and consider it safe to do so—your own say/do ratio, comparing the number of things you say you’re going to do and the number of things you’ve actually done. Encourage colleagues to bring their own score closer to 1:1, a measure of perfect integrity and authenticity. There’s also much team leaders can do to develop skills and behaviors among colleagues. Allow them to get to know one another better with occasional agenda-free events, such as monthly breakfasts or lunches. Whenever possible, personal face-to-face discussions should be encouraged. Team members should be involved in developing the positive, big-picture focus on projects and tasks and should be made to feel as though each is a necessary component of the team. When assigning roles and tasks, choose people you can

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trust and hand over responsibility to them, to help build their confidence and competence. Don’t hesitate to use your own interpersonal style, including humor and openness, to build rapport and create a fun, safe working atmosphere. Reward colleagues who focus on more than their day jobs and are collaborative, experimental, and open to risk. Be sure to communicate that these colleagues are learning from mistakes, accepting challenges, and contributing to the team’s positivity. • Creating Psychological Safety: To begin, it might be helpful to establish a clear baseline picture of how colleagues perceive the team’s or organization’s psychological safety. Amy Edmondson, as part of Google’s re:Work project, has developed a measurement tool for doing just this, available at the re:Work website (https://rework.withgoogle.com/ guides). Remain alert to what Edmondson describes as the three simple things individuals can do to foster team psychological safety: framing the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem; acknowledging your own fallibility; and modeling curiosity (asking lots of questions). Establishing psychological safety often consists of small gestures—setting aside available time when team members can come to you with concerns, for example. By openly expressing your own feelings or mistakes, you can encourage team members to do the same. When communicating a vision or message, particularly a message that might be difficult to accept, be focused on exactly what that message is and how you’re communicating it. Encourage regular feedback on your own performance as a leader—and act decisively and conspicuously on this feedback. Include a speak up agenda item in regular team meetings, where colleagues can make suggestions and offer authentic and positive insights in a safe environment. (continued)

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(continued) • Establishing a Culture of Recognition: Recognition should be an engrained element in team interactions, occurring early and often, even if it’s a simple, informal “thank you.” Success stories should be regularly shared. Regular, small rewards, such as a lunch celebrating an incremental achievement, are better than an annual gold star or employee-of-the-month program. Team members should recognize one another periodically, also, even if it’s something as simple as remembering and celebrating one another’s birthdays. Be careful to avoid merely recognizing collective or individual triumphs, which can discourage risk-taking; personal appreciation, in particular for taking risks and failing, should be a part of all developmental discussions.

CHAPTER 8

Purpose Meaning and Commitment Are the Path to Joyful Leadership “Purpose endows a person with joy in good times and resilience in hard times, and this holds true all throughout life.” —William Damon, The Path to Purpose1

In Chapter 4 we introduced you to the late Anita Roddick, the teacher, activist, and The Body Shop CEO who relied on her ability to articulate and inspire others with her vision of a company true to its core values: ethical community-based trade, the protection of animals and the environment, fair labor practices, and—in an industry famous for imposing cartoonish standards of beauty—a global campaign to boost women’s self-esteem. Roddick once said: “I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in.”2 Those words may not sound all that radical now, but in the 1980s, when The Body Shop was beginning to grow, the company seemed bathed in a revolutionary aura. It was a remarkable achievement: Roddick and her brand, a decade before the dawn of the information age, were able to capture the collective consciousness. To step into a Body Shop store was to travel to a world of noble ideals, and the act of buying cosmetics was designed to awaken concerns not many were voicing yet: about the ozone layer, the

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objectification of women, overseas sweatshops, and testing cosmetics on animals. For Roddick, capitalism didn’t have to be a fulfillment of the social Darwinism that had dominated the industrial era—the idea that the strong should see their wealth and power increase, while the weak should continue to decline. “I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently,” Roddick once said. “This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.”3 The Quakers, it was said, came to America to do good, and they ended up doing well. To do good and to do well can be two sides of the same coin. In 2011, University of California–Los Angeles professor Jim Stengel, the former global marketing officer for Procter & Gamble, reported the results of a study in which he tracked 10-year growth trends of 50,000 consumer brands worldwide. His team was looking for patterns that could explain the success of the fastest-growing brands—and what they discovered surprised them. The data showed that the world’s fastest-growing brands were “organized around ideals of improving people’s lives and activated these ideals throughout their business ecosystems.” The top brands, in other words, were driven by a higher purpose—and they outperformed other companies by a wide margin. This was true of every one of the world’s 50 highest-performing brands, and this group—the “Stengel 50”—grew three times faster than their competitors. Over the 10-year period Stengel studied, an investment in the Stengel 50 would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. In the book derived from this research, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies, Stengel wrote, “The team and I were totally unprepared for this, and for its consistency across very different businesses in different geographies, in both B2B and B2C categories.” The Stengel 50 included business management consultants, soft drink manufacturers, luxury apparel designers, IT and mobile communications companies, online retailers, brewers and distillers, credit card companies, and a chocolate maker.4 They couldn’t have been more different in the goods and services they offered to the world—but they had similar ideas about the values

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they conveyed to themselves and their customers. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in Built to Last, studied the most successful organizations and reported similar findings. This basic truth also applies to individuals. Stanford professor Damon, one of the leading scholars of human development, writes in his book The Path to Purpose: “Study after study has found a person’s sense of life purpose to be closely connected to virtually all dimensions of well-being.” The studies Damon refers to focus on both psychological and physical well-being. Remember that in the Blue Zones, where people tend to live longer and better, Dan Buettner pointed to a sense of purpose as one of the key enablers of longevity and wellness. As Damon points out, people driven by a deeply held sense of purpose are also better equipped to deal with hardships—knowing where you’re headed, and why, makes it harder for you to get knocked off the rails.5 In the book Psychological Capital, management professor Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef, and Bruce J. Avolio write: “It is truly amazing to see how persistent some individuals are to a cause if they have a very deep belief in that cause, purpose, or mission.”6 As Rick Warren reminds us in his best-selling book The PurposeDriven Life, a strong sense of purpose also helps us set priorities: “Without a clear purpose you have no foundation on which you base decisions, allocate your time and use your resources. You will tend to make choices based on circumstance, pressures and your mood at the moment. People who don’t know their purpose try to do too much, and that causes stress, fatigue and conflict.”7 But what if we’re not fortunate enough to work for Roddick or another leader who helps connect business objectives to purposeful pursuits? How can we as individuals working for a less-than-ideal organization find meaning at work? Or, how can we as leaders create a meaningful workplace for our colleagues? The answer lies in a distinction made by Viktor Frankl, author of the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, between meaning of life and meaning in life. One of the myths we discussed in Chapter 3—The key to fulfillment lies in seeking and finding the meaning of life—often prevents many people from finding meaningful work. Given the centrality of work to our life, people often look for the dream job that will provide that meaning. Anything short of this ideal place to work is immediately discarded as

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a compromise, as, at best, a stepping-stone to what they were really meant to do with their lives. Needless to say, with the bar set so high, this approach leaves little chance for fulfillment from work—or from most other activities. In lowering the bar, it is important to recognize that the work we do in and of itself may not be inherently meaningful, and to draw on the existentialists’ argument, life itself may not be inherently meaningful. However, some people, particularly those with an internal locus of control, are able to inject their work—and life—with meaning. Roddick understood that there may be nothing inherently meaningful in manufacturing and selling beauty products, or in any other business venture. We either inject meaning in what we do, or we don’t—and if we don’t, we’re almost sure to find our work, and our lives, unsatisfying. Injecting our work and the work of our colleagues with meaning is something we can all do—and this, precisely, is what 10X leaders do.

CRAFTING OUR WORK The research we discussed by Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton in Chapter 3 suggests how it is possible for us to find meaning in our work. Their research demonstrates how employees in almost any industry and any organization experience their work as a job, a career, or as a calling. Janitors in hospitals, for example, can experience their work as a calling, as can doctors in those same hospitals; and then there are janitors and doctors in those very same hospitals who experience their work as a job. The same applies to hairdressers, engineers, teachers, or managers—some of whom experience their work as a job, as meaningless, whereas others experience the same work as a calling, as meaningful. If asked to predict the findings of Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s research in hospitals on work as a job, career, or calling, most people would have guessed that those who found their work most meaningful—a calling—were exclusively physicians and nurses. Yet, that is not what the research demonstrated. Some janitors—as well as some doctors—at the hospital viewed their work as a job, but others saw it as a calling, even though they did the same work as other janitors: cleaning soiled linens, mopping hallways, and stocking

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restrooms. Clearly, official job titles and descriptions have little to do with it. The janitors who viewed their work as a calling felt these official duties were only part of what they did. The idea of job crafting draws on the work of Wrzesniewski and Dutton and helps redefine one’s work in meaningful ways by injecting meaning into it. People of any rank within an organization can make different meanings of their work—and of themselves at work. There are three broad categories of ways to do this: first, altering the tasks you perform, to spend more energy on tasks you find more gratifying; second, changing relationships in the workplace, to spend more quality time with people who make you feel better about yourself and your work; and third, using cognitive reframing to change the way you perceive your work. Janitors in hospitals who saw their work as a calling did just what the professors prescribed. They saw their work as another aspect of the hospital’s mission to promote health, cure sickness, and relieve suffering. These janitors were more likely to engage with doctors, nurses, and patients and their families, to listen when someone felt like talking. They charged themselves with doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families. Some helped calm patients when nurses inserted IV lines. Others helped visitors find their way around the hospital. They weren’t paid for this so-called extra work—but some said this aspect of the job was what motivated them to get out of bed every morning. They internalized the broader mission of the hospital—not because of their official job description but almost in spite of it. Summarizing their findings, Wrzesniewski and Dutton point out, “Even in the most restricted and routine jobs employees can exert some influence on what is the essence of their work.”8 Another example of cognitive reframing is offered by Di Blackburn of Sainsbury’s, one of our clients, who dreads, almost above all the other tasks she confronts in her working life, dealing with e-mails. “It can be real drudgery,” she said. “Oh, gosh, here come another 20 e-mails.” But when I thought about my purpose in life, it’s—whether I’m at work or at home—developing people. I got frustrated thinking about the time all these e-mails consumed, but what I

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realized, when I looked at what was actually in the e-mails, was that they were about helping people and building on that helping relationship. It was something I needed to do for them . . . . I get quite a large amount of e-mail, but now I enjoy doing it and have a different approach to it. I can spend more time in that zone, leading and developing, if I think about it in the right way. The same work can and often is experienced in very different ways. There is a story about a person who walked past a construction site in Italy and asked the builders what they were doing. The first builder said that he was laying bricks; the second said that he was building a wall; and the third said that he was building a cathedral to the glory of God. These are totally different subjective experiences of the same work, and no doubt with very different levels of life satisfaction and performances. To experience purpose, one does not need to be engaged in extraordinary, world-changing, life-transforming work. Writes Damon, in The Path to Purpose: “A purpose can be noble without being ‘heroic’ or requiring daring, life-endangering adventures. Noble purpose may mean this, and our history books are full of dramatic accounts of courageous acts that really did save the day. But noble purposes also may be found in the day-to-day fabric of ordinary existence.”9 It’s interesting to point out that one of the primary indicators of success in the working world—salary—doesn’t seem to be a very significant predictor of whether one finds work meaningful. Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace report found that employees with college degrees—a strong predictor of higher earnings—were less likely than those with less education to report being engaged in their work. One notable exception, studied intently by Bunderson and Thompson and reported in 2009, is zookeepers: Though more than 80 percent of the zookeepers Bunderson and Thompson studied had college degrees, their average annual income was less than $25,000. Their typical job description involved scrubbing enclosures, cleaning up more animal waste in a day than most people clean up in a lifetime, and working holidays and weekends. Difficult as their work often was,

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there weren’t (and still aren’t) many opportunities for zookeepers in the United States—there are only so many zoos, after all. Yet Bunderson and Thompson found that many zookeepers had volunteered for years while they waited for a paid position to open up. While many zookeepers were committed to the conservation mission of zoos, that was only part of the reason for their inspiration—nearly all expressed the idea that they were born to do the job.10 They were the kind of ideal employees Aviva’s Karen Stefanyszyn envisioned in a 2011 speech describing employees who would make a business vibrant, successful, and valuable: “We don’t want people who can do the job,” she said. “We want people who can’t not do the job.”11 Or as one of Tal’s students, Ebony Carter, wrote, “Instead of focusing on what we can live with, we should be thinking about what we can’t live without.”

PURPOSE AS MEANING AND COMMITMENT Damon offers a clear definition of purpose: “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self.” He also makes an important distinction between purpose and goals (though we see goals as important tools for fulfilling one’s purpose, as we’ll soon explain). Purpose, Damon said, involves (a) a long-term commitment and (b) meaning or value beyond oneself.12 Douglas Conant, the former CEO of Campbell’s, highlights these two aspects in “The Power of Idealistic-Realism,” a 2012 article he wrote in the Harvard Business Review: An idealistic vision is what motivates all of us. We want to know that we are working toward something consequential, something noble. This simple truth applies to every single person within your organization, from the receptionists to the general managers. That is the real job of a true leader—to offer a vision that inspires and motivates. But as difficult as that is to achieve, it is not enough. People also need to know that you yourself, as a leader, are in touch with reality, that you are willing to roll up your sleeves and engage in the hard work that execution entails.13

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In other words, in addition to having a meaningful ideal, a leader needs to display a real commitment to that ideal. President John F. Kennedy delivered one of the most inspirational speeches of the twentieth century on September 12, 1962, at Rice University in Houston, Texas, the site of NASA’s new Manned Spacecraft Center. On that day, Kennedy announced his intention to marshal the resources of the U.S. space program and land human beings on the moon within a decade. It was an astonishing example of what’s referred to today as a stretch goal. The most NASA had done so far had been to send astronaut Scott Carpenter into three consecutive earth orbits, but Kennedy tied the goal to a higher purpose—to several higher purposes, actually: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills . . . . The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.” Kennedy also urged and inspired the assembled scientists and engineers to commit themselves to the mission. “We must be bold,” he said. “But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.”14 Though Kennedy didn’t live to see it, NASA’s space program— overcoming unheard-of challenges and setbacks, many of them as tragic as his own 1963 assassination—fulfilled his audaciously stated purpose when the Apollo 11 mission landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969. And nearly a half century later, as he predicted, Americans and others around the world—in their schools, their hospitals, their private businesses, and their homes—continue to reap the benefits of this historic burst of technological inquiry and exploration. Meaningfulness is about the connection we feel toward an activity—whether we experience it as personally significant and aligned with our ideals. Commitment is about the motivation or energy we bring to the activity—and consequently, how likely we are to persevere in what we’re doing. In his book, which was focused mostly

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on how young people chose the direction their lives would take, Damon categorized people into four groups—the disengaged, the dreamers, the dabblers, and the purposeful. We adapted Damon’s idea into a simple matrix (Figure 8.1) that applies to professional adults working in organizations. You know already that the place you least want to be in one of our matrices is at the bottom left. You’re drifting here, doing something that has no meaning for you and to which you feel no commitment. Back when Tal was in school and had his eyes on a career as a professional squash player, he couldn’t have cared less about his calculus class. In the classroom he was drifting and purposeless. At the top left, a person feels a strong sense of meaningfulness in a cause or activity but has little or no personal commitment to it. For Tal, a personal example is environmentalism. He cares deeply about the future of the planet, and he knows how important it is to do something about it—but he doesn’t do much, other than recycle his family’s bottles and paper and, occasionally, argue passionately for taking care of the environment. Early in his career, Angus often found himself at the bottom right of the matrix. To earn a reputation as a team player, he would take on client projects that were outside his fields of interest. Once he’d started these projects, though, he would find he had no deep connection to them. The work was difficult, but not at all fulfilling—it was a grind. Today, in his leadership development work, helping people become happier, more engaged, and more successful, Angus finds

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himself squarely in the top right, where meaningfulness and commitment meet. It’s not always easy—it involves plenty of difficulties and challenges—but he rarely feels as though it’s a grind or as though he’s drifting. The truth is that the variety of working experiences, and the rapid pace of change, in today’s disaggregated world will put us in each of these four quadrants at some point. We all have distasteful chores or tasks that need to get done, and that we’ll do, even though we neither care much about them nor have much commitment to them. We all have dreams we don’t do much about. We can’t live every waking moment enrobed in the splendor of meaningfulness and commitment. But we can actively move more of our lives to that upper-right sweet spot—we call it the Purposeful Life Zone—where we connect, as often as possible, with the ideals that give us a deep sense of meaning, and where we’re willing and able to dedicate ourselves to realizing those ideals.

TOOLS FOR PURPOSEFUL LIVING Damon’s two distinguishing characteristics—a long-term commitment and a meaning or ideal beyond oneself—are necessary for identifying one’s purpose. But let’s face it: They aren’t of much practical use. Long-term commitment is difficult, and in many cases unsustainable. And an ideal greater than oneself is—like Roddick’s dedication to ideals such as justice and self-esteem—an abstraction that’s hard to grab on to. We discussed recrafting our work as a powerful tool to inject our work with meaning. There are other practical tools we can use for living with greater purpose. For example, the very characteristics that make goals lesser, so to speak, ambitions than ideals—goals are aimed at the short term and at concrete and specific outcomes—make them useful for aligning oneself with a larger purpose. Eliminating animal testing in all Body Shop product lines, for example, was a goal the company achieved in 1993—and three years later The Body Shop gathered 4 million signatures on a petition to ban cosmetic testing on animals throughout the European Union. The EU ban went into effect in 2004.

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Similarly, Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade provided a deep sense of purpose to NASA employees and many others. And the goals we set do not have to be extraordinary ones, like Roddick’s or Kennedy’s. Although it’s not possible to live every moment fulfilling our greater purpose, it is possible to set up and pursue shorter-term goals that will inject our day-to-day activities with both meaning and commitment. The greatest challenge in developing goals, however, is precisely that in setting them, we often misidentify our larger purpose. In Chapter 3, we discussed Dan Gilbert’s study of the professors who’d earned tenure. Achieving that goal merely created a short-lived spike in happiness among those who participated in his study. Other research indicates that similarly self-focused goals—earning a bonus or raise, winning the sales contest, or being promoted—are likely to similarly disappoint. What is the answer, then? How can we consistently inject a sense of purpose in our life? By changing the expectations we articulate for our goals. Rather than perceive them as ends, expecting their attainment to make us happy, we need to see them as means (recognizing that we’ll be happy in the pursuit of them, if they’re in line with our ideals). It’s a bit of a paradox, we know: A goal is a means, and the experience is the end. Well-designed goals give us a road map that helps us enjoy the present, and enjoy the journey we’re taking toward achieving it. They help us focus our energies on the things we find most meaningful, and they energize us to make the most of opportunities we encounter along the way. Surely it’s gratifying to reach our destination, but the main generator of happiness is the journey that constitutes the path to that destination. In the words of psychologist David Watson, author of the Handbook of Positive Psychology: “It is the process of striving after goals—rather than goal attainment per se—that is crucial for happiness.”15 And as Tal wrote about in his book Happier, “Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain, nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak.”16

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SHARPening Moment: Purpose • Identify the things you do at work and at home that fill you with a sense of both meaningfulness and commitment, as defined in this chapter. • Try to strategize ways to spend more time on these purposeful activities—more time doing, and less time dreaming of doing them, or drifting into meaningless work. • If you find yourself unavoidably committed to doing work that’s not meaningful to you—grinding—try to strategize ways to recraft or reframe that work in a way that connects it to a larger, more meaningful purpose. Remember Blackburn’s approach to viewing e-mail not as drudgery but as a tool to lead and develop the potential of others. • Write the story of how you have achieved and will achieve important personal and work-related goals. Make sure to avoid fantasy: Design each of these goals as a step toward fulfilling your larger sense of purpose.

THE POWER OF STORY When Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s team sat down to talk with hospital janitors, they learned about their work attitudes by listening to their stories. Perhaps without being aware of it, the janitors were crafting narratives, with themselves as the main characters, about their trials and triumphs in the hospital. Storytelling, one of the oldest human art forms, is one of the most powerful ways in which people articulate their connection to the larger world. As children we build knowledge, skills, and moral sensibilities through stories, and as we mature, stories help us understand the culture we’re part of, make sense of the world, and understand the meaning of our own lives. Our brains are wired to connect the isolated episodes we encounter over time and chain them into a narrative that explains who we are and what we’re doing on this earth. In the

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words of Drew Gilpan Faust, the esteemed American historian and president of Harvard University: “We create ourselves out of the stories we tell about our lives, stories that impose purpose and meaning on experiences that often seem random and discontinuous. As we scrutinize our own past in the effort to explain ourselves to ourselves, we discover—or invent—consistent motivations, characteristic patterns, fundamental values, a sense of self.”17 The study Wrzesniewski and Dutton conducted is one in a growing body of research that finds storytelling to be a compelling way to connect oneself—and one’s coworkers—with a larger purpose at work. When he was a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan, Wharton management professor Adam Grant proposed a study set in a university fund-raising call center, among students working as phone solicitors. Phone solicitor may be among the least glamorous job titles imaginable; it’s a repetitive and often emotionally demanding job, and callers in the center faced daily abuse and a rejection rate of about 93 percent. Their manager had tried every incentive in the book, including competitions and cash prizes, with little if any success. Grant tried something different: He arranged for a recent graduate, who had attended the university on a scholarship funded by such contributions, to meet with the students. The graduate told the story of how the scholarship had changed the course of his life, and how grateful he was for their solicitation efforts. Even Grant was surprised at the results: One month after the graduate’s visit, the student workers’ time on the phone soliciting donations had increased by 142 percent—and revenue had increased by 171 percent. Revenues rose by over 400 percent in a subsequent study.18 There are, clearly, both psychological and financial benefits to meaningful stories that assign value to the work we do. In recent decades, stories have found their way into the world of corporate strategic planning. In the 1990s, the 3M Company— although it had a strong culture of storytelling in product development, sales and marketing, and human resources—built strategic plans in the traditional way, with bullet lists of goals: increase market share by 25 percent; increase profits by 30 percent. One of 3M’s managers decided

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to change this up, turning the bullet points to stories and the list into a longer narrative. It was a successful approach that spread within 3M and to other companies. In 1998, a group of 3M leaders wrote about this change in the Harvard Business Review: “If the language we use in writing strategic planning reports were only a matter of presentation, of the way we package ideas and offer them to others, it would not matter much how we wrote them. But writing is thinking. Bullets allow us to skip the thinking step, genially tricking ourselves into supposing that we have planned when, in fact, we’ve only listed some good things to do.”19 In the same way, stories can also be useful for individuals to articulate meaningful goals for the future. Many performance management systems and training programs involve these bulleted lists of goals and plans—but they’re often dry, the results typically uninspired. A story, on the other hand, can connect specific changes you plan to make right now, or in the near future, to the longer-term purpose you’ve defined for yourself. We strongly encourage you to craft stories in which you are the protagonist, focused on getting from where you are today to a purposeful future. But we don’t encourage fantasy. As the award-winning screenwriter Robert McKee once wrote for the Harvard Business Review: “You emphatically do not want to tell a beginning-to-end tale describing how results meet expectations. This is boring and banal. Instead, you want to display the struggle between expectation and reality in all its nastiness.”20 The film It’s a Wonderful Life would not be so wonderful if George Bailey had galloped from one triumph to another. When you write your story, you need to foresee and describe the potential challenges you’ll encounter and the ways in which you’ll overcome them. By including the struggles and obstacles, you’ll write—and ultimately live—your working life as an adventure.

THE INSPIRATIONAL LEADER: ANIMATING OTHERS WITH PURPOSE In a 2013 interview, Jane Dutton put her finger on a potential drawback to emphasizing how employees can create their own meaning at

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work. “People could argue that this contributes to how organizations can extract labor from people,” she said. “‘I’ll give you a crappy job and it’s up to you to make something good out of it.’”21 A good leader ensures that this form of exploitation does not happen, becoming the coauthor of the story she and her employees want written for themselves. As Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner point out in their book The Leadership Challenge, “A leader’s dynamism doesn’t come from special powers. It comes from a strong belief in a purpose and a willingness to express that conviction.”22 Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, Fortune magazine’s CEO of the twentieth century, adds: “Yesterday’s idea of the boss, who became the boss because he or she knew one more fact than the person working for them, is yesterday’s manager. Tomorrow’s person leads through a vision, a shared set of values, a shared objective.”23 We came up with four important principles to follow for leaders who want to rally a team or organization to commit to a shared vision: 1. The leader must help others see the connection between their own work and the greater purpose. One of Gallup’s Q12 questions is: Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important? As Wrzesniewski and Dutton clearly demonstrate, people are happiest when they feel they’re working at something valuable; a higher purpose is critical for workplace well-being, engagement, and loyalty. And as the work of Adam Grant proves, leaders who rally employees around a shared vision and higher purpose can increase—often dramatically—a team or organization’s productivity. 2. For a purpose to inspire others to action, it has to provide the right kind of challenge. In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras point out that visionary companies set “big, hairy and audacious” goals for themselves.24 President Kennedy’s goal of a manned lunar landing might have been the biggest, hairiest, and most audacious goal ever achieved, but it’s also important that a company’s stretch goals be attainable—if it’s too far beyond the reach of employees, it will be discouraging and counterproductive.

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Probably the most effective way to make an audacious goal attainable is to break it down into smaller, bite-size goals—an approach validated by Ellen Langer’s research. “People can imagine themselves taking steps,” she wrote, “while great heights seem entirely forbidding.”25 3. A purpose or vision must be communicated to others in a way that’s positive. We often use contrasting examples from the approach taken by two American leaders: Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Carter was considered by many to be one of the most intelligent U.S. presidents of the twentieth century and was elected during one of the most turbulent periods of twentieth-century America. After his inauguration in 1977, he helped negotiate several important foreign policy victories, including the historic Camp David accords and the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks II agreement with the Soviet Union. But today Carter may be best remembered for the speech he delivered on July 15, 1979, titled “Crisis of Confidence.” The whole point of the speech, apparently, was to rally Americans to help solve the energy crisis the recent Iranian Revolution sparked, but the tone was ominous and scolding. “Too many of us,” Carter said, “now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns.”26 Unsurprisingly, nobody much cared for President Carter’s “malaise speech.” Nobody was inspired by his purpose, which was difficult to untangle from his negative opinion of the people listening to it. Weeks after the malaise speech, Carter lost his bid for reelection to Ronald Reagan, whose vision of America was decidedly more optimistic. Reagan focused on the greatness of the American people and, at a time when things were arguably not going well, inspired them with his hopeful message. He was also a great storyteller, able to influence others and disarm critics with an anecdote or a well-timed punch line. It was difficult not to like him, even if you disagreed with him. Reagan, unlike Carter, won reelection to a second term in 1984.

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4. Communicating purpose effectively is to epitomize it—to walk the talk. As Gandhi once implored: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Words are not enough, no matter how positive they are, or how moving the story they tell. If words aren’t accompanied by action, they’ll only inspire cynicism. Actions speak louder than words is a truism, a cliché—but for some reason, it continues to be ignored too often. In his 1875 essay “Social Aims,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.” Visionary leaders are, above all, role models. They demonstrate their vision, their aspiration to a purpose larger than themselves, every day—not merely through what they say but also through who they are and what they do.

Tactics for Creating Meaningful Work Experience • Creating a beyond Business Culture: As Douglas Conant points out, people are driven by a vision statement and values that connect them to something noble and consequential. Articulating such a vision starts at the top of the company hierarchy, of course, but team leaders are responsible for making this statement a conspicuous part of work that’s planned and assigned: task lists, performance objectives, and project scoping should all be built on and feature references to these values and larger purpose. As a team leader, you should model this focus, striving to be a personal contributor to the collective company objective. When recruiting new colleagues, look for people who seek this sense of purpose in their work with direct questions: “What sorts of things give you meaning at work? What things really matter to you in the work we do?” When orienting new colleagues, link this sense of what they find meaningful to the wider purpose of the team and (continued)

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(continued) organization. Newly formed teams should collaboratively develop their own vision and values statements, in line with the company’s, aimed at a specific purpose. Performance contracts and reviews should include conversation points on the connection between people’s individual sense of purpose and outcomes. Although most companies perform a variety of community outreach programs, a team can unite around its own outreach initiative or corporate social responsibility program, such as a charity run or community service activities. When possible, teams should choose outreach activities that intersect with their company’s mission and values—for example, a work group at a pharmaceutical firm might volunteer at a hospital—and pay it forward. • Recrafting Work to Maximize Meaningfulness and Commitment: Recrafting can take many forms. Keep in mind the hospital custodians from Wrzesniewski and Dutton’s study—those who focused solely on their official duties were less likely to find much meaning in their work. As a group, a team might identify activities or tasks they find meaningless (such as responding to e-mails) and then consider: Is there anything they like about it? Is there anything about it that serves their larger purpose in life? Does it involve the use of any particular personal strengths? Would working collaboratively on these tasks allow people to view them more favorably or connect them more clearly to the organization’s vision? Does looking at these tasks in these ways change or shift anything in how they view them? Remember the three broad categories of work recrafting mentioned in this chapter: (1) altering the tasks performed, (2) changing workplace relationships, and (3) cognitive reframing to change the way work is perceived.

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Work with colleagues to discover which approach works best for them. Team leaders can also arrange life purpose workshops in which an outsider challenges each team member individually to formulate his or her life purpose, one that encompasses both work and private life. Career conversations should be linked to a sense of wider meaning and purpose, and development initiatives should focus beyond the colleague’s immediate job description. • Designing Appropriate Goals: To ensure work goals are the means to achieving a sense of broader purpose and joy, they should be carefully designed and articulated. As a team leader, you should model this by sharing your goals for the year, and the choices you’ve made in creating them. Ensure teams design goals for each task, using language that expresses this sense of deeper purpose, rather than a focus on numbers or other data. Team members should be encouraged to set goals for their personal lives as well as their work lives. • Telling the Right Stories: Teams should compose their own stories that tell why they’re doing what they’re doing and why it’s important. Colleagues should be able to create understanding and conviction around this story. When telling this story to others, be sure to tailor your message to the audience (e.g., shareholders, wholesalers, or retail customers) to maximize impact and efficiency.

CHAPTER 9

The Balanced Approach: SHARP and Cascading Success “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.” —Samuel Beckett

Now we’ve laid out the five performance multipliers in our strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose (SHARP) framework, one by one, and detailed some of the research affirming (1) the value of each to living productively and happily and (2) the costs to people and organizations when these attributes remain undeveloped. You’ve probably noticed we’re not the pioneers who discovered and developed the five elements of our SHARP framework. The brilliant business leaders, psychologists, and researchers we’ve mentioned in previous chapters have written extensively on their importance, and on how to develop them. You may have also noticed that so far, we’ve discussed these components in a discrete sequence, using our SHARP acronym to tie them all together. It’s a common tactic; Western thinkers and researchers tend to grapple with complex ideas by cordoning off territories and diving deeply into specialties and subspecialties. The value of exploring these ideas fully, in depth, is considerable, but as we’ve pointed out, there’s also a price to pay, in the disaggregated world, for keeping them

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in separate boxes. If we pigeonhole these concepts, we miss the opportunity to think systematically, to connect different ideas and disciplines, and to maximize results. The good news is that even if you wanted to zero in on one of the SHARP components and develop it in isolation, you’d find it impossible. In the sophisticated system that includes you, your work, your family, and your friends and coworkers, you’ll find that developing or neglecting any of these components is likely to have a profound effect on the development of the others. The next step in becoming a 10X leader is to be able to integrate the insights and skills we’ve introduced in the SHARP framework and apply them to flourish both within and beyond the work environment. In the late 1990s, a term arose in the IT community to describe a large-scale phenomenon that sometimes occurred in highly interconnected systems: cascading failure. The term is fairly new, but the phenomenon—a failure in one component that triggers the failure of other components, which triggers further failures, ultimately bringing the whole system to its knees—isn’t. It’s often used in reference to electrical grids: In 1996, for example, a single power line in the state of Oregon failed, funneling increased loads to other lines, which also failed, ultimately triggering a power outage for millions of customers across much of the western United States and Canada. We don’t come across many cascading failures in our lines of work, but when we do, they’re harrowing. Donal Skehan (see Chapter 5), celebrity chef, worked impossibly long hours, ate terrible food, and slept very little, until his teetering health finally collapsed and laid him out in a Vietnamese hospital bed: unable to exercise his strengths, to focus his mind on a task other than recuperation, to develop relationships with anyone outside his hospital room, or to pursue a purpose any loftier than his body’s immediate needs. His work and his life came to a grinding halt. Most of the failures we encounter are subtler examples, the decline or neglect of one SHARP component adversely affecting others. If you spend all your time developing your strengths, it’s likely you’ll feel more motivated, and improve your performance in the short term—but if you’re not connected to others in your workplace, or not acting out of a sense of purpose, you’re likely to feel you’re

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grinding through tasks in isolation, missing opportunities that come about through collaboration or the ability to remain mindful of your top priorities. If you focus solely on becoming healthier, you’ll have more energy—but without a purpose toward which to direct all that energy, you’ll find it difficult to sustain the effort. You might become disengaged from your work, and because you won’t be as committed as other team members, your relationships could suffer as a result. It’s conceivable that these five components could, as they atrophy, drag one another down—along with your well-being and your career. And your well-being or your career might suffer anyway, if you manage to sustain some of these performance multipliers and ignore others. It’s possible to be terrible at maintaining good working relationships while exercising your strengths, staying healthy, and remaining absorbed in work that’s driven by a powerful sense of purpose. Such people exist, and they’re often star performers who simply don’t believe mutual support or good working relationships are necessary for success. Jack Welch, for one, fired such star performers—no matter how impressive their individual results, he simply didn’t want people around who didn’t care about other people. In a slide show articulating its unique company culture, Netflix explicitly says that while some companies tolerate “brilliant jerks,” it prefers not to employ them. Their cost to effective teamwork is too high. When we set out to determine what makes a 10X leader, we were careful not to simply observe effective leaders and pluck individual traits, a la carte, to cram into some maddeningly unattainable formula. This is a crucial point to make: We chose the SHARP components not because they make a snazzy acronym but because they were traits we often found effective leaders using in combination to achieve impressive results—to achieve, in other words, the cascading success that occurs when all five performance multipliers are working together. We hesitate to use the word because, of all the buzzwords floating around out there now, it’s become one of the most tiresomely and imprecisely used, but in this case, synergy—the interaction of elements that, when combined, produce an overall effect greater than the sum of their individual effects—perfectly describes the way in which SHARP components feed one another to truly multiply one’s well-being and performance as a leader.

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SHARP: REAL-WORLD SYNERGY One of the leaders we find most fascinating is Bill George, the Harvard professor and former Medtronic CEO we introduced in Chapter 7. In George’s tenure at Medtronic, from 1991 to 2001, the company’s market value grew from $1 billion to $60 billion. He’s since become one of the leading voices on business leadership, a mentor, and author of best sellers such as Authentic Leadership and True North. George credits much of his success to weekly meetings he’s been having for decades with a group of close friends outside of work. In these Wednesday morning conversations, George and his friends talk about recent personal events, sharing both triumphs and disappointments. This group, he says, has helped remind him that he’s more than a business executive—but also helped him clarify his own thoughts and values, and make important work-related decisions, even when the talk isn’t work related. “Enduring relationships,” he has written, “are built on connectedness and a shared purpose of working together toward a common goal. Every person has a life story and wants to share it with you, if you are open to hearing the story and sharing in return. It is in sharing our life stories that we develop trust and intimacy with our colleagues.”1 On his blog, George writes that this support team has helped him through the most trying periods in his life, including the time his wife, Penny, was diagnosed with breast cancer and the difficult months that followed as she went through treatment. He credits Penny, a psychologist whose work focuses in integrative health and healing, with helping develop his own ideas about mindfulness and wellness. “Progressive companies are recognizing the importance of their employees’ health to their productivity and resilience by emphasizing wellness, healthy diets and nutrition, regular exercise and sleep patterns,” he said in a March 2016 interview with the Huffington Post.2 Penny took Bill to his first transcendental meditation workshop in 1975, and today he’s among the most prominent advocates of mindfulness in the workplace. He used to meditate in secret, behind a closed office door, but now he meditates 20 minutes twice a day, with the door wide open. Meditation “was the best thing that ever happened to me, in terms of staying grounded,” he told ABC News in February of 2015.

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“To be a successful leader you need to be authentic, grounded, and you need to be mindful.”3 In his leadership course at Harvard, he requires students to practice reflection, either through meditation or through answering introspective questions in a journal. In a 2012 article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review, George explained how mindful absorption helps both strengthen relationships and create a powerful sense of shared purpose: “The pursuit of mindful leadership will help you achieve clarity about what is important to you and a deeper understanding of the world around you,” he wrote. “Mindfulness will help you clear away the trivia and needless worries about unimportant things, nurture passion for your work and compassion for others, and develop the ability to empower the people in your organization.”4 It took years—decades—for Bill George to reach these kinds of conclusions. He began his career in a culture in which leadership was defined by power and intimidation. Over time, he saw that the fear generated by this approach wasn’t confined to underlings—it also affected leaders and forced them to be inauthentic. “By being vulnerable,” he wrote in 2015, “you can connect authentically with others. By being open, you retain the power, rather than acting in fear of being unmasked and exposed.”5 Of all the leaders we’ve studied from recent history, probably none was more vulnerable—nor more powerful—than Katharine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post through two of the most turbulent decades in American history. It wasn’t a job she wanted, at first; a self-described “doormat wife” to Philip Graham, the Post’s publisher since 1946, she reluctantly took the reins of the Post and its sister magazine, Newsweek, after Philip’s death in 1963. As the owner of the controlling shares in the corporation, she felt she had no choice. Graham would later confess her unreadiness and insecurity in her astonishingly frank Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, Personal History. The daughter of a rich Wall Street executive, she’d been raised to embrace a lifetime of raising children and hosting dinner parties. When she took over the Post at the age of 47, she knew nothing about business; in her book she explained how her financial mentor, Warren Buffett, taught her to read a balance sheet: Assets on the left, liabilities

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on the right. Buffett would later recall the time he visited her office and saw—10 years after she’d taken over the newspaper—a piece of paper on her desk that read Assets on the left, liabilities on the right. At first painfully shy around the newspaper’s executives, too embarrassed to speak to reporters, Graham learned, to her own surprise, that she had an unshakeable sense of moral duty as publisher of the Washington Post. At a time when many Americans questioned the integrity of their institutions, Graham decided her newspaper would tell the unvarnished truth. She hired the best reporters she could find, invited them to share in her righteous vision, and stood by their decisions, even when confronting substantial opposition. Graham and executive editor Ben Bradlee, in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, defied the Nixon White House and published the Pentagon Papers in 1971; the following year, when reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began unraveling the story of the Watergate scandal, Graham’s lawyers and accountants advised against publishing the more shocking revelations—because doing so, they cautioned, could result in the newspaper’s being shut down. The duty to inform the public about the Nixon administration’s crimes far outweighed any financial concerns, Graham decided—and with that decision, she won the unswerving loyalty and admiration of her staff, and established the Washington Post as the preeminent journalism outlet of the era. Profits of The Washington Post Company, the fifth-largest publishing empire in the United States, grew 20 percent annually from 1975 to 1985.6 Graham’s obituary in the New York Times, published on July 17, 2001, recalled her as the person who had “transformed The Washington Post from a mediocre newspaper into an American institution and, in the process, transformed herself from a lonely widow into a publishing legend.”7 What intrigues us most about Graham is that she was a leader so clearly made, not born. Thrust into a position of prominence with no experience or apparent skills, she discovered her greatest strength, used it to define a noble purpose for her organization, and then used that purpose to attract and forge authentic and positive relationships with the best people she could find for the job. In 2004, when Bill George published the article “The Journey to Authenticity,” it’s easy to imagine he was writing about Graham:

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“The one essential quality you must have to lead is to be your own person, authentic in every regard,” he wrote. “The best leaders are autonomous and highly independent. Those who are too responsive to the desires of others are likely to be whipsawed by competing interests, too quick to deviate from their course or unwilling to make difficult decisions for fear of offending. My advice to the people I mentor is simply to be themselves.”8 It’s also easy to imagine George was writing about Herb Kelleher, the near-legendary founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, who, with Rollin King and banker John Parker, outlined their business concept on a cocktail napkin in a San Antonio restaurant. In 1971, when the airline began operations, the industry wasn’t any friendlier than it is today—multiple competitors, astoundingly high overhead and capital requirements, a customer base highly sensitive to price, and boom-bust cycles that were often unpredictable. But Kelleher and King also saw plenty of room for improvement in an industry that was almost universally loathed by customers. They decided to create their own market within this hypercompetitive market by flying passengers shorter distances, often to smaller airports, at a lower cost, quickly, and on time. As CEO, Kelleher was the very embodiment of this no-frills approach. He was funny, genuine, and often quirky; Kevin Freiberg’s history of the airline, published in 1998, was titled Nuts!, a reference to Kelleher’s personality as well as the bags of peanuts the airline distributes in lieu of expensive (and usually terrible) airline meals. Kelleher also made it clear he valued input—or merely simple conversation—from everyone at the company, from the baggage handlers to the junior executives. He was often simply walking around among employees and customers at Southwest airport terminals, chatting and joking. He’s been spotted passing out donuts to passengers at the gate, helping clean out the cabin after a flight, and unloading baggage to help turn a plane around quickly. Before semiretiring in 2008, he was the apotheosis of Robert Greenleaf’s servant leader. Because Kelleher never ranked himself, in human terms, above his employees, he avoided the kinds of perks other business leaders enjoyed—and which often made them seem inauthentic when they tried to get chummy with the help. Kelleher never, for example, opted

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for a corporate airplane for himself or other Southwest leaders; he would either fly with the passengers or charter—at his own expense—a Southwest plane to get his group to its destination. Because circulating among employees and sharing his vision was clearly the part of his job he enjoyed the most and was best at, Kelleher was completely absorbed in his work, and his employees, seeing this, often felt the same; they were friends, working together to fulfill the airline’s purpose. In a 2013 interview with Forbes magazine, which has called him perhaps the best CEO in America, Kelleher told of a conversation he once had with a ramp agent who said: “Herb, I finally got it. You’re making work fun, and home is work.”9 Southwest Airlines has earned a profit every year since 1972. By the early twenty-first century, its market value had surpassed that of all the other major U.S. airlines combined. The culture that has distinguished Southwest—airplanes emblazoned with large paintings, flight attendants who tell corny jokes and sing in-flight announcements—is one in which people take themselves lightly but their jobs seriously. Southwest has one of the best safety records among U.S. airlines. There has been only a single on-ground fatality among the millions who’ve flown Southwest since the airline began operating with that name in 1971, and the airline has consistently received the lowest ratio of per-passenger complaints since the Department of Transportation began tracking customer satisfaction in 1987.10 A few Southwest employees enjoyed being around Kelleher so much that they spent their entire careers with the airline. Colleen Barrett worked for several years in the 1960s as Kelleher’s executive assistant, when he was a lawyer in New Jersey. She came to work for the airline in 1978 and rose steadily through its ranks, finally serving as the company’s president from 2001 to 2008. A few days before she stepped down as president, she gave a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business, in which she explained the purpose that drove her and so many people to work so hard for so many years. In 1971, she said, when the company began, only about 13 percent of Americans flew—and those 13 percent were almost exclusively male business travelers. “We wanted to really give America the freedom to fly,” Barrett said. “We helped people achieve their dreams.” Because of Southwest,

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grandmothers could visit their grandkids several times a year, and Barrett heard often from people such as these: letters from divorced parents, who thanked them for helping them watch their kids grow up, and e-mails from people who were opening business offices, asking if Southwest planned to maintain service to their city—because they wouldn’t open an office without knowing they could rely on the airline. She received multiple wedding invitations, from couples who had lived in different states and had been able to keep their relationships alive, sometimes for years, by taking frequent Southwest flights. “Herb used to go to all the receptions and meet all the women,” Barrett said, “and I used to buy all the wedding gifts.” This purpose—to “democratize the skies,” as Barrett put it—was more than lip service.11 In treating everyone at Southwest equally, Kelleher proved he really meant it. He was committed to fulfilling such a noble and ambitious purpose. So how did Kelleher make sure he recovered from difficult stretches and maintained the energy he needed to run the nation’s most successful airline? We’d love to tell you it was through a healthy diet, regular exercise, and plenty of sleep. Yes, unlike most senior managers who spend most of their time sitting behind their desks, he did get much exercise walking around interacting with customers and employees. But at the same time, he was—until he quit in 2010, because he found himself frequently out of breath—a smoker with a five-pack-a-day habit. He was often photographed with a cigarette in one hand, and sometimes photographed with a whiskey glass in the other. He was one of those rare people who are most energized, at all times, by being on the job. “For me,” he said in a 1999 interview, “working with these people is like going to the spa for a couple of weeks. They restore you and rejuvenate you and they renew your dedication to Southwest.”12

SHARP: NOT ONE SIZE FITS ALL Kelleher’s clear infraction, according to the SHARP framework we’ve so neatly spelled out for you, makes an important point, which we emphasize to participants in our 10X leadership program: The SHARP framework isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula. Not every concept we present will resonate equally with everyone. SHARP is a guideline,

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not a prescription, for experiencing joy in leadership. You won’t get anywhere with our program if you’re looking to become someone else. As George has written: “Leadership is the sum total of who you are.”13 We know, because we’ve seen it time and again, that effort guided by the SHARP framework can amplify your performance, productivity, and well-being. We also know that change is hard—that knowing what will make you happier and more effective is one thing; knowing how to change into that happier and more effective person—or, for starters, to believe it’s possible to change—is the more difficult task. Two additional purposes remain for us as authors of this book, before we release you into the disaggregated world: to demonstrate to you that lasting behavioral change, though challenging, is eminently possible, and to introduce briefly some of the tools we use to help people become—and remain—more fully who they are.

PART III

HOW TO CHANGE—AND STAY CHANGED

CHAPTER 10

Obstacles—and Pathways—to Lasting Behavioral Change Neuroplasticity and the Possibility of Joyful Transformation

erhaps one of the cruelest ironies of the new disaggregated world we described in Part One is that amid this environment of rapid, constant change, the apparatus by which it’s been engineered—the human spirit—tends to change slowly, if at all. This isn’t true for everyone, of course; we wouldn’t be experiencing such radical transformation if it weren’t for the innovative minority who have set this new economy in motion.

P

The development of a talented person into a joyful leader is, in a sense, a transaction, involving two symbiotic agents: the organization and the individual. In designing our 10X leadership program, we’ve done our best to correct for glaring flaws on the organizational side: The 10X program is scalable down to every employee in an organization; it’s administered, and requires practice and interaction, in the context of the workplace; it’s implemented over an extended period; and it measures results beyond attendance or satisfaction surveys. However, it’s not just organizational factors that determine whether change will take place. The individual matters a great deal too, of course. A 2014 article published in McKinsey Quarterly, aimed at explaining why so many leadership development programs fail to produce lasting change, identified several common mistakes, one of 161

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which is underestimating mind-sets: “Identifying some of the deepest, ‘below the surface’ thoughts, feelings, assumptions, and beliefs is usually a precondition of behavioral change—one too often shirked in development programs.”1 In other words, no matter what an organization does, change is unlikely unless individual participants are able to recognize the controlling mind-sets that affect our perceptions and beliefs.

CONTROLLING MIND-SETS These mind-sets are often so ingrained that they’re more personality traits than attitudes, but they can be changed. In our work we see these (often interrelated) mind-sets again and again.

Inertia: Clinging to the Status Quo For all its imperfections—its nagging discomforts, its mediocrity, its lack of progress or promise—the present state of things is at least familiar. It is usually nonfatal, and usually doesn’t upset anyone, so we ride it out. But the reluctance to rock the boat can create a dry, visionless conformity. In the 1950s, Polish psychologist Solomon Asch published studies of this phenomenon that have become classics in their field. Asch showed three lines of different lengths, lines A, B, and C, to a group of people. He then showed them a fourth line (pictured at left in Figure 10.1) and asked them which of the first three it was similar to in length. It was a simple question, with no tricks or illusions. Among the control group, in which subjects relied solely on their own perceptions, only 1 percent got the answer wrong. The answer, of course, is C. But when the participants were placed in a group whose other members had all been told to give the same wrong answer, 37 percent chose to go against their convictions and go with the majority opinion, which they knew to be wrong. We’re social animals. We care about what other people think. But Asch’s experiment is an important lesson for all of us about the danger

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Figure 10.1

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of caring to the point where we lose sight of what Bill George (see Chapter 7) calls our “True North.” Sometimes doing what’s best for ourselves, and for our organizations, requires us to buck the trend. At worst, the status quo can create toxic absurdity that runs counter to every organizational goal. Remember Tal’s story from Chapter 7, about the company full of people who preferred lying to their CEO constantly, rather than suffer his wrath? It would be disingenuous to claim you don’t care what other people think, and it’s not really possible to live and work as if you don’t. We work with people in our program to accept that it does matter what other people think, especially the people closest to you—but also to understand and evaluate views that conflict with their own, to filter through the noise, and to chart a course for change.

Overwork: So Much to Do, So Little Time “Happiness is determined by factors like your health, your family relationships and friendships, and above all by feeling that you are in control of how you spend your time.” —Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize–winning psychologist2

Probably the number one reason given for why people don’t make a change they acknowledge as healthy or productive is that they don’t have enough time. They’re simply too busy. We mentioned this briefly in our discussion of mindfulness and flow in Chapter 6, but it’s worth repeating: Just because you’re

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busy doesn’t mean you’re doing anything meaningful or productive. Without an awareness of exactly how we’re spending our time, we can easily find ourselves without enough time to do what most needs to be done. A little over a decade ago, Nobel Prize winner and Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues developed a tool that helped people chart how satisfied they were with how they spent their time: the Day Reconstruction Method. Professional women, in Europe and in the United States, were asked to list the activities in which they had engaged the previous day and report on how they felt during each activity. The women listed activities such as eating, working, taking care of their children, shopping, commuting, socializing, having sex, doing housework, and so on. The most surprising finding was that in general, mothers didn’t particularly enjoy the time they spent taking care of their children. It wasn’t that the mothers didn’t love their kids—in fact, most of them had said their children were the most important part of their lives. The problem was that when the mothers were with their kids, they weren’t really with them. They were physically there, but they were usually multitasking: checking work e-mails, talking on the phone, or planning an activity for later. Even though each of these activities, on its own, could have had the potential to get the mothers fully engaged in the moment and bring them joy, it proved too much when they all came together. Quantity affected quality. Because of the competing demands on their attention, potentially rewarding experiences became a chore and a burden. The American psychologist Tim Kasser shows in his research that time affluence—the feeling that one has sufficient time to pursue activities that are personally meaningful—is a better predictor of a person’s well-being than material affluence. By contrast, time poverty—the feeling that one is constantly stressed, hurried, overworked, or running behind—is a pervasive and destructive force in most people’s lives. The truism less is more comes into sharper focus for those who undergo the kind of day reconstruction Kahneman devised. To change—to develop our capacity to lead and flourish—we often need to focus more time on the activities and relationships that fulfill and

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strengthen us and less time on tasks we find draining or ultimately irrelevant. After he got married and started a family, Tal went through a period of adjustment during which he realized, with some frustration, that he wouldn’t be able to spend the same amount of time at work as before—and that he didn’t feel he was spending enough quality time with his family, either. He conducted a sort of preemptive day reconstruction, focusing on what he identified as the five most important areas of his life: his parenthood, his marriage, his career, his friendships, and his health. When he calculated how many hours would be required for him to spend as much time as he wanted on each of these, it turned out that he would need something like a 48-hour day. It was actually kind of liberating, to learn that this was so clearly impossible. Tal promptly adopted what he calls the good enough approach. In a perfect world, he would be spending 12 hours a day on work; in the real world, 8 would have to be good enough, even if it meant turning down some opportunities he would have liked to pursue. In a perfect world, he would practice yoga for 90 minutes a day, six days a week, and spend a comparable amount of time at the gym. In the real world, an hour of yoga twice a week and jogging for a half hour three times a week is good enough. Going out with his wife once a week is far from perfect, but it’s good enough to keep their relationship close. Tal does the best he can do, given his life’s competing demands and restraints. Guarding our time more closely—learning to say no more often, to people as well as to opportunities, and settle for the good enough— isn’t always easy. But simplifying doesn’t mean compromising on success. Leslie Perlow, Harvard Business School professor and author of the book Finding Time, has conducted several studies of intense work environments in which people have “a feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it.” Even at a fast-paced, high-tech firm, Perlow found, engineers who gave each other periods of quiet, uninterrupted time not only felt less stressed out, but they also got more done.3 Increasingly, evidence suggests that reducing the time pressure on our lives, and focusing more on the quality of the activities with which

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we consume time, both in our personal lives and at work, can help us not only to enjoy more, but also to achieve more, and to grow as leaders. A leader who is alert to this idea, for example, could arrange for colleagues to avoid the working lunch in which people eat hurriedly from cartons, hunched over their computer screens, ignoring one another while checking e-mails or websites. Instead that time could be used to bring people together, if they’d like, to build collegiality and good working relations—or simply to relax for a while and enjoy a meal in the company of others.

Perfectionism: The All-or-Nothing Approach For the past several decades, studies of one of the most common attempts to change human behavior—dieting—have documented relapse rates similar to those among alcoholics, smokers, and heroin addicts. According to the National Institutes for Health, between 50 and 80 percent of dieters will put weight back on. In August of 2011, Dr. Kevin Hall, of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease, and colleagues published a study in the Lancet in which they spelled out a possible explanation for this: Losing weight takes much longer than most people think. Most people give up on diets within months, Hall said, because they expect unrealistic results that can’t be achieved.4 In other words, instead of adopting Tal’s good enough approach, they adopt the all-or-nothing approach and fail because of their perfectionism. Attempts to establish an exercise routine often fail for the same reason. A person might say to himself or herself: “If I can’t exercise for at least 45 minutes today, why bother?” But numerous studies conducted in the last decade offer proof that as little as 10 minutes of moderate exercise per day can have a cumulative benefit, reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality.5 If all is not possible, certainly, something is better than nothing. Small incremental changes, implemented over time, are more likely to make a lasting difference than a drastic plunge into radically new ways of thinking and acting. In his 2015 book The Blue Zones Solution, Dan Buettner points out how small and seemingly insignificant changes to our daily lives are far more consequential than we might first imagine. He suggests that we

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inconvenience, so to speak, ourselves more often, particularly when it comes to physical activity in a world that has effectively immobilized us. Small changes—taking the stairs rather than the elevator or getting rid of the remote control—can add up to make a big difference. “It’s not a silver bullet,” Buettner wrote, “but silver buckshot: a healthy swarm of small things that make a huge impact.”6 A few months after completing the 10X leadership program, Donal Skehan considered this one of the most important ideas he’s carried with him. “It’s not going to be a quick fix,” he said. It’s actually something you have to work on continuously. It’s something you have to check in with every day. I guess my biggest takeaway from it is: I will absolutely do my damndest to get up at 6:30 in the morning—but if I don’t, I’m not going to beat myself up about it. I know I’m filming Wednesday through Friday, so realistically I’m probably going to maybe just do 10 minutes of meditation, or something that’s my own. It’s not going to be the full walk with the dog, or the full session of yoga and meditation, but I’ll get my little something out of it, and I don’t beat myself up about it, because I think it’s so satisfying when you do get back into the groove of it.

Fear of Failure When Swiss tennis great Stanislas Wawrinka won the Australian Open, his first Grand Slam championship, in 2014, sportswriters took note of a tattoo written in script on the inside of his left forearm. The words were from Worstward Ho, a 1983 parody written by Samuel Beckett, the bleak postmodernist generally not known for inspirational quotes: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”7 If the author of Waiting for Godot can acknowledge that failure and perseverance are the formula for success, so can we all. Of course, nobody likes to fail, but there’s a difference between a healthy aversion to failure and the intense fear of it. Fear this intense can paralyze us—rather than risk failure, particularly in the parts of our lives we care most about, we may choose not to act at all.

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Success is impossible without failure: So many accomplished people have affirmed this message, again and again, that repeating it seems unnecessary. But we’ll remind you anyway: When he died in 1931, Thomas Edison, the world’s most prolific inventor, had accumulated 2,332 patents worldwide, 1,093 of which were in the United States. These many successes were accompanied by tens of thousands of failed experiments, but Edison seemed ambivalent about whether to call them failures—he hadn’t failed, he said; he’d just found 10,000 ways that wouldn’t work. “Many of life’s failures,” he said, “are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”8 Warren Bennis, who studied great leaders, found that almost all of them had succeeded at their life’s work after at least one significant setback. Abraham Lincoln, for example, failed in business several times, had a nervous breakdown when he was 27, and lost eight elections for political office, all before becoming one of the most celebrated presidents in the history of the United States.9 A mantra we repeat to our clients and ourselves is “learn to fail or fail to learn.” Over time, as we accept that failure is a necessary part of our development into better leaders, we learn to fail better.

The Fixed Mind-Set The mind-sets mentioned above are, in a sense, subcategories of the overarching belief that change isn’t possible—a belief that, unsurprisingly, sharply decreases the likelihood of change ever happening. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has shed light on this self-fulfilling prophecy over the course of a career that has articulated the difference between what she calls the “fixed mindset” and the “growth mindset.” A fixed mind-set is the belief that our abilities—our intelligence, physical competence, personality, and interpersonal skills—are essentially set in stone. This approach suggests that we’re either innately gifted, in which case we’ll succeed in school, at work, in sports, and in our relationships, or permanently deficient in these gifts, and consequently doomed to failure.

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In contrast, a growth mind-set is the belief that our abilities are not fixed—that they can, and do, change throughout our lives. We’re born with certain abilities, but these provide a mere starting point, and to succeed we have to apply ourselves, dedicate time, and invest a great deal of effort. Dweck first began studying these mind-sets in the 1970s, and in studies involving several hundred fifth graders, published in 1998, Dweck and colleagues randomly assigned fifth graders to two groups. In the first round of the study, they gave each group 10 questions from a nonverbal IQ test. She recalled the experience in an article she wrote for Scientific American in 2015: “After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: ‘Wow . . . that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.’ We commended others for their process: ‘Wow . . . that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.’”10 In later rounds of the studies, Dweck and her colleagues found that kids who were earlier praised for their intelligence tended to shy away from more challenging assignments; they wanted easy ones instead, ones more likely to earn them praise for their intelligence. They became more easily discouraged, doubting their ability, and their scores—even on easier assignments—declined in comparison with previous results. The kids praised for working hard, on the other hand, tended to gain confidence, even when confronted with harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the problems that followed. As Dweck explained in a 2007 interview with New York magazine: “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”11 In a 2008 article in the New York Times, Dweck told the story of how Scott Forstall, senior vice president of Apple in charge of iPhone software, contacted her to tell her of something he’d done after reading her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Forstall summoned several superstars from various departments to work on his next project, whose details he couldn’t reveal to them. Instead he

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promised them the opportunity “to make mistakes and struggle, but eventually . . . do something that we’ll remember the rest of our lives.” Only people who immediately jumped at the challenge ended up on Forstall’s team. “It was his intuition,” Dweck said, “that he wanted people who valued stretching themselves over being king of their particular hill.”12 The fixed mind-set is a trap people most often fall into when attempting to apply the strengths-based approach, and they confuse the fact that they have natural talent with the idea that those talents are inalterable. The strengths-based approach requires a growth mind-set: We grow a great deal more when we apply efforts using our personal strengths, and we bring out the best in others when we encourage this kind of growth. The growth mind-set recognizes that big changes aren’t the result of innate gifts. They result from action, from doing something, failing, and trying again and again.

NEUROPLASTICITY: NEW PATHWAYS TO CHANGE In our years of work in the fields of leadership development and personal flourishing, we’ve repeatedly encountered variations on these obstacles to change among people who want to make themselves happier and more productive, and to take on more significant and productive roles in their organizations. Many cite past failures: They are who they are. They’ve proved this to themselves again and again over the years. Transforming themselves into better, happier leaders of people is an unlikely proposition. Until the latter twentieth century, such people didn’t get much help from the scientific community. The dominant belief among scientists and laypeople alike was that the brain, after the first few years of life, does not change. But as we pointed out in Chapter 4, Rosenthal and Jacobson’s documentation of the Pygmalion Effect in 1965 seemed to embolden other psychologists and neuroscientists to reexamine the conventional wisdom about the brain and its function: Maybe it wasn’t, as was commonly believed, an organism whose connections and functions were fixed shortly after birth and changed very little

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throughout a person’s life. Maybe it was possible to improve the way it worked. By the time of Rosenthal and Jacobson’s experiment, a new generation of researchers had already begun examining how conditioning could change connections between neurons in the brain. Most of the first investigations of neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life—tended to focus on helping people who had suffered brain injury or stroke.

WHAT’S NEUROPLASTICITY? Here’s an oversimplified way of explaining how the brain works: Its neurons form an intricate web of connections, and through an experience—an event or thought that creates a certain response— a neural pathway is created. Repeating the same or similar experiences regularly, whether playing music or focusing on one’s breathing, can reinforce that particular pathway, making it stronger and more durable. A neural pathway, once formed, is a self-reinforcing loop. Information is more likely to flow through an established pathway than to create a new one, just as water is more likely to flow through an existing channel than flow randomly overland. Once a neural pathway is formed, more information passes through it—increasing the likelihood that future information will flow through it, deepening and widening the channel, so to speak. This is how small events—incremental changes—can lead to large changes in the long run. When a new pathway is created and reinforced over time, we can say we’ve developed a habit—a predictable way of performing a certain activity. It could be a tennis stroke, enabling us to perform a backhand seamlessly, without thinking about it as the ball approaches, or playing the piano without consciously deciding which keys to hit with our fingers. In fact, we often talk about a physical activity, in sports or music or elsewhere, as being grooved—which means the neural pathway is entrenched, automatic.

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A neural pathway can be healthy or unhealthy, empowering or disempowering, helpful or hurtful. A person who gets angry easily, for example, often has strong neural connections to the amygdala, the part of the brain associated with anger. In contrast, in the brain of a person with a positive outlook or a calm disposition, the neural pathways between the parts of the brain triggered by external events and the part of the brain associated with pleasant emotions is strong. Established pathways greatly influence how we’ll react in any given situation. Taken together, they might be seen as our general disposition. But this doesn’t mean our general disposition is set in stone. It simply means it’s become more entrenched through the self-reinforcing nature of neural pathways—until we decide to change.

THE SCIENCE OF BRAIN-ALTERING BEHAVIORS To give you a more complete view of how some people have been able to alter these pathways, we’ll mention some of the most exciting research findings of the last 20 years or so. In 1997, Irish neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire and colleagues, using magnetic resonance imaging technology, began reporting astonishing observations of the brains of London taxi drivers, whose certification examination typically requires three to four years of study and requires candidates to all but memorize a map of the labyrinthine city. Maguire established that particular brain structures associated with memory—the anterior and posterior hippocampus—were larger among London taxi drivers.13 More dramatic results, hinting at the power of neuroplasticity, were reported in 2011 after Maguire and Katherine Woollett of University College London compared cab drivers who’d passed their training to two other groups: trainees who hadn’t passed the exam and a control group of people who hadn’t undergone any training or study. The new London cab drivers had more gray matter—brain tissue containing the neuronal cells that process information—in the back part

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of their hippocampus than the people from either of these groups. The successful candidates, who also performed better on memory tasks, had literally remodeled their brains. “We conclude,” wrote Woollett and Maguire, “that specific, enduring, structural brain changes in adult humans can be induced by biologically relevant behaviors engaging higher cognitive functions such as spatial memory, with significance for the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate.”14 University of Wisconsin psychologist Richard Davidson is among the first to investigate the potential of neuroplasticity in the context of emotional well-being. It isn’t just study that can change the way the brain functions, he’s found; his research, including examinations of the brains of Tibetan Buddhist monks, suggests regular practice of meditation can also alter the brain’s structure and function.15 A 2011 study reported by a team of Harvard researchers detailed some of these changes: Eight weeks of mindfulness meditation increased the cortical thickness in the hippocampus and in other specific areas of the brain that factor into emotional regulation and self-referential processing (the me center). Meditation also decreases brain cell volume in the amygdala, the structure responsible for regulating feelings of fear, anxiety, and stress. These changes matched with participants’ self-reports of stress levels, suggesting that meditation not only changes the brain but our subjective experience—our mood and sense of well-being—as well.16 Over the last decade, a growing body of research has also suggested that physical exercise causes changes in brain structure and function: stimulating the growth of sensory neurons;17 proliferating hippocampal cells and alleviating depression; 18 improving cognitive performance;19 boosting levels of mood-related neurotransmitters such as serotonin, noradrenalin, and dopamine;20 and increasing attention span.21 We introduce the concept of neuroplasticity because it challenges the belief that change isn’t possible and helps to shift from a fixed to a growth mind-set. This shift is critical for bringing about actual change. The changes in the brains of London taxi drivers and Buddhist

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monks helps us recognize that both the number of neurons, as well as the ways and means by which they communicate and connect, remain changeable—plastic—throughout the entire course of a human life. But we also, along with the American psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, see a danger in taking this assumption too far—in assuming that the quantity and quality of our gray matter dictate our capabilities. We still don’t fully understand cause and effect: What happened to increase the amount of gray matter, and alter the neurochemistry, in the brains of these people? All we know is that they acted—they studied, or meditated, or exercised—and made it happen. In his 2002 book The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Schwartz and Wall Street Journal science columnist Sharon Begley described the discovery Schwartz made over decades of treating patients for obsessive-compulsive behavior: While following the therapy he’d developed, his patients were creating significant and lasting changes in their neural pathways, by focusing attention away from negative behaviors and toward more positive ones. Schwartz called this self-directed neuroplasticity, a concept he later applied more broadly to solving other problems in the book he wrote with psychiatrist Rebecca Gladding: You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life. Schwartz argued that making necessary change isn’t as simple as neurons and neurotransmitters and pathways—which are, after all, merely part of a person’s body. In distinguishing between brain and mind, Schwartz isn’t just a psychiatrist; he’s also a philosopher: The mind, he argued, is an entity independent of dopamine and axons. It’s what he calls the mental force that drives these physical changes in the brain, changes that Schwartz believes provide scientific evidence of free will: the inherent capacity of human beings to make choices that benefit themselves and the world. Tristan and Felicity, the hypothetical examples we presented in Chapter 1, illustrate the stark difference between people who persist in believing they have the capacity to make such choices and those who, somewhere along the way, become skeptical about themselves.

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We’d like for this chapter to provide a reminder to everyone with the desire to become a 10X leader and flourish among his or her colleagues: The desire is a good start. And the science tells us that we can, when we use that desire to motivate action—choices, made again and again until they become as instinctive and effortless as a master’s piano concerto—to become what we desire. In the next chapter we’ll introduce you to the process we use to help people redirect their thoughts and behaviors, untracking themselves from the unhealthy pathways, commonly known as ruts, into the positive, healthy pathways that bring them closer to what they desire. We’ll also expose you to some of the tools we teach to help make these changes last.

CHAPTER 11

Creating New, Durable Pathways to Joyful Leadership Tools and Tactics for Making SHARP Changes “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits,—practical, emotional, and intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.” —William James, “The Laws of Habit”1

Socrates, the ancient Greek scholar considered one of the founders of Western philosophy, believed reason was essential for the good life. He left behind no writings of his own, so his words were given to us through others, mostly through his most famous student, Plato, who quotes Socrates: “To know the good is to do the good.” In other words, once a person knows the right thing to do, the right action will follow. Maybe Socrates’s statement, as it was passed down to us, was missing some important context. Maybe he never said it at all—but if he did, we think he was utterly wrong. After working for many years with thousands of people who want to make changes they know will benefit them and their organizations, we join with the many philosophers, including Aristotle and Confucius, who reject this idea.

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The people we’ve known are simply far more complicated than Socrates’s ideal. Donal Skehan certainly knew that he should consume healthy foods as he traveled from one beautiful location to another and presented gorgeous, painstaking dishes to his viewers. And yet, he was making himself sick on gas station sandwiches. It’s hard to imagine any of the millions of people who don’t exercise are unaware that an active lifestyle is good for them. Many people, given the choice between broccoli and a donut, will falter. Many people understand fully that they’ll die one day and that it’s important to be grateful for everything they have, rather than take it all for granted—but they don’t express gratitude regularly, if at all. Knowing what’s good for you doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll do it. It’s only a first step. In Parts One and Two of this book we made the case for why the world needs more and better leaders, and we explained the importance of the qualities and abilities we’ve observed among the best leaders we’ve seen. In Chapter 10, we established that behavioral change, because it requires you to venture out of your comfort zone, is difficult—but eminently doable, with results that can be measured in both your brain and body. If you’ve read this far, the knowing has been accomplished. But it’s not enough. It’s time to prepare you for action. In 1947, the German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin introduced a model for managing organizational change in which he used the analogy of a block of ice: To change its shape, three steps were necessary. First, you needed to melt it into its liquid form, a form ready to accept change (unfreezing); second, you needed to remold the water into the shape you wanted (change); and third, you needed to solidify the new shape (refreezing).2 Our Potentialife program is, in a sense, an adaptation of Lewin’s model on an individual scale. Though we often engage with clients at the organizational level, our blocks of ice are people, and as we’re introducing those people to the SHARP components, we’re orienting them to the ways in which they can break old habits, form new pathways, and discover the joy of leadership. What follows is a rundown of how this works.

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UNFREEZING: DISCOVERING AND EXPERIMENTING WITH ALTERNATIVE THOUGHTS AND BEHAVIORS To unfreeze, in the personal sense, is to challenge the status quo—one’s tendencies toward unhealthy, mediocre, or otherwise disappointing ways of thinking and acting—with new possibilities. To use an example from our work, Kevin Glynn (see Chapter 6) found his interactions with clients to be less than satisfying, both in terms of his own enjoyment of sales calls and in terms of their results. So he began to consider ways of becoming more engaged and focused on the needs of clients. This is the earliest stage of lasting change for people trying to develop the strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose (SHARP) performance multipliers: considering and playing around with your options. One of the unfreezing tactics we teach at Potentialife is an approach called Appreciative Inquiry, or AI, developed by David Cooperrider, a professor of social entrepreneurship at Case Western University. Cooperrider developed the concept of AI when he was a doctoral student in the 1980s, interviewing local physicians on the topic of leadership. His interview questions included the following: 1. Tell me about your biggest failure. 2. What did you learn from it? 3. Tell me about your biggest success. 4. What did you learn from it? The physicians’ answers to the first two questions were unsurprising; most were familiar with the concept of learning from failure, and their answers tended to be less than inspiring. The stories of success, however—of positive cooperation, innovation, and the egalitarian ethic—were grippingly vivid, and Cooperrider and his doctoral adviser, Suresh Srivastva, developed a process for systematically and deliberately appreciating valuable and successful experiences, and then using that positive analysis to speculate on

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possibilities for the future.3 In summary, AI draws on the best of the past to inspire the present and create a better future. You might have noticed that, throughout Part Two of this book, we began each SHARPening Moment with a prompt to recall past successes. We encourage people to recall vivid, inspiring memories of what’s worked in the past—we also try to widen the array of alternatives by introducing people to the concepts discussed in this book. Kevin, for example, practiced a form of AI when he reflected on what had worked best for him during interactions with customers: He was, by nature, a social person, gifted in engaging others and eliciting meaningful conversation. His successes had come from learning and responding to the unique circumstances, thoughts, and feelings of customers, engaging them on a human level. By Kevin’s own admission, he wasn’t fully aware of the ways in which his sales calls were coming up short until he began working through the Potentialife module on absorption and learned about other behaviors that might work to encourage flow, reduce distractions, and engage more deeply with people: the relaxation response, e-mail–free periods, scheduled downtime, goal setting, deep listening, “getting into the other person’s movie,” and other techniques and practices.4 Combined with your own history of success, the methods we introduce for developing SHARP performance multipliers—both in this book and in our program—will give you a world of ideas you can begin to experiment with and adapt to your own ways of working and living.

CHANGE: PICKING AND LEADING WITH YOUR NEW APPROACHES TO SHARP LIVING We call this middle stage of behavioral change the picking and leading phase, in which people decide on the new behaviors or approaches they’re going to use and begin to practice them. One of the reasons we introduce such a variety of tactics and techniques for developing SHARP components is that we reject the one-size-fits-all approach. Some of our participants, for example, tell us bluntly that they’re never going to practice meditation—though we often find out they’ve begun

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to set aside periods of quiet time for gathering their thoughts and focusing themselves on the coming tasks. Which is fine. They don’t have to call it meditation if they don’t want to. Though meditation wouldn’t seem to have a direct connection to the outcomes of sales calls, Kevin found it a useful tactic for getting himself together at the beginning of every day. For him, meditation wasn’t a mind-emptying focus on a meaningless symbol but a chance to preview and orient himself to the day ahead. Along with the conversational tactics he adopted in his sales calls, he began to set aside some time—even as little as 10 minutes—at the beginning of each day for quiet reflection. Appreciative Inquiry and experimentation can help us decide which tools and tactics work best for us—but they can’t make us do anything. We have to inspire ourselves and discover the impetus, either on our own or with the support of others. One of the concepts we use to get people on track during this critical middle phase of change is the As If principle. Toward the end of The Verdict, the 1982 screen adaptation of the David Mamet play, the lawyer Frank Galvin, played by Paul Newman, makes a passionate appeal in his closing argument to the jury. “In my religion,” he said, “they say: ‘Act as if ye have faith. Faith will be given to you.’ If we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves and act with justice.”5 We love this quote, but we can’t figure out where Mamet found it; it doesn’t appear anywhere else we can find. But Aaron Sorkin, creator of the television series The West Wing, liked it too—enough to borrow it for one of the early episodes, in 2000, when Leo McGarry (John Spencer) is trying to convince Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) to run for president. When Jed tells Leo he has too much faith him—faith he doesn’t share—Leo responds: “‘Act as if ye have faith, and faith shall be given to you.’ Put it another way: Fake it ’til you make it.”6 There is some science, actually, behind “fake it ’til you make it.” In the late nineteenth century, the great American psychologist and philosopher William James began to explore the relationship between emotion and behavior. In particular, he began to challenge the conventional wisdom that the two were locked in a one-way causal

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relationship, that emotions were the root cause of behaviors: If you’re happy, you smile; if you’re sad, you frown. James proposed a new theory: Maybe it was a two-way street. Maybe smiling can make you happy. Maybe frowning can make you sad. In his book The As If Principle: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life, Richard Wiseman points out that for decades, the emerging genre of self-help books ignored this idea, and directed people toward changing the way they thought, rather than the way they acted. But then researchers began to put James’s idea to the test: In the 1970s, psychologist James Laird measured differences in subjective reports of happiness among subjects who were asked to adopt different facial expressions.7 Wiseman cites subsequent research demonstrating that this same effect applies to other aspects of our lives. “By acting as if you are a certain person,” he has written, “you become that person—what I call the ‘As If’ principle.”8 In a 1979 study of a group of men in their 70s, Ellen Langer framed a five-day reunion as a “week of reminiscence” in which the men would act as if it were 20 years earlier—they were even told not to mention anything to each other that happened after 1959, and to speak in the present tense. Langer and her team also subtly removed many of the environmental aids and supports these men had relied on for the last 20 years. Over the five days, Langer took various physical and psychological evaluations of the participants and discovered improvements in dexterity, blood pressure, eyesight, hearing, and speed of movement. Acting as if they were 20 years younger had apparently reversed or alleviated some of the effects of aging on their bodies and minds. Langer has shared this story in several publications, including her own book Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.9 Wiseman cites other studies that have demonstrated the power of certain behaviors to influence our thoughts and feelings: to make us more persistent,10 be tougher negotiators,11 feel less guilty,12 become more persuasive13 —and fall in love14 . Change is hard—but the As If principle gives us a nudge away from the rationalizations we typically use to justify inaction or procrastination: I’ll do it later, when I have more time. I need to think about

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it some more. I’m not feeling it. We don’t need to get our thoughts and feelings sorted out first. That’s a lie we tell ourselves to avoid discomfort. The way to start feeling it, says the As If principle, is to act as if ye are feeling it. Dan Millman, the Stanford University gymnastics coach turned best-selling author and lecturer, is among the contemporary thinkers who believe many of today’s self-help gurus don’t focus enough on the practical world—on doing things, instead of sorting out our jangled insides. In his 1980 book, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Millman writes: To change the course of your life, choose one of two basic methods: 1. You can direct your energy and attention toward trying to fix your mind, find your focus, affirm your power, free your emotions and visualize positive outcomes so that you can finally develop the confidence to display the courage to discover the determination to make the commitment to feel sufficiently motivated to do what it is you need to do. 2. Or you can just do it.15 Or as Leo McGarry would put another way: Fake it ’til you make it.

REFREEZING: RITUALS AND REMINDERS FOR STRENGTHENING NEW PATHWAYS It might seem, once the picking and leading phase is complete, that the hard part is over: You’ve discarded the old, unsatisfying ways of doing things and adopted new ways of thinking and acting. You’re happier, healthier, more effective, and more influential than before. Why would you ever go back? We don’t know why you would; probably nobody knows why. Why would someone take up cigarettes after several smoke-free years? Why do people struggle, after losing weight and getting fit, to keep the weight off? All we know, from our years of experience, is that a

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remarkable number of us go back. This third phase of change is the most difficult, simply because it never ends. It involves overcoming the mysterious predilection toward reverting to the old ways, and ritualizing healthier, more joyful ways of living and interacting with others. In his 2012 book, Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton draws on the work of revered philosophers and theologians to argue that there is much everyone—religious or not—can learn from religion to live healthier, happier lives. De Botton, an atheist himself, suggests that religious ethics sprang from pragmatic needs that were key to our survival and therefore considered divinely inspired. One of the ways in which all religious practitioners adhere to these ethics is through rituals and ceremonies that celebrate and illustrate them repeatedly. We strongly encourage you to identify the kind of change you would like to introduce in your life and then to establish rituals around that change. We use a secular definition of the word ritual—an established or prescribed procedure or routine—and use it to emphasize the importance of introducing and maintaining behavioral change. Your objective should be for your desired leadership behaviors to become ritualized in the same way that brushing your teeth is. Again, this is about changing entrenched neural pathways, and the best way we know to modify those pathways—to strengthen those that benefit us and to weaken those that harm us or hold us back—is to fake it ’til we make it, to persistently behave in ways that reflect our desired change. One of our favorite illustrations of the way ritualizing behavior leads to permanent change is the work of Harvard neurology professor Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a pioneer in using brain imaging technology to establish the relationship between behavior and brain activity. Probably his most famous research is the series of experiments he began in the early 1990s, in which he mapped connections in the sensorimotor cortexes of blind students who were beginning to learn Braille, a skill that requires a high level of sensitivity and takes considerable time to develop. The students studied intensely during the week, and were given the weekend off. For nearly six months the cortical maps recorded on Fridays, immediately after the week of study, revealed dramatic

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changes in the part of the brain associated with finger sensitivity, whereas the Monday scans revealed a significant drop-off. But after about six months had passed, the Friday changes became less dramatic, and Monday’s neural maps started to grow. Follow-up scans and studies led Pascual-Leone to conclude the Monday changes provided the measure of whether students were remaining Braille learners or were becoming Braille experts. He believed, further, that the rapid but temporary Friday changes strengthened existing neural pathways, whereas the more deliberately formed and more permanent Monday changes signified brand-new structures, maybe the sprouting of new neuronal connections and synapses.16 Later studies by Pascual-Leone revealed a similar pattern in the motor cortexes of piano learners—and further revealed that these changes, in the part of the brain responsible for finger movement, occurred not only when the subjects played the piano, but also when they imagined playing.17 It doesn’t seem a stretch to imagine the concept of Monday and Friday changes could be applied to almost any kind of learning. We all remember cramming for a big test—but no matter how well we might have done on that test, we probably don’t remember what we studied, unless we continued to study that subject for months or years afterward. In cramming, we were shooting for the Friday changes. The knowledge came and it went, because the pathways we created were temporary. What Pascual-Leone demonstrates in his work is that long-term change requires time, effort, and persistence. The things that are now second nature to us—reading or riding a bicycle—became permanently embedded over time. They’re Monday changes. This is part of the reason why our 10X leadership program unfolds over nine to 12 months, roughly the same time frame as Pascual-Leone’s Braille study—and why we encourage anyone who wants to achieve lasting behavioral change to take the long view and set up his or her own program of sustained practice. To establish permanent pathways and make lasting change, you need to study and practice again and again, continuing to make mistakes and continuing to learn from those mistakes. It’s not enough to remind yourself to

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listen more carefully when you find yourself on the phone with clients, for example; if this is a behavior you want to adopt, it should be something that’s programmed, planned, and executed regularly—ideally, every day—for months. Kevin, who made careful listening part of his daily routine, has become a master of mindful engagement—but he doesn’t consider himself out of the woods yet. He maintains this mastery by continuing to practice and refine it. The rituals we help people establish aren’t just new ways of doing things. They also involve not doing things: not opening e-mail, or checking in with the folks at BuzzFeed, first thing in the morning; not having a chat window open while working; not slowing down as we approach that box of pastries in the lobby; not staying at work past 6 every evening. For some reason these simple things feel uncomfortable, almost painful, as we do them, but almost always, they become less so over time. The key is to take small steps—and to keep taking them—until we’ve established the Monday changes and feel we’re in a new comfort zone.

REMINDERS: JUST KEEP DOING IT Millman’s Just do it is a motto memorable enough that we’d always assumed the organizational leaders at Nike, the company that launched its Just do it ad campaign in 1988, were admirers of Millman’s work. As it turns out, there was no connection between the two,18 but this doesn’t change our opinion of Millman’s Just do it: It’s terse, inspirational, and a mantra that allows you to picture yourself as a decisive and flourishing leader of others. But making the changes necessary to become an effective leader isn’t about just doing one thing once; it’s about doing a lot of things over an extended period, incrementally transforming your outlook and your performance. Just keep doing it, obviously, lacks some of the sparkle of Just do it; it doesn’t capture the moment you decide to do it but drags on over the span in which you continue to do it. If it sounds a little murkier to you—maybe less like an exhilarating call to action and more like a veiled warning, a reminder that you could fall off the wagon any moment—then we’d like to offer further reassurance: Just

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as making a difficult change is doable, so also is sustaining that change over time. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Charles Duhigg explored this idea, and more of the science behind the ways in which people create and change patterns of behavior, in his 2012 book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Among Duhigg’s discoveries, offered up by an army major: “There’s nothing you can’t do if you get the habits right.”19 Yet old habits die hard, and some habits, once established, can atrophy during a long layoff—if you’ve ever tried to ride a bike after years out of the saddle, you’ll know you can get rusty, that it can take a few rides to feel balanced and confident again. We emphasize the use of repetition and rituals, of constant reminders of what our path should be, as the key to lasting change. As de Botton points out, religion does this through prayer—every day, sometimes several times a day, along with special holy days that remind us regularly, and repeatedly, of something important, and with icons, hymns, and other symbols that pervade both daily life and spiritual observances. Of course, you don’t need to be religious to have reminders—and many of those kinds of reminders aren’t applicable to or appropriate for the workplace, anyway; you’ll need something analogous to the rite and the icon. In their 2007 book, Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change, Sara Orem, Jacqueline Binkert, and Ann Clancy tell the story of Rory, a young man with a passion for yoga and massage who’d been raised to value job security: Work was work, and your life happened outside of work. Rory made his living as a medical secretary—but his heart wasn’t in it. He wanted to do something that fed his spirit, so he decided to leave his job and open his own yoga and massage studio. Months before he’d made the leap, Rory began to feel intense anxiety. Instead of looking forward to the future with hope, he began to think about times in the past when he’d failed, when projects or ideas hadn’t panned out. When he did think about the future, it wasn’t pretty: “A seemingly endless list of ‘what ifs’ kept him awake: What if nobody came to his studio? What if nobody liked him? What if no one

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was interested? He felt discouragement from the past and uncertainty about the future. What was happening to his hopes and dreams?” Clearly, Rory’s own habit of thinking—the very habit that had led him to take a job that meant nothing to him—was dragging him down. But he had an idea: To pull himself out of the mental and emotional vicious cycle of being stuck in the past and lost in the future, he chose to focus on the present. He took his watch and painted the word NOW in large letters on the clock face. He wore the watch every day as the construction on his building was coming to a close. He relates how that really helped him to accept the present moment as a gift to be taken advantage of—isn’t that why they call it the present? He began to see the “now” as the only time he had for achieving change—whether in his mind, business, or body. By the time Orem, Binkert, and Clancy had published Appreciative Coaching, Rory had enjoyed three years of success at his new business. The NOW watch, he said, had been his anchor: He couldn’t change the past, and the future wasn’t here yet. But the watch reminded him that he could change the present.20 We’ve adapted Rory’s idea as part of our 10X leadership program, working with participants to comb through their own personal iconography to find reminders that will keep them on track to permanently change their habits. These reminders sometimes take the form of simple images—a picture of Florence Nightingale, for example, to remind someone to be empathetic and kind—or favorite quotes, programmed as screen savers on computer or phones. While working through our program, Di Blackburn of Sainsbury’s embraced the concept of reminders with gusto. She now uses several to keep her on track, one of which is a set of dice. As you remember from Chapter 6, Di wanted to become a better communicator, taking the time to listen to people before jumping in with her own ideas. “I was chatting with my line manager,” she said, “and we were talking about how I was doing with that. And he said, ‘You could still slow down a bit more, Di. Try counting to 10 before jumping in.’”

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Now, when she attends a meeting, she sits down and places one of the dice on top of her things, six dots facing upward. “I count to six,” she said. “It’s not quite the same as counting to 10—but if I’m going into a meeting where we’re talking about something I’m really passionate about, or where I know there are going to be people with whom it’s hard to get a word in edgewise, I take it. It reminds me that it’s okay to stop and slow down and listen, and that it’s not always about putting my view in first.” Di shared the purpose of the dice with the members of her team: “I asked them for feedback, too. I told them: ‘Help me. When you see me jumping in, remind me.’” Many people find their most useful reminders to be not objects or the words of others, but their own words, written and repeated to themselves every day. As a reader, this may seem a particularly useful approach. But remember, reminders are not a final step in this carefully designed process. It’s never safe to stop reminding yourself of the importance of the changes you’ve made. To replicate the behavioral change that happens among people who engage with our ideas and techniques, which we’ve introduced here in written form, we strongly recommend you set up your own disciplined regimen for doing the following: 1. Begin by revisiting your responses to the prompts in our SHARPening Moments in Chapters 4 through 8 of this book. Review and write down the ideas and approaches that mean the most to you—the methods and tactics you want to use to develop each of the SHARP performance multipliers. 2. For each SHARP component, map out your own plan for unfreezing—using Appreciative Inquiry and drawing from this book’s recommendations to develop alternatives for thinking and acting. 3. Change. Pick and lead with the options that work best for you. If it seems difficult, awkward, or forced, remember the As If principle: Fake it ’til you make it. Also, make sure each option is more than a vague vow to change: Schedule regular practice and engagement for each of the new behaviors.

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4. Refreeze your new outlook and behavior by ritualizing and by using reminders to regularly reorient yourself. If you can’t come up with a clever device, such as Di’s dice, go back to Step 1 and remind yourself, in your own words, why this change is important to you and how you plan to maintain it—why, for example, it’s important for you to focus on developing positive relationships at work and at home and how you’re working to do that every day. This can serve as your reminder. The key is to read, and reread, these reminders each day as if for the first time—slowly, deliberately, mindfully. Again, taking our lesson in ritual from religion, we encourage you to create the equivalent of a daily prayer, minus the religious component, that will help the most important ideas you’ve learned from the book take hold and allow them to create new, permanent pathways toward a happier and healthier life.

CHAPTER 12

Finale: The 10X Effect Revisited and Becoming the Sum Total of Who You Are ot everyone we work with is as excited about rituals and reminders as Di Blackburn (see chapter 2). This probably has to do with connotations attached to words such as ritual and routine: They sound like a grind, like drudgery. Establishing rituals and routines, people fear, will remove spontaneity from their lives and sap creativity.

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We’d like to add this fear to the persistent myths and misconceptions about leadership and well-being we mentioned in Chapter 5. For some reason, many people continue to believe it—except most of the people who have achieved great things. They’ll tell you inspiration happens during work, not before. “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,” wrote Tchaikovsky, the great Russian composer. “To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing,” said Pablo Picasso. “Show up, show up, show up,” said the novelist Isabel Allende, “and after a while the muse shows up, too.” A growing body of research by psychologists, including Todd Thrash, a professor at the College of William and Mary, and Andrew Elliot of the University of Wisconsin, backs up the words of these artists, revealing that inspiration—the motivational spark that compels people to bring ideas into fruition—is not a mystical visit from the divine, but a mental state that can be activated and managed.1 Perspiration precedes inspiration.

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Over the years, as Angus has worked to develop a new generation of organizational leaders—whether at McKinsey or with clients—he’s noticed another risk in establishing new ways of thinking and acting: While developing rituals and routines, people often aren’t aware of the positive changes they’ve already made. When they’re in the midst of change, they often can’t see what’s working. They can become discouraged and gradually lose some of the drive that compelled them to change in the first place—and they often abandon their efforts, as Thomas Edison pointed out, without ever realizing how close they actually are to achieving profound, transformational change. While you’re trying to develop into a 10X leader, unfortunately, you won’t have access to the blood testing equipment that measures the rise and decline of hormones and neurotransmitters associated with competence and well-being. You won’t be able to consult regular brain scans to chart the difference between your Friday changes and your Monday changes, or to measure your thickening posterior hippocampus as you become more efficient, productive, and influential. So what do you do? Act as if ye have faith. Trust the process, trust yourself, and keep at it—and keep your eye on what’s important. If you’re going through a structured program of behavioral change and still looking forward to some future happy state, some zenith of achievement and capability, we’re afraid you might be missing the point. “Perfection,” says the writer Neil Gaiman, “is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.”2 Just keep doing it. The proficiency and happiness you’re creating should be apparent not in the future, but in the now, in the moments you’re building on your strengths; increasing your health and well-being; creating flow; strengthening the authentic, positive bonds between the people who mean the most to you and yourself; and discovering a deeper purpose in the work you do every day. Over time you’ll see results in your performance at work, in your ability to inspire and lead others in your organization, and in your overall sense of happiness and well-being. As you become a better leader, you will become, as Bill George has said, the sum total of who you are. You just might not fully realize it at first.

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But, as we’ve discussed, you can’t think your way to leadership: You have to act. Reading a book, by itself, won’t magically transform you into the sum total of who you are and bring the joy of leadership to you. So how can you find your way to the joy of leadership? In the mid-twentieth century, the American educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom developed what he called the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, now often simply known as Bloom’s Taxonomy. The taxonomy created a framework for categorizing educational goals, in order of sophistication, that educators could use to sequence curriculum. It’s often depicted, as hierarchies sometimes are, as a pyramid, with basic skills—knowledge and understanding, the ability to recall facts and explain ideas—forming the foundation. At the pinnacle of the pyramid are the more complex behaviors, the evaluation and synthesis of all this fresh information to create something new or original (see Figure 12.1). In this book we’ve climbed about two-thirds of the way up this pyramid—presenting the strengths, health, absorption, relationships, and purpose (SHARP) framework, explaining its different elements, showing how these elements are applied in different situations, and

Evaluation Synthesis Analysis Application Comprehension Knowledge Figure 12.1

Bloom’s Taxonomy

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demonstrating the different ways in which they’re interconnected. We’ve also presented to you the evidence suggesting that behavioral change, while difficult, is far from a lost cause—that through a combination of what Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley call the mental force that can remodel your neural pathways and a persistent effort to establish healthier rituals, you can become the leader you’ve always suspected you could be (see chapter 10). Leadership, like the other arts, isn’t just an idea, or a body of knowledge, or even merely a set of skills, however high level those skills may be. Leadership is one of the most complex and ineffable human behaviors, a mode of viewing and interacting with the world that inspires and motivates others. Reading this book and absorbing the ideas contained within it is a good start toward becoming a more joyful, effective leader. When you take these ideas out into the world, put them into practice, and share them with colleagues, supervisors, and mentors, you’ll be laying the groundwork for working at the highest levels of the taxonomy: creating new levels of performance, happiness, and well-being, not only for yourself but also for everyone around you. These abilities, as we’ve pointed out, have never been more crucial to the success of organizations. The increasing competitiveness and dynamism of the global economy requires today’s and tomorrow’s leaders to shift their focus from managing to more effectively tapping into a company’s diverse human resources. It requires them to remain alert and receptive to ways of challenging the status quo and facilitating creativity—to become inspired and to inspire others. An astute observer will notice the levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy become not only more sophisticated as they ascend, but also more active, rather than passive. Most of the people participating in our nineto 12-month program have attested to being more active than ever before: busy not only with their own work, but also with developing and reinforcing the skills that will help them bring others along as they grow and achieve more for themselves and their organizations. The people who work with us find that when they become more actively focused on what’s already within them, they become more fully who they are, much like the outstanding leaders we mentioned

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in Chapter 9. When the SHARP components are working together, you’ll find it takes very little effort to cultivate one or another—and interestingly, you may, like many participants in our program, stop thinking about them as separate entities. In people’s early work with the Potentialife program, when they’re going through separate modules—to develop strengths-based leadership, to focus on health, to cultivate mindful absorption in work, to develop positive relationships, or to refine their sense of a higher purpose in their work and their lives—they might say something like, “I’m working on absorption this week.” But afterward, when they’re practicing these components together, they typically adopt a more synergetic view. “I don’t tend to think of the changes I’ve made as sections of a program,” said Di. “I finished about eight weeks ago, and now when I think about what SHARP means, I think: ‘What does it mean to me in my heart? What is it that I’m doing differently?’ The effect kind of ripples throughout what you do.” Di found, for example, that being more mindful when she was talking to other people—actually listening, instead of multitasking or focusing on her own thoughts—helped strengthen her relationships with family and coworkers. Likewise, when Donal Skehan recovered his health and, months later, participated in the Potentialife program, these experiences helped him realize that his mental and physical well-being were inextricably bound with his sense of purpose: “[The program] came at really the right time for me,” he said. “It allowed me to step back and look at what I was doing with my career, where I wanted to go, and what was stopping me from getting there. It made me more mindful of my mental health, because that’s such an important part of what we do. And now, even though I still find myself getting crazy busy, I’m more able to step back and say: ‘Okay, are we still making decisions based on what we want, or are we making decisions based on what’s simply here in front of us?’” When companies first began offering mindfulness training to employees, it was mostly intended as a stress management tool. But the practice has proliferated because of its other benefits: better decisionmaking, better relationships, and better performance. As Ellen Langer reminds us, it’s “energy-begetting, not energy-consuming . . . You

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like people better, and people like you better, because you’re less evaluative. You’re more charismatic.”3 Kevin Glynn, who honed his salesmanship through mindfulness, agrees. The Potentialife program, he said, “kind of transcended leadership for me. It really just made me a better person in a lot of respects. I cared more. I loved more. I listened more. I was more helpful, and wished better things for other people. I laughed more. I became more positive, healthier, happier, smarter—really more ‘switched on.’ I saw my core values rise to the surface, developed a clearer understanding of who I am and how I’ve grown. From there, you just naturally become a better leader.” When you read the words of people like Donal or Di or Kevin, you’ll see they’ve scaled to the summit of Bloom’s pyramid: They’ve analyzed and synthesized these components of the SHARP framework to create something new, if not literally original—the instincts, talents, and potential they tapped into, after all, were already there. They simply “switched on,” to become happier, more effective versions of themselves. Whether you’re able to switch on in a similar way is up to you. If you’ve read and absorbed the hard-earned lessons contained in this book, you should be thrilled by your choice to struggle, make mistakes, and grow into the kind of leader the world needs now.

NOTES CHAPTER 1 1. Collins, James C., and Jerry I. Porras. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. 3rd ed. HarperBusiness Essentials. New York: HarperBusiness, 2002.

CHAPTER 2 1. Cutter, Bowman. “The Good Economy.” July 6, 2015. http://roosevelt institute.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Cutter-The-Good-Economy .pdf. 2. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Employee Tenure in 2016.” September 22, 2016. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm. 3. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Number of Jobs Held, Labor Market Activity, and Earnings Growth among the Youngest Baby Boomers. Washington, DC: Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2015. 4. Mir, Zak. “Making Money: Jim Mellon.” Yahoo! Finance, November 29, 2016. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/making-money-jim-mellon120302142.html. 5. Coonerty, Ryan, and Jeremy Neuner. The Rise of the Naked Economy: How to Benefit from the Changing Workplace. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 2013.

CHAPTER 3 1. Drucker, Peter. “Managing Oneself.” Chap. 6 in Management Challenges for the 21st Century. New York: HarperBusiness, 2001. 2. Dubreuil, P., J. Forest, and F. Courcy. “From Strengths Use to Work Performance: The Role of Harmonious Passion, Subjective Vitality and Concentration.” The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9.4 (2014), pp. 335–349. 3. Vella-Brodrick, D. A., N. Park, and C. Peterson. “Three Ways to Be Happy: Pleasure, Engagement, and Meaning—Findings from Australian and US Samples.” Social Indicators Research, 90.2 ( January 2009), pp. 165–179. 4. Harzer, C. and W. Ruch. “When the Job is Calling: The Role of Applying One’s Signature Strengths at Work.” The Journal of Positive Psychology, 7/5 (2012), pp. 362–371. 197

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5. Brim, Brian, and Jim Asplund. “Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths.” Gallup, November 12, 2009. http://www.gallup.com/business journal/124214/driving-engagement-focusing-strengths.aspx. 6. Kirby, E. D., S. E. Muroy, W. G. Sun, D. Covarrubias, M. J. Leong, L. A. Barchas, and D. Kaufer. “Acute Stress Enhances Adult Rat Hippocampal Neurogenesis and Activation of Newborn Neurons via Secreted Astrocytic FGF2.” eLife, (April 16, 2013), e00362. 7. Dhabhar, F. S., W. B. Malarkey, E. Neri, and B. S. McEwen. “StressInduced Redistribution of Immune Cells—From Barracks to Battlefields: A Tale of Three Hormones.” Psychoneuroendocrinology, 37.9 (Sept 2012), pp. 1345–1368. 8. Aschbacher, K., A. O’Donovan, O. M. Wolkowitz, F. S. Dhabhar, Y. Su, and E. Epel. “Good Stress, Bad Stress and Oxidative Stress: Insights from Anticipatory Cortisol Reactivity.” Psychoneuroendocrinology, 38.9 (Sept 2013), pp. 1698–1708. 9. Csikszentmihalyi, M. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. 10. Frederickson, B. L. “The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 359 (2004), pp. 1367–1377. 11. Lecic-Tosevski, D., O. Vukovic, and J. Stepanovic. “Stress and Personality.” Psychiatriki, 22.4 (Oct-Dec 2011), pp. 290–297. 12. Flaa, A., O. Ekeberg, S. E. Kjeldsen, and M. Rostrup. “Personality May Influence Reactivity to Stress.” BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 2007 1.5 (March 1, 2007). 13. Oxbay, F., D. C. Johnson, E. Dimoulas, C. A. Morgan III, D. Charney, and S. Southwick. “Social Support and Resilience to Stress.” Psychiatry, 4.5 (May 2007), pp. 35–40. 14. Baqutayan, S. “Stress and Social Support.” Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, 33.1 ( Jan-Jun 2011), pp. 29–34. 15. Heinrichs, M., T. Baumgartner, C. Kirschbaum, and U. Ehlert. “Social Support and Oxytocin Interact to Suppress Cortisol and Subjective Responses to Psychosocial Stress.” Biological Psychiatry, 15.54 (Dec 2003), pp. 1389–1398. 16. Huang, C. J., H. E. Webb, M. C. Zourdos, and E. O. Acevedo. “Cardiovascular Reactivity, Stress, and Physical Activity.” Frontiers in Physiology, 4 (2013), 314. 17. Schoenfeld, T. J., P. Rada, P. R. Pieruzzini, B. Hsueh, and E. Gould. “Physical Exercise Prevents Stress-Induced Activation of Granule Neurons and Enhances Local Inhibitory Mechanisms in the Dentate Gyrus.” The Journal of Neuroscience, 33.18 (May 1, 2013), pp. 7770–7777.

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18. Grossman, P., L. Niemann, S. Schmidt, and H. Wallach. “MindfulnessBased Stress Reduction and Health Benefits: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Psychosocial Research, 57.1 ( July 2004), pp. 35–43. 19. Shapiro, S. L., J. A. Astin, S. R. Bishop, and M. Cordova. “MindfulnessBased Stress Reduction for Health Care Professionals: Results From a Randomized Trial.” International Journal of Stress Management, 12.2 (May 2005), pp. 164–176. 20. Chiesa, A. and A. Serretti. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Stress Management in Healthy People: A Review and Meta-Analysis. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 15.5 (May 18, 2009), pp. 593–600. 21. Tang, Y. Y., Y. Ma, J. Wang, Y. Fan, S. Feng, Q. Lu, Q. Yu, D. Sui, M. K. Rothbart, M. Fan, and M. I. Posner. “Short-term Meditation Improves Attention and Self-Regulation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104.3 (October 23, 2007), pp. 17152–17156. 22. Maslow, Abraham H. Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. New York: Viking Press, 1970. 23. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. 24. Tepper, Bennett J. “Abusive supervision in work organizations: Review synthesis, and research agenda.” Journal of Management 33, no. 3 (June 2007): 261–289. 25. Duffy, Michelle K., Daniel C. Ganster, and Milan Pagon. “Social Undermining in the Workplace.” Academy of Management Journal 45, no. 2 (2002): 331–351; Gastil, John. “A Meta-Analytic Review of the Productivity and Satisfaction of Democratic and Autocratic Leadership.” Small Group Research 25, no. 3 (August 1994): 384–410; Harris, Kenneth J., K. Michele Kacmar, and Suzanne Zivnuska. “An Investigation of Abusive Supervision as a Predictor of Performance and the Meaning of Work as a Moderator of the Relationship.” Leadership Quarterly 18, no. 3 (June 2007): 252–263; Schyns, Birgit, and Jan Schilling. “How Bad are the Effects of Bad Leaders? A Meta-Analysis of Destructive Leadership and Its Outcomes.” Leadership Quarterly 24, no. 1 (February 2013): 138–158; Tepper, Bennett J., Jon C. Carr, Denise M. Breaux, Sharon Geider, Changya Hu, and Wei Hua. “Abusive Supervision, Intentions to Quit, and Employees’ Workplace Deviance: A Power/Dependence Analysis.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 109, no. 2 (July 2009): 156–167. 26. Harvey, Paul, Jason Stoner, Wayne Hochwarter, and Charles Kacmar. “Coping with Abusive Supervision: The Neutralizing Effects of

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NOTES Ingratiation and Positive Affect on Negative Employee Outcomes.” Leadership Quarterly 18, no. 3 ( June 2007): 264–280; Tepper, Bennett J. “Consequences of Abusive Supervision.” Academy of Management Journal 43, no. 2 (April 1, 2000): 178–190. Hoobler, Jenny M., and Daniel J. Brass. “Abusive Supervision and Family Undermining as Displaced Aggression.” Journal of Applied Psychology 91, no. 5 (September 2006): 1125–1133. Quoted in Reestman, Tom. “Ideas, Not Hierarchy: On Steve Jobs Supposedly Making All Apple Decisions.” Small Wave (blog), August 28, 2011. https://thesmallwave.com/2011/08/28/ideas-not-hierarchy-on-stevejobs-supposedly-making-all-apple-decisions/. Wrzesniewski, Amy, Clark McCauley, Paul Rozin, and Barry Schwartz. “Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work.” Journal of Research in Personality 31, no. 1 (1997): 21–33. Berg, Justin M., Adam M. Grant, and Victoria Johnson. “When Callings Are Calling: Crafting Work and Leisure in Pursuit of Unanswered Occupational Callings.” Organization Science 21, no. 5 (2010): 973–994; Bunderson, J. Stuart, and Jeffery A. Thompson. “The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work.” Administrative Science Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 2009): 32–57; Cardador, M. Theresa, Erik Dane, and Michael G. Pratt. “Linking Calling Orientations to Organizational Attachment via Organizational Instrumentality.” Journal of Vocational Behavior 79, no. 2 (2011): 367–378; Wrzesniewski, Amy, Nicholas LoBuglio, Jane E. Dutton, and Justin M. Berg. “Job Crafting and Cultivating Positive Meaning and Identity in Work.” Chap. 13 in Vol. 1 of Advances in Positive Organizational Psychology. Edited by Arnold B. Bakker. Bingley, United Kingdom: Emerald Group, 2013. Gilbert, Daniel. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: Vintage Books, 2005. Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Laura King, and Ed Diener. “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 6 (November 2005): 803–855. Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Rene Dickerhoof, Julia K. Boehm, and Kennon M. Sheldon. “Becoming Happier Takes Both a Will and a Proper Way: An Experimental Longitudinal Intervention to Boost Well-Being.” Emotion 11, no. 2 (April 2011): 391–402; Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade. “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change.” Review of General Psychology 9, no. 2 (2005): 111–131. Lyubomirsky, Sonja. The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York: Penguin Group, 2007. Maslow, Abraham. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. New York: Viking Press, 1970.

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CHAPTER 4 1. Hodges, Timothy D., and Donald O. Clifton. “Strengths-Based Development in Practice.” Chap. 16 in Positive Psychology in Practice. Edited by P. Alex Linley and Stephen Joseph. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. 2. Buckingham, Marcus, and Donald O. Clifton. Now, Discover Your Strengths. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. 3. Buckingham and Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths. 4. Drucker, Peter. “Managing Oneself.” Chap. 6 in Management Challenges for the 21st Century. New York: HarperBusiness, 2001. 5. Zenger, John H., Joseph R. Folkman, Robert H. Sherwin, Jr., and Barbara A. Steel. How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. 6. Zenger, John H., and Joseph R. Folkman. “Develop Strengths.” Leadership Excellence 30, no. 1 ( January 2013): 12. 7. Quoted in Steen, Rob, Jed Novick and Huw Richards. The Cambridge Companion to Football. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 169. 8. Buckingham and Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths. 9. Zenger and Folkman, “Develop Strengths.” 10. Citrin, James M., and Richard A. Smith. The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers: The Guide for Achieving Success and Satisfaction. New York: Crown Business, 2005. 11. Brown, Jonathon D., and Keith A. Dutton. “The Thrill of Victory, the Complexity of Defeat: Self-esteem and People’s Emotional Reactions to Success and Failure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68, no. 4 (April 1995): 712–722; Kernis, Michael H., Joel Brockner, and Bruce S. Frankel. “Self-Esteem and Reactions to Failure: The Mediating Role of Overgeneralization.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57, no. 4 (October 1989): 707–714; Stephanou, Georgia, and Konstantinos Tatsis. “Effects of Value Beliefs, Academic Self-esteem, and Overgeneralization of Failure Experience on the Generation of Emotions and Attributions for Academic Performance.” International Journal of Learning 15, no. 11 (2009): 203–220. 12. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. “How Leaders Gain (and Lose) Confidence.” Leader to Leader 35 (Winter 2005): 21–27. 13. Schunk, Dale H. “Goal-Setting and Self-Efficacy During Self-Regulated Learning.” Educational Psychologist 25, no. 1 (1990): 71–86; Steyn, Renier, and John Mynhardt. “Factors that Influence the Forming of Self-Evaluation and Self-Efficacy Perceptions.” Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif

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NOTES vir Sielkunde [South African Journal of Psychology] 38, no. 3 (September 2008): 563–573. Buckingham and Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths. Rosenthal, Robert, and Lenore Jacobson. “Pygmalion in the Classroom.” Urban Review 3, no. 1 (September 1968): 16–20. J. Sterling Livingston. “Pygmalion in Management.” Harvard Business Review, July/August 1969, 81–89. Avolio, Bruce, and Fred Luthans. Psychological Capital: Developing the Human Competitive Edge. Oxford University Press, 2006. Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983. Stanford University Communications. “‘You’ve Got to Find What You Love,’ Jobs Says.” Stanford News, June 14, 2005. http://news.stanford.edu/ 2005/06/14/jobs-061505/. Quoted in Wasik, John. “Apple Innovation Rules: Steve Jobs’s Secrets.” Forbes, May 20, 2016. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwasik/2016/05/ 20/apple-innovation-rules-steve-jobss-secrets/#5066fadd3a4b. Stanford University Communications, “‘You’ve Got to Find.’” Buckingham and Clifton, Now, Discover Your Strengths.

CHAPTER 5 1. American Institute of Stress. “Workplace Stress.” Accessed April 12, 2017. https://www.stress.org/workplace-stress/. 2. Health and Safety Executive. “Work related Stress, Anxiety and Depression Statistics in Great Britain 2016.” November 2016. http://www.hse .gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress/stress.pdf. 3. Ricci, J. A., E. Chee, A. L. Lorandeau, and J. Berger. “Fatigue in the U.S. Workforce: Prevalence and Implications for Lost Productive Work Time.” Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 49, no. 1 ( January 2007): 1–10. 4. Sanders, Robert. “Researchers Find out Why Some Stress Is Good for You.” Berkeley News, April 16, 2013. http://news.berkeley.edu/2013/04/ 16/researchers-find-out-why-some-stress-is-good-for-you/. 5. Dhabhar, Firdaus S., William B. Malarkey, Eric Neri, and Bruce McEwen. “Stress-Induced Redistribution of Immune Cells—from Barracks to Boulevards to Battlefields: A Tale of Three Hormones—Curt Richter Award Winner.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 37, no. 9 (September 2012): 1345–1368.

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6. Crum, Alia J., Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor. “Rethinking Stress: The Role of Mindsets in Determining the Stress Response.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104, no. 4 (2013): 716–733. 7. Loehr, Jim, and Tony Schwartz. “The Making of a Corporate Athlete.” Harvard Business Review, January 2001. https://hbr.org/2001/01/themaking-of-a-corporate-athlete. 8. Clayton, Derek. Running to the Top. Mountain View, CA: Anderson World, 1980. 9. Buettner, Dan. The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society. 10. Dawson, Drew, and Kathryn Reid. “Fatigue, Alcohol and Performance Impairment.” Nature 388, no. 6639 (July 17, 1997): 235–237. 11. Mullington, Janet, Monika Haack, Maria Toth, Jorge M. Serrador, and Hans K. Meier-Ewert. “Cardiovascular, Inflammatory, and Metabolic Consequences of Sleep Deprivation.” Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases 51, no. 4 (2009): 294–302; Patel, Sanjay R., and Frank B. Hu. “Short Sleep Duration and Weight Gain: A Systematic Review.” Obesity 16 no. 3 (2008): 643–653; Patel, Sanjay R., Atul Malhotra, David P. White, Daniel J. Gottlieb, and Frank B. Hu. “Association between Reduced Sleep and Weight Gain in Women.” American Journal of Epidemiology 164, no. 10 (2006): 947–954. 12. Gregory, Alice M., Früuhling V. Rijsdik, Jennifer Y. F. Lau, Ronald E. Dahl, and Thalia C. Eley. “The Direction of Longitudinal Associations Between Sleep Problems and Depression Symptoms: A Study of Twins Aged 8 and 10 Years,” Sleep 32, no. 2 (February 1, 2009): 189–199; Krystal, Andrew D. “Sleep and Psychiatric Disorders: Future Directions,” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 29, no. 4 (December 2006): 1115–1130. 13. Markt, Sarah C., Erin E. Flynn-Evans, Unnur A. Valdimarsdottir, Lara G. Sigurdardottir, Rulla M. Tamimi, Julie L. Batista, Sebastien Haneuse, et al. “Sleep Duration and Disruption and Prostate Cancer Risk: A 23-Year Prospective Study.” Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention 25, no. 2 (February 2016): 302–8; Phipps, Amanda I., Parveen Bhatti, Marian L. Neuhouser, Chu Chen, Tracy E. Crane, Candyce H. Kroenke, Heather Ochs-Balcom, et al. “Pre-diagnostic Sleep Duration and Sleep Quality in Relation to Subsequent Cancer Survival.” Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 12, no. 4 (April 15, 2016): 495–503; Thompson, Cheryl L., Emma K. Larkin, Sanjay Patel, Nathan A. Berger, Susan Redline, and Li Li. “Short Duration of Sleep Increases Risk of Colorectal Adenoma.” Cancer 117, no. 4 (February 2011): 841–847. 14. Walker, Matthew P. “Sleep-Dependent Memory Processing.” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 16, no. 5 (2008): 287–298.

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15. Zhang, Jing, Yan Zhu, Guanxia Zhan, Polina Fenik, Lori Panossian, Maxime M. Wang, Shayla Reid, et al. “Extended Wakefulness: Compromised Metabolics in and Degeneration of Locus Ceruleus Neurons.” Journal of Neuroscience 34, no. 12 (March 19, 2014): 4418–4431. 16. Merrill, R. M., S. G. Aldana, J. E. Pope, D. R. Anderson, C. R. Coberley, and A. W. Whitmer. “Presenteeism According to Healthy Behaviors, Physical Health, and Work Environment.” Population Health Management, 15.5 (2012), 293–301. 17. Ratey, John J. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. With Eric Hagerman. New York: Little, Brown, 2008. 18. Quoted in Hammond, Kayla. “National Napping Day Spotlights the Benefits of a Midday Siesta.” Huffington Post, November 17, 2011. http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/14/national-napping-day_n_835063 .html. 19. Buettner, The Blue Zones. 20. Fredrickson, Barbara L. “The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 359 (2004): 1367–1377. 21. Lyubomirsky, Sonja, Laura King, and Ed Diener. “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 6 (November 2005): 803–855. 22. Ramachandran, Vilayanur. “The neurons that shaped civilization.” TEDIndia video, 7:43. November 2009. https://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization. 23. Keysers, Christian, Bruno Wicker, Valeria Gazzola, Jean-Luc Anton, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese. “A Touching Sight: SII/PV Activation during the Observation and Experience of Touch.” Neuron 42, no. 2 (April 22, 2004): 335–346; Wicker, Bruce, Christian Keysers, Jane Plailly, Jean-Pierre Royet, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolatti. “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust.” Neuron 40, no. 3 (October 30, 2003): 655–664. 24. Schwartz, Tony. “Overcoming Your Negativity Bias.” New York Times, June 14, 2013. https://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/dealbook/2013/06/14/ overcoming-your-negativity-bias/. 25. Loehr, Jim, and Tony Schwartz. “The Making of a Corporate Athlete.”

CHAPTER 6 1. Quoted in Gallagher, Winifred. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life. New York: Penguin, 2009.

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2. Towers Perrin. Closing the Engagement Gap: A Road Map for Driving Superior Business Performance. 2008. https://c.ymcdn.com/sites/simnet.site-ym .com/resource/group/066D79D1-E2A8-4AB5-B621-60E58640FF7B/ leadership_workshop_2010/towers_perrin_global_workfor.pdf. 3. Gallup Inc. State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders. 2013. https://www.ctdol.state.ct.us/ osha/Breakfast/Archives/11-18-14/State_of_the_American_Workplace_ Report_2013.pdf. 4. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. Reprint ed. New York: Basic Books, 1998. 5. Adler, Rachel, and Raquel Benbunan-Fich. “Self-Interruptions in Discretionary Multitasking.” Computers in Human Behavior 29, no. 4 ( July 2013): 1441–1449. 6. Mark, Gloria, Daniela Gudith, and Ulrich Klocke. “The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress.” Paper presented at the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence, Italy, April 2008. 7. Adler and Benbunan-Fich, “Self-Interruptions in Discretionary Multitasking.” 8. Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. 15th anniversary ed. New York: Delta, 2005. 9. Langer, Ellen, Timothy Russel, and Noah Eisenkraft. “Orchestral Performance and the Footprint of Mindfulness.” Psychology of Music 37, no. 2 (April 2009): 125–136. 10. Langer, Ellen. “A Call for Mindful Leadership.” Harvard Business Review, April 28, 2010. https://hbr.org/2010/04/leaders-time-to-wake-up. 11. Wired staff. “Check Out My Flow.” Wired, July 1, 2006. https://www .wired.com/2006/07/check-out-my-flow/. 12. Quoted in Chen, Jenova. “Implement Flow in Games.” Accessed April 13, 2017. http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/implementfig.htm. 13. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Performance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. 14. Quoted in Mehesy, Nancy. “The Power of the Visionary Leader.” Maximum Trajectory (blog), September 13, 2015. https://maximumtrajectory .com/the-power-of-the-visionary-leader/. 15. Malone, Lisa. [Apollo 11 30th anniversary press conference transcript]. NASA, July 16, 1999. https://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/ ap11ann/pressconf.htm. 16. Gallagher, Rapt. 17. Siegel, Daniel J. Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oneworld, 2009.

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18. Tan, Chade-Meng. Search Inside Yourself. New York: HarperCollins, 2012. 19. Benson, Herbert. The Relaxation Response. New York: William Morrow, 2000. 20. Fredrickson, Barbara L., Michael A. Cohn, Kimberly A. Coffey, Jolynn Pek, and Sandra M. Finkel. “Open Hearts Build Lives: Positive Emotions, Induced Through Loving-Kindness Meditation, Build Consequential Personal Resources.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 5 (November 2008): 1045–1062. 21. Gallagher, Rapt. 22. Langer, Russel, and Eisenkraft, “Orchestral Performance.” 23. Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow. 24. Postrel, Virginia. The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. New York: Touchstone, 2008. 25. Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow. 26. Antonakis, John, Marika Fenley, and Sue Liechti. “Can Charisma be Taught? Tests of Two Interventions.” Academy of Management Learning & Education 10, no. 3 (2011): 374–396; Levine, Kenneth J., Robert A. Muenchen, and Abby M. Brooks. “Measuring Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: Why Isn’t Charisma Measured?” Communication Monographs 77, no. 4 (2010): 576–591. 27. Greenleaf, Robert K. Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. 25th anniversary ed. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2002. 28. Rogers, Carl R., and Richard E. Farson. “Active Listening.” In Communicating in Business Today. Edited by Ruth G. Newman, Marie A. Danziger, and Mark Cohen. Lexington, MA: D.C. Health, 1987. 29. Shafir, Rebecca. The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction. Rev. ed. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2003. 30. Gallagher, Rapt.

CHAPTER 7 1. Harter, Jim, and Wagner, Rodd. “The Tenth Element of Great Managing.” Gallup, February 14, 2008. http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/ 104197/tenth-element-great-managing.aspx. 2. Sparks, Dennis. “Look for Ways to Ignite the Energy Within—An Interview with Jane Dutton.” Journal of Staff Development 25, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 38–42. 3. Quoted in Comen, Evan, Samuel Stebbins, and Thomas C. Frohlich. “The Worst Companies to Work For.” 24/7 Wall Street, June 10, 2016.

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http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/06/10/the-worst-companiesto-work-for-2/2/. DeVries A. Courtney, Erica R. Glasper, and Courtney E. Detillion. “Social Modulation of Stress Responses.” Physiology & Behavior 79, no. 3 (August 2003): 399–407. Detillion, Courtney E., Tara K. S. Craft, Erica R. Glasper, Brian J. Prendergast, and A. Courtney DeVries. “Social Facilitation of Wound Healing.” Psychoneuroendocrinology 29, no. 8 (2004): 1004–1011. Holt-Lunstad, Julianne, Timothy Smith, and J. Bradley Layton. “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review.” PLoS Medicine 7, no. 7 ( July 2010), e1000316. Gilbert, Daniel. “Affective Forecasting . . . or . . . The Big Wombassa: What You Think You’re Going to Get, and What You Don’t Get, When You Get What You Want: A Talk with Daniel Gilbert.” https://www .edge.org/conversation/daniel_gilbert-affective-forecastingorthe-bigwombassa-what-you-think-youre-going-to. Hallowell, Edward. “The Human Moment at Work.” Harvard Business Review, January/February 1999. https://hbr.org/1999/01/the-humanmoment-at-work. Dictionary.com, s.v. “Authentic.” Accessed April 13, 2017. http://www .dictionary.com/browse/authentic. Bennis, Warren. On Becoming a Leader, 4th Edition. New York, NY: Basic books (2009), p. xl. George, Bill. True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership. With Peter Sims. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. Coutu, Diane. “Making Relationships Work.” Harvard Business Review, December 2007. https://hbr.org/2007/12/making-relationships-work. Garr, Stacia. The State of Employee Recognition in 2012. Oakland, CA: Bersin by Deloitte, June 2012. Globoforce. JetBlue Airways. 2012. http://go.globoforce.com/rs/globo force/images/Jet%20Blue_CS_web.pdf. Grant, Adam M., and Francesca Gino. “A Little Thanks Goes a Long Way: Explaining Why Gratitude Expressions Motivate Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98, no. 6 ( June 2010): 946–955; Lambert, Nathaniel M., and Frank D. Fincham. “Expressing Gratitude to a Partner Leads to More Relationship Maintenance Behavior.” Emotion 11, no. 1 (February 2011): 52–60; Sansone, Randy A., and Lori A. Sansone. “Gratitude and Well Being: The Benefits of Appreciation,” Psychiatry (Edgmont) 7, no. 11 (November 2010): 18–22. Seligman, Martin, Tracy A. Steen, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson. “Positive Psychology: Empirical Validation of Interventions.” American Psychologist 60, no. 5 (2005): 410–421.

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17. Brim, Brian, and Jim Asplund. “Driving Engagement by Focusing on Strengths.” Gallup, November 12, 2009. http://www.gallup.com/business journal/124214/driving-engagement-focusing-strengths.aspx. 18. Gable, Shelly, Gian C. Gonzaga, and Amy Strachman. “Will You Be There for Me When Things Go Right? Supportive Responses to Positive Event Disclosures.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 91, no. 5 (2006): 904–917. 19. Fredrickson, Barbara L., and Thomas Joiner. “Positive Emotions Trigger Upward Spirals toward Emotional Well-Being.” Psychological Science 13, no. 2 (2002): 172–175. 20. Makary, Martin, and Michael Daniel. “Medical Error—the Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.” British Medical Journal 53 (May 3, 2016): i2139. 21. Edmondson, Amy. “Learning from Mistakes is Easier Said Than Done: Group and Organizational Influences on the Detection and Correction of Human Error.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 32, no. 1 (March 1996): 5–28. 22. Tucker, Anita, and Amy Edmondson. “Why Hospitals Don’t Learn from Failures: Organizational and Psychological Dynamics that Inhibit System Change.” California Management Review 45, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 55–72. 23. Wilf-Miron, R., I. Lewenhoff, Z. Benyamini, and A. Aviram. “From Aviation to Medicine: Applying Concepts of Aviation Safety to Risk Management in Ambulatory Care.” Quality & Safety in Health Care 12, no. 1 (2003): 35–39. 24. Goleman, Daniel. Boyatzis, and McKee. Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. Harvard Business Review Press, 2004, p. 92.

CHAPTER 8 1. Damon, William. The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009. 2. The Body Shop. Annual Report 1999. Littlehampton, United Kingdom: The Body Shop, 1999. 3. Roddick, Anita. Body and Soul. New York: Crown, 1991. 4. Stengel, Jim. Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies. New York: Crown Business, 2011. 5. Damon, The Path to Purpose. 6. Luthans, Fred, Carolyn M. Youssef, and Bruce J. Avolio. Psychological Capital: Developing the Human Competitive Edge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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7. Warren, Rick. The Purpose-Driven Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan (2002). 8. Wrzesniewski, Amy, and Jane E. Dutton. “Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work.” Academy of Management Review 26, no. 2 (2001): 179–201. 9. Damon, The Path to Purpose. 10. Bunderson, J. Stuart, and Jeffery A. Thompson. “The Call of the Wild: Zookeepers, Callings, and the Double-edged Sword of Deeply Meaningful Work.” Administrative Science Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 2009): 32–57. 11. Quoted in Burton, Di. “The Key to Keeping Your Staff Happy.” Brand Yorkshire. Accessed April 13, 2017. http://www.brandyorkshire.com/ features/legal-a-hr/item/141-the-key-to-keeping-your-staff-happy. 12. Damon, The Path to Purpose. 13. Conant, Douglas R. “The Power of Idealistic-Realism: How Great Leaders Inspire and Transform.” Harvard Business Review, January 12, 2012. https://hbr.org/2012/01/the-power-of-idealistic-realis. 14. Kennedy, John F. “John F. Kennedy Moon Speech - Rice Stadium.” September 12, 1962. https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm. 15. Watson, David. “Positive Affectivity: The Disposition to Experience Pleasurable Emotional States.” Chap. 8 in Handbook of Positive Psychology. Edited by C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 16. Ben-Shahar, Tal. Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2007. 17. Faust, Drew Gilpan. “Living History.” Harvard magazine, May/June 2003. http://harvardmagazine.com/2003/05/living-history.html. 18. Dominus, Susan. “Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?” New York Times magazine, March 27, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/ 31/magazine/is-giving-the-secret-to-getting-ahead.html. 19. Shaw, Gordon, Robert Brown, and Philip Bromiley. “Strategic Stories: How 3M Is Rewriting Business Planning.” Harvard Business Review 76, no. 3 (1998): 42–44. 20. McKee, Robert. “Storytelling That Moves People.” Harvard Business Review 81, no. 6 (June 2003): 136. 21. Weir, Kirsten. “More than Job Satisfaction.” Monitor on Psychology 44, no. 11 (December 2013): 39–44. 22. Kouzes, James M., and Barry Z. Posner. The Leadership Challenge. Jossey-Bass (1995). 23. Quoted in Bennis, Warren. On Becoming a Leader, 4th Edition. New York, NY: Basic books (2009), p. 250. 24. Collins, James C., and Jerry I. Porras. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. 3rd ed. HarperBusiness Essentials. New York: HarperBusiness, 2002.

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25. Langer, Ellen J. Mindfulness. 25th anniversary ed. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2014. 26. Quoted in Mattson, Kevin. “Why Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech Is More Relevant than Ever.” History News Network, July 15, 2009. http:// historynewsnetwork.org/article/95308.

CHAPTER 9 1. George, Bill. Authentic Leadership: Rediscovering the Secrets to Creating Lasting Value. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004. 2. Che, Jenny. “Even a Company Known for Overworking People Is Embracing Sleep.” Huffington Post, March 14, 2016. http://www.huffing tonpost.com/entry/mckinsey-sleep_us_56e3345de4b0b25c9181fa48. 3. Zimmerman, Jamie, and Lana Zak. “The Secret Weapon of CEOs and Basketball Pros to Get in the Zone.” ABC News, February 18, 2015. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/secret-weapon-ceos-basketball-proszone/story?id=29051073. 4. George, Bill. “Mindfulness Helps You Become a Better Leader.” Harvard Business Review, October 26, 2012. https://hbr.org/2012/10/mindfulnesshelps-you-become-a. 5. George, Bill. “Vulnerability Is Power.” Huffington Post, November 24, 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-george/vulnerability-ispower_b_8640284.html. 6. Graham, Katharine. Personal History. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. 7. Berger, Marilyn. “Katharine Graham, Former Publisher of Washington Post, Dies at 84.” New York Times, July 17, 2001. http://www.nytimes .com/2001/07/17/obituaries/katharine-graham-former-publisher-ofwashington-post-dies-at-84.html. 8. George, Bill. “The Journey to Authenticity.” Leader to Leader 31 (2004): 29–35. 9. Reingold, Jennifer. “Southwest’s Herb Kelleher: Still Crazy after All These Years.” Fortune, January 14, 2013. http://fortune.com/2013/01/ 14/southwests-herb-kelleher-still-crazy-after-all-these-years/. 10. Mangla, Ismat Sarah. “Southwest Airlines Maintenance Snafu Raises Safety Concerns.” International Business Times, February 25, 2015. http:// www.ibtimes.com/southwest-airlines-maintenance-snafu-raises-safetyconcerns-1828478; Southwest Airlines. “Southwest Corporate Fact Sheet.” January 2017. https://www.swamedia.com/pages/corporate-factsheet.

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11. Heaser, Steve. “Colleen Barrett Speaks to MBAs.” Audio, 10:07. Posted January 6, 2010. https://www.southwestaircommunity.com/htcpi66732/ attachments/htcpi66732/stories/2585/2/RBR087-ColleenWharton .mp3. 12. Walker, Karen. “The King of Low-Cost: Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines.” FlightGlobal, June 1, 1999. https://www.flightglobal .com/news/articles/the-king-of-low-cost-herb-kelleher-of-southwestairlines-51730/. 13. George, Bill. True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership. With Peter Sims. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

CHAPTER 10 1. Gurdjian, Pierre, Thomas Halbeisen, and Kevin Lane. “Why Leadership Development Programs Fail.” McKinsey Quarterly, January 2014. http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/leadership/why-leadershipdevelopment-programs-fail. 2. Zweig, Jason. “Kahneman: Master of the Imperfect Mind.” CNN Money, August 23, 2007. http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/23/pf/zweig_ kahneman.moneymag/index.htm?section=magazines_moneymag. 3. Perlow, Leslie. “The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time.” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1999): 57–81. 4. Roberts, Michelle. “Diets Fail Because Advice Is Wrong, Say Researchers.” BBC News, September 22, 2011. http://www.bbc.com/ news/health-14882832. 5. Church, Timothy, Conrad P. Earnest, James S. Skinner, and Steven N. Blair. “Effects of Different Doses of Physical Activity on Cardiorespiratory Fitness Among Sedentary, Overweight or Obese Postmenopausal Women With Elevated Blood Pressure: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Journal of the American Medical Association 297, no. 19 (May 16, 2007): 2081–2091; Lee, Duk-chul, Russell R. Pate, Carl J. Lavie, Xuemei Sui, Timothy S. Church, and Steven N. Blair. “Leisure-Time Running Reduces All-Cause and Cardiovascular Mortality Risk.” Journal of the American College of Cardiology 64, no. 5 (August 2014): 472–482. 6. Buettner, Dan. The Blue Zones Solution: Eating and Living Like the World’s Healthiest People. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2015. 7. Beckett, Samuel. Worstward Ho. New York: Grove Press, 1983. 8. Quoted in Hedstrom-Page, Deborah. From Telegraph to Light Bulb with Thomas Edison. Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2007.

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9. Bennis, Warren, and Steven B. Sample. The Art and Adventure of Leadership. With Ron Aschar. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015. 10. Dweck, Carol. “The Secret to Raising Smart Kids.” Scientific American, January 1, 2015. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-secretto-raising-smart-kids1/. 11. Bronson, Po. “How Not to Talk to Your Kids.” New York magazine, August 3, 2007. http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/. 12. Rae-Dupree, Janet. “If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow.” New York Times, July 6, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/business/ 06unbox.html. 13. Maguire, Eleanor A., Richard S. J. Frackowiak, and Christopher D. Frith. “Recalling Routes around London: Activation of the Right Hippocampus in Taxi Drivers.” Journal of Neuroscience 17, no. 18 (1997): 7103–7110. 14. Woollett, Katherine, and Eleanor A. Maguire. “Acquiring ‘the Knowledge’ of London’s Layout Drives Structural Brain Changes.” Current Biology 21, no. 24 (December 20, 2011), 2109–2114. 15. Davidson, Richard J., and Antoine Lutz. “Buddha’s Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation.” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 25, no. 1 ( January 1, 2008): 171–174. 16. Hölzel, Britta K., James Carmody, Mark Vangel, Christina Congleton, Sita M. Yerramsetti, Tim Gard, and Sara W. Lazar. “Mindfulness Practice Leads to Increases in Regional Brain Gray Matter Density.” Psychiatry Research 191, no. 1 ( January 30, 2011): 36–43. 17. Molteni, Raffaella, Jun-Qi Zheng, Zhe Ying, Fernando Gómez-Pinilla, and Jeffery L. Twiss. “Voluntary Exercise Increases Axonal Regeneration from Sensory Neurons.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101, no. 22 ( June 1, 2004): 8473–8478. 18. Bjørnebekk, Astrid, Aleksander Mathé, and Stefan Brené. “The Antidepressant Effect of Running Is Associated with Increased Hippocampal Cell Proliferation.” International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology 8, no. 3 (September 2005): 357–368. 19. Tomporowski, Phillip D. “Effects of Acute Bouts of Exercise on Cognition.” Acta Psychologica 112, no. 3 (March 2003): 297–324. 20. Sutoo, Den’etsu, and Kayo Akiyama. “Regulation of Brain Function by Exercise.” Neurobiology of Disease 13, no. 1 ( June 2003): 1–14; Young, Simon N. “How to Increase Serotonin in the Human Brain without Drugs.” Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience 32, no. 6 (November 2007): 394–399. 21. Budde, Henning, Claudia Voelcker-Rehage, Sascha PietraßykKendziorra, Pedro Ribeiroc, and Günter Tidowa. “Acute Coordinative Exercise Improves Attentional Performance in Adolescents.” Neuroscience Letters 441, no. 2 (August 22, 2008): 219–223.

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CHAPTER 11 1. James, William. “The Laws of Habit.” Chap. 8 of Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt, 1914. 2. Lewin, Kurt. “Frontiers in Group Dynamics: Concept, Method and Reality in Social Science; Social Equilibria and Social Change.” Human Relations 1, no. 5 ( July 1947): 5–41. 3. Cooperrider, David L., and Suresh Srivastva. “Appreciative Inquiry in Organizational Life.” Research in Organizational Change and Development 1, no. 1 ( January 1987): 129–169. 4. Shafir, Rebecca. The Zen of Listening: Mindful Communication in the Age of Distraction. Rev. ed. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2003. 5. Newman, Paul, Charlotte Rampling, Jack Warden, and James Mason. The Verdict. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1982. Videocassette (VHS). 6. Sheen, Martin, Bradley Whitford, and John Spencer. “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen.” The West Wing, season 2, episodes 1 and 2. Directed by Thomas Schlamme. Aired October 4, 2000. NBC. 7. Laird. James D. “Self-Attribution of Emotion: The Effects of Expressive Behavior on the Quality of Emotional Experience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 29, no. 4 (1974): 475–486. 8. Wiseman, Richard. “Self-Help: Forget Positive Thinking, Try Positive Action.” The Guardian, June 30, 2012. https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2012/jun/30/self-help-positive-thinking. 9. Langer, Ellen J. Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. New York: Ballantine Books, 2009. 10. Friedman, Ron, and Andrew J. Elliot. “The Effect of Arm Crossing on Persistence and Performance.” European Journal of Social Psychology 38, no. 3 (April/May 2008): 449–61. 11. Ackerman, Joshua M., Christopher C. Nocera, and John A. Bargh. “Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions.” Science 328, no. 5986 (June 25, 2010): 1712–1715. 12. Zhong, Chen-Bo, and Katie Liljenquist. “Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing.” Science 313, no. 5792 (September 8, 2006): 1451–1452. 13. Wells, G. L., and R. E. Petty. “The Effects of Head Movements on Persuasion: Compatibility and Incompatibility of Responses.” Basic and Applied Psychology 1, no. 3 (1980): 219–230. 14. Epstein, Robert. “How Science Can Help You Fall in Love.” Scientific American Mind 21, no. 1 (January/February 2010): 26–33. 15. Millman, Dan. The Way of the Peaceful Warrior: A Book That Changes Lives. Tiburon, CA: H J Kramer, 1980.

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16. Hamilton, Roy H., and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, A. “Cortical Plasticity Associated with Braille Learning.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2, no. 5 (May 1, 1998): 168–174; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, Angel Cammarota, Eric M. Wassermann, Joaquim P. Brasil-Neto, Leonardo G. Cohen, and Mark Hallett. “Modulation of Motor Cortical Outputs to the Reading Hand of Braille Readers.” Annals of Neurology 34, no. 1 (July 1993): 33–37; Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, and Fernando Torres. “Plasticity of the Sensorimotor Cortex Representation of the Reading Finger in Braille Readers.” Brain 116, no. 1 (February 1993): 39–52. 17. Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, Amir Amedi, Felipe Fregni, and Lotfi B. Merabet. “The Plastic Human Brain Cortex.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 28, no. 1 (July 2005): 377–401; Pascual-Leone, A., D. Nguyet, L. Cohen, J. Brasil-Neto, A. Cammarota, and M. Hallett. “Modulation of Muscle Response Evoked by Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation During the Acquisition of Fine Motor Skills.” Journal of Neurophysiology 74, no. 3 (September 1995): 1037–1045. 18. Peters, Jeremy W. “The Birth of ‘Just Do It’ and Other Magic Words.” New York Times, August 19, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/ business/media/20adco.html. 19. Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2012. 20. Orem, Sara L., Jacqueline Binkert, and Ann L. Clancy. Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.

CHAPTER 12 1. Thrash, Todd M., and Andrew J. Elliot, “Inspiration as a Psychological Construct.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 4 (2003): 871–889; Thrash, Todd M., and Andrew J. Elliot. “Inspiration: Core Characteristics, Component Processes, Antecedents and Function.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87, no. 6 (2004): 957–973; Thrash, Todd M., Andrew J. Elliot, Laura A. Maruskin, and Scott E. Cassidy. “Inspiration and the Promotion of Well-Being: Tests of Causality and Mediation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98, no. 3 (2010): 488–506. 2. Winding Trails Media. “Neil Gaiman’s 8 Rules of Writing.” YouTube video, 57:45. April 7, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18bt6fm N36s. 3. Langer, Ellen J. “Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity.” Harvard Business Review, March 2014. https://hbr.org/2014/03/mindfulness-inthe-age-of-complexity.

INDEX Note: Page references in italics refer to exhibits. Absorption, 87–106 engagement and, 88–89 flow and, 89–90 Mindful Engagement Zone, 94, 100 mindfulness and, 90–92, 101–104 overview, 12–13, 87–89 tools for, 94–100 workplace tactics for mindful engagement, 104–106 Active constructive responding (ACR), 121, 121–122, 125 Adaptation, need for, 25–26 Adler, Rachel, 90 Air Force (Israel), 124–125 Alderfer, Clayton, 20 Aldrin, Buzz, 136 Allende, Isabel, 191 Amabile, Teresa, 80 American Institute of Stress, 68 American Psychological Association, 46, 68 Apollo 11 (NASA), 136 Apple, 34–35, 61, 169 Appreciative Coaching (Orem, Binkert, Clancy), 187–188 Appreciative Inquiry (AI), 179–180 Armstrong, Neil, 94, 136

Asch, Solomon, 162–163, 163 As If principle, 181–182 The As If Principle (Wiseman), 182 Attention, 94 Authenticity for relationships, 111–115, 114, 126–127 Autocratic leadership, problems of, 34–35 Aviva, 54 Avolio, Bruce, 60, 131 Awareness, 83–84 Bacon, Sir Francis, 24 Bandura, Albert, 51, 56 Barrett, Colleen, 156–157 Beckett, Samuel, 167 Beckman, David, 48 Begley, Sharon, 174, 194 Benbunan-Fich, Raquel, 90 Benefactor Empowerment Zone, 114, 114–115, 120 Bennis, Warren, 112, 168 Ben-Shahar, Tal career of, 36–37, 43–44, 53, 123, 165 Happier and Being Happy, 7, 139 The Joy of Leadership, 9–13 Potentialife inception and, 6–9 215

216

Benson, Herbert, 95–96 Bersin by Deloitte, 116 Best, George, 48 Binkert, Jacqueline, 187–188 Blackburn, Di, 26, 102–103, 133, 188–189, 195 Bloom, Benjamin, 193, 194 Bloomberg View, 98 The Blue Zones (Buettner), 73–75, 78–79, 109, 131 The Blue Zones Solution (Buettner), 166–167 Body language, 106 The Body Shop, 47–49, 129–130, 138–139 Boundarylessness, 17. See also Disaggregated world Bouskila-Yam, Osnat, 101 Brain attention and, 94 happiness and, 32 health and, 69, 75, 76, 81 neuroplasticity of, 170–175 ritualizing behavior for permanent change, 184–185 Breaks, importance of, 85 Breathing meditation, 95–96 Brigham Young University, 76 Brin, Sergey, 65 Buckingham, Marcus, 46–49, 58, 62 Buettner, Dan, 73–75, 78–79, 131, 166–167 Buffett, Warren, 153–154 Built to Last (Collins, Porras), 10–11, 131, 143 Bunderson, J. Stuart, 134–135 Butternot Box, 103

INDEX

Cacioppo, John, 111 Career change, fluid nature of, 17–20, 19 Carter, Ebony, 135 Carter, Jimmy, 144 Cascading failure, 150–151 Center for Creative Leadership, 68 “CEO disease,” 125 Challenge, need for, 93 Change, 161–175, 177–190, 191–196 adaptation and, 25–26 alternative thoughts and behaviors for, 179–180 to become sum total of who you are, 191–196 as constant, 23–26 creating pathways for, 177–178 disaggregation and positive change, 98 obstacles to, 161–171, 163 overview, 13 pathways to, 171–175 for personal flourishing, 16–17, 174–175 picking and leading phase of, 180–183 repetition for, 186–190 strengthening with rituals and reminders, 183–186 10X effect for, 26–27 Charisma, 101 Chen, Jenova, 93 Churchill, Winston, 76–77 Citrin, Jim, 52 Clancy, Ann, 187–188

INDEX

Clayton, Derek, 70–72 Clifton, Donald, 46–49, 58, 62, 117 Cognitive reframing, 36, 132–135 Cole, Steve, 78 Collins, Jim, 10–11, 131, 143 Commitment, 135–138 Compliments, 117 Conant, Douglas, 135, 145 Conformity, 162–163, 163 Control, myths about, 34–35, 108 Coonerty, Ryan, 20–21 Cooperrider, David, 179–180 Cortisol, 109 Counterclockwise (Langer), 182 Coupe, Mike, 26 Co-working spaces, 20–21 “Crisis of Confidence” (Carter), 144 Crum, Alia J., 69–70 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 33–34, 89–90, 92–94, 98–99 Culture of mindfulness, 104–106 Cutter, Bowman“Bo,” 15 Czeisler, Charles, 75–76 “Damage control” mind-set, discouraging, 45–49, 64 Damon, William, 131 Davidson, Richard, 173 Dawson, Drew, 75 De Botton, Alain, 184, 187 Detillion, Courtney, 109 Dhabhar, Firdaus, 69 Diener, Ed, 38, 109

217

Diet, health and, 74–75, 85 Disaggregated world, 3–13, 15–27, 29–39 finding happiness in, 29–39 information fluidity in, 23–26 overview, 3–6, 12, 15–17 people’s fluidity in, 17–20, 19 positive change and, 98 resistance to change and, 161 role fluidity in, 20–23 10X leadership for, 26–27 Distraction, reducing, 105 Distress, 32 Diversity in teams, 61–62 “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” (Easterlin), 110 Drucker, Peter, 16, 31 Duhigg, Charles, 187 Dutton, Jane, 108, 132–135, 142, 143, 146–147 Dweck, Carol, 168–170 Easterlin, Richard, 110 Edison, Thomas, 168, 192 Edmondson, Amy, 122–124 Elliot, Andrew, 191 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 145 Emmons, Robert A., 80 Emotion behavior and change, 181–182 meditation and, 96–97 positive emotions, 97 positive emotions for health, 78–80 “upward spirals” of positive emotion, 122 Emotional contagion, 81

218

Energy depletion and recovery of, 70–73, 84–85 Energy Creation Zone (ECZ), 70–73 managing time versus, 68–70 See also Health Energy Project, 84 Engagement, 88–89 Entrepreneurship, 17 Eustress, 32, 69 External locus of control, 35–36 Failure in relationships, responding to, 120–125, 121 Farson, Richard, 102 Faust, Drew Gilpan, 141 Fear of failure, 167–168 Feedback, 47, 120, 125, 127–128, 189 The Fifth Discipline (Senge), 25 Fight-or-flight response, 32–33, 95–96 Financial incentive, meaning and, 134–135 Finding Flow (Csikszentmihalyi), 98–99 Finding Time (Perlow), 165 The 5 Patterns of Extraordinary Careers (Citrin, Smith), 52 Flow conditions needed for, 92–94 defined, 33–34 overview, 89–90 for teams, 105–106 tools for, 94–100

INDEX

See also Absorption flOw (game), 93 Fluidity flow versus, 89 of information, 23–26 of people, 17–20, 19 of roles, 20–23 of workplace, 15–17 Focus. See Absorption Folkman, Joseph R., 47, 49 Follow Donal (Food Network UK), 67 “Followership,” 22–23 Food Network UK, 67 Forbes, 156 Forstall, Scott, 169–170 Frames of Mind (Gardner), 60 Frankl, Viktor, 131 Fredrickson, Barbara, 78, 80, 97, 122 Freiberg, Kevin, 155 Friendship in workplace, 107–111 Fulfillment, discovery of, 36–38 Full Catastrophe Living (Kabat-Zinn), 91 The Future and Its Enemies (Postrel), 98 Gable, Shelly, 120 Gaiman, Neil, 192 Gallagher, Winifred, 94, 97, 104 Gallup Inc. on employees’ engagement in work, 31, 118–119 flow and, 89 Q12 , 45–46, 107, 115

INDEX

State of the American Workplace, 88–89, 134 Gandhi, Mohandas, 145 Gardner, Howard, 60 “Genius of the AND,” 10–11 George, Bill, 112, 152–155, 163, 192 Geraghty, Joanna, 118 Gilbert, Daniel, 38, 110, 139 Gladding, Rebecca, 174 Globalization, 16 Glynn, Kevin, 87–88, 97, 99–100, 103–104, 107, 179–180, 196 Goals appropriateness of, 147 attainability of, 144 flow and, 92–94 purpose and, 135, 138–140 Goleman, Daniel, 125 Good Mood Food (blog), 67 Google, 65, 86 Gottman, John, 112–113 Graham, Katharine, 153–155 Grant, Adam, 141 Gratitude, 115–119 “Gratitude visit,” 118 Great Sioux Nation, as role-fluidity example, 22 Greenblatt, Edy, 72–73 Greenleaf, Robert, 101 Gross National Happiness (GNH), 110 Grow (Stengel), 130–131 Growth mindset, 168–170 Gudith, Daniela, 90

219

Hackman, Richard, 93–94, 122–123 Hall, Kevin, 166 Hallowell, Ed, 110–111 Handbook of Positive Psychology (Watson), 139 Happier and Being Happy (Ben-Shahar), 7, 139 Happiness, 29–39 discovery of fulfillment for, 36–38 meaning and purpose for, 35–36 overview, 29–30 peak experience for, 33–34 relationships and, 109–110 relationship strength and, 34–35 SHARP implementation for, 38–39 strengths of individuals for, 30–31 stress and, 31–33 success and, 12 Harrison, Lee Hecht, 17 Harter, Jim, 107 Hartland, Jon, 25–26 Harvard Business Review, 92, 110–111, 113, 135, 142, 153 Harvard University, 7, 36–37, 116–117, 173 See alsoindividual names of professors Hawthorne Works (Western Electric Company), 116–117

220

Health chronic stress as problem of, 68–70 depletion and recovery of energy for, 70–73 identifying areas for improvement, 77–78 longevity and, 73–77 managing team energy for, 80–83 overview, 12–13, 67–68 positive emotions for, 78–80 social relationships and, 86, 108–109 workplace tactics for, 83–86 Health and Safety Executive (UK), 68–69 Heraclitus, 23 Hierarchy of needs, 18–20, 19 Hobbs, Nicholas, 104 Holt-Lunstad, Julianne, 109 How Full Is Your Bucket? (Clifton, Rath), 117 The How of Happiness (Lyubomirsky), 38 How to Be Exceptional (Zenger, Folkman, Sherwin, Steel), 47 Huffington Post, 152 “Human moment,” 110–111 Immune system. See Health Individuals changing behavior of, 161–162 (See also Change) strengths of, 30–31 10X effect for, 20 Inertia as mind-set, 162–163, 163

INDEX

Information, fluidity of, 23–26 Inspiration, 142–145 Intelligence Dweck on, 169 Gardner on, 60 Internal locus of control, 35–36 Jacobsen, Lenore, 58–59, 170–171 James, William, 119, 181–182 JetBlue Airways, 117–118 Job crafting, 36, 132–135, 146–147 Jobs, Steve, 34–35, 60–61 John Hopkins University, 123 Joiner, Thomas, 122 Journal of Neuroscience, 75 Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 69 Journal of Staff Development, 108 “The Journey to Authenticity” (George), 154–155 The Joy of Leadership (Ben-Shahar, Ridgway), 9–13 Jung, Carl, 58 “Just do it” (Millman; Nike), 186 Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 91 Kahneman, Daniel, 164 Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, 55 Kasser, Tim, 164 Kaufer, Daniela, 69 Kelleher, Herb, 155–157 Kennedy, John F., 136 King, Laura, 38, 79 King, Rollin, 155 Kitchen Hero (television show), 67

INDEX

Klocke, Ulrich, 90 Kouzes, Jim, 143 Laird, James, 182 Langer, Ellen, 90–92, 144, 182, 195–196 Lao Tzu, 24 Layton, Bradley, 109 Leadership charisma and, 101 complexity of, 194 development of, 12 happiness for, 29–39 inspirational leaders, 142–145 leaders as role models, 145 personal flourishing for, 3–9 social media and “followership,” 22–23 See also Change; Disaggregated world; SHARP (Strengths, Health, Absorption, Relationships, Purpose); 10X effect The Leadership Challenge (Kouzes, Posner), 143 Lewin, Kurt, 178 “Lift” ( JetBlue Airways), 117–118 Lincoln, Abraham, 168 Listening, 101–104, 106 Littman-Ovadia, Hadassah, 79 Livingston, J. Sterling, 59–60 Locke, Edwin, 93 Locus of control, 35–36 Loehr, Jim, 68, 70, 82–83 Longevity, 73–77, 109, 131 Luthans, Fred, 60, 131 Lyobomirsky, Sonja, 38, 79

221

Maguire, Eleanor, 172–173 Mamet, David, 181 “Managing Oneself” (Drucker), 31, 47 Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl), 131 Mark, Gloria, 90 Maslow, Abraham, 18–20, 19, 33 Mastery experiences, 51, 54–57, 56, 64–65 Matrix of responses, 120–122, 121 McCullough, Michael E., 80 McKee, Robert, 142 McKinsey & Company, 6–7, 44 McKinsey Quarterly, 161–162 Meaning finding, 35–36 purpose as, 135–138 (See also Purpose) Medellin, Rico, 98–99 Meditation, 95–97, 105–106, 173, 180–181 Merrill, Ray, 76 Millman, Dan, 183, 186 The Mind & The Brain (Schwartz, Begley), 174 Mindful Engagement Zone, 94, 100 Mindful living, 38 Mindfulness culture of mindfulness, 104–106 importance of, 90–92 leadership and, 101–104

222

Mindfulness(continued) Mindful Engagement Zone, 94, 100 neuroplasticity and, 173 tools for, 94–100 workplace tactics for mindful engagement, 104–106 See also Absorption Mindfulness (Langer), 91–92 Mind-set fear of failure and, 167–168 growth versus fixed, 168–170 inertia, 162–163, 163 overwork, 163–166 perfectionism, 166–167 underestimating, 162 Mindset (Dweck), 169–170 Mindsight (Siegel), 94–95 Mirror neurons, 81 Multitasking, 90 NASA, 136 National Geographic, 73 Netflix, 151 Neuner, Jeremy, 20–21 Neuroplasticity, 170–175 New York (magazine), 169 New York Times, 169–170 Next American Economy (Roosevelt Institute), 15 NextSpace, 20–21 Nike, 186 Nir, Dina, 79 Nixon, Richard, 154 Now, Discover Your Strengths (Clifton, Buckingham), 46–49, 58, 62 Nuts! (Freiberg), 155

INDEX

Ohio State University, 34 On Becoming a Leader (Bennis), 112 Optimal relating, 113–115, 114 Orem, Sara, 187–188 Organizations fluidity of workplace, 15–17 (See also Disaggregated world) 10X effect for individuals and, 20 traditional interpretation of, 24–25 Outsourcing, 16 Overgeneralization, 55 Overwork as mind-set, 163–166 Oxytocin, 109 Page, Larry, 65 Parker, John, 155 Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, 184–185 Passion strengths, 50, 51 Passive constructive responding, 121, 122 The Path to Purpose (Damon), 131, 134–135, 137, 138 Pathways to change. See Change Peak experience. See Flow Peak Potential Zone discovering, 49–54, 52, 64 encouraging, 65 mastery experience and, 57 Pennebaker, James, 79 Perfectionism as mind-set, 166–167 Performance strengths, 50, 51 Perlow, Leslie, 165

INDEX

Personal flourishing change and, 16–17, 174–175 defined, 7–9 overview, 3–6 Personal History (Graham), 153 Physical activity developing routine for, 166 for health, 70–72, 75, 76, 82–83 Picasso, Pablo, 191 Picking and leading phase of change, 180–183 Plato, 177 Porras, Jerry, 10–11, 131, 143 Positivity positive emotions, 78–80, 97 for relationships, 111–115, 114, 119–120, 126–127 Posner, Barry, 143 Postrel, Virginia, 98, 99 Potentialife Appreciative Inquiry (AI), 179–180 forming new pathways to change with, 178 (See also Change) on happiness, 39 inception of, 6–9, 29–30 10X program of, 10–12 Power, myths about, 34–35, 108 The Power of Full Engagement (Loehr, Schwartz), 68 The Power of Habit (Duhigg), 187 “The Power of Idealistic-Realism” (Conant), 135 Prairie dogging, 90 Primal Leadership (Goleman), 125

223

Psychological Capital (Luthans, Youssef, Avolio), 131 Psychological safety, 123–124, 127–128 Psychology of leadership, overview, 7–9. See alsoindividual theories and theorists Purpose, 129–147 finding, 35–36 inspiration and, 142–145 job crafting and, 132–135 as meaning and commitment, 135–138, 137 overview, 12–13, 129–132 Purposeful Life Zone, 138 storytelling for, 140–142 tools for purposeful living, 138–140 workplace tactics for meaningful work experience, 145–147 The Purpose-Driven Life (Warren), 131 Pygmalion Effect, 59, 65, 170–171 “Pygmalion in Management” (Livingston), 59–60 Q12 (Gallup Inc.), 45–46, 107, 115 Quality of activities, 164–166 Ramachandran, V. S., 81 Rapt (Gallagher), 94, 104 Ratey, John, 76 Rath, Tom, 117 Reagan, Ronald, 144

224

Recognition, 115–119, 128 Reid, Kathryn, 75 Relationships, 107–128 authenticity for, 111–115, 114 Benefactor Empowerment Zone, 114, 114–115, 120 friendship in workplace, 107–111 health and, 86, 109–110 overview, 12–13 positivity for, 111–115, 114, 119–120 recognition and gratitude in, 115–119 relationship strength, 34–35 responding to success and failure in, 120–125, 121 synergy in, 152 workplace tactics for, 125–128 The Relaxation Response (Benson), 95–96 Religion for Atheists (de Botton), 184 Reminders, 183–186 Repetition, 186–190 Rest, 75–77, 85 Restore Yourself (Greenblatt), 72–73 “Rethinking Stress” (Crum), 70 Ridgway, Angus career of, 44–45, 72, 81, 124, 137–138, 192 The Joy of Leadership, 9–13 Potentialife inception and, 6–9 The Rise of the Naked Economy (Coonerty, Neuner), 20–21 Rituals, 183–186

INDEX

Roddick, Anita, 47–49, 129–130, 138–139 Rogers, Carl, 102 Role models, leaders as, 145 Roosevelt Institute, 15 Rosenthal, Robert, 58–59, 170–171 Rotter, Julian, 35–36 Rules, flow and, 93 Running to the Top (Clayton), 71 Sainsbury, John James, 25 Sainsbury’s (supermarket chain), 25–26, 62–63 Schwartz, Jeffrey, 174, 194 Schwartz, Tony, 68, 70, 82–84 Scientific American, 169 “Screen off, mind on,” 105 Search Inside Yourself (Tan), 95 “The Secrets of Living Longer” (Buettner), 73 Self-confidence, building, 51, 54–57, 56 Self-directed neuroplasticity, 174 Self-management, 31, 47 Seligman, Martin, 109, 118 Selye, Hans, 31–32, 69 Senge, Peter, 25 Sensitive listening, 102 Servant leadership, 101–102 Seventh-Day Adventists, 74, 75 Shafir, Rebecca, 103 SHARP (Strengths, Health, Absorption, Relationships, Purpose) absorption (SHARPening moment), 100

INDEX

balanced approach to, 149–158 defined, 11–12 health (SHARPening moment), 77–78 implementing, for happiness, 38–39 overview, 12–13 purpose (SHARPening moment), 140 relationships (SHARPening moment), 119–120 strengths (SHARPening Moment), 51 See also Absorption; Health; Purpose; Relationships; Strengths Sherwin, Robert H., 47 Siegel, Daniel, 94–95 Skehan, Donal, 67–68, 76, 82, 150, 167, 178, 195 Smith, Richard, 52 Smith, Timothy, 109 “Social Aims” (Emerson), 145 Social media leadership and“followership” in, 22–23 relationships and, 111, 117–118 Socrates, 177 Sorkin, Aaron, 181 Southwest Airlines, 155–157 Spark (Ratey), 76 Spencer Stuart, 52 Srivastva, Suresh, 179 Stanford University, 69–70

225

The State of Employee Recognition in 2012 (Bersin by Deloitte), 116 State of the American Workplace (Gallup), 88–89, 134 Steel, Barbara A., 47 Stefanyszyn, Karen, 54, 135 Stengel, Jim, 130–131 Storytelling, 140–142, 147 Strengths, 43–66 building self-confidence and, 51, 54–57, 56 discovering Peak Potential Zone, 49–54, 52, 64 focusing on, 43–45, 65–66 leading with, 58–60 making connections for, 60–63 myths about weakness, 30–31 overview, 12–13 recognizing, 45–49 workplace tactics for strengths-based leadership, 63–66 Stress advantages of, 31–33 chronic stress as health problem, 68–70 meditation for, 95–97 relationships in workplace for reducing, 108, 109 Stumbling on Happiness (Gilbert), 37 Success recalling successes, 180 in relationships, 120–125, 121 (See also Relationships) Synergy, 151–157

226

Tan, Chade-Meng, 95 Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (Bloom), 193, 193, 194 Taylor, John, 62–63 Tchaikovsky, P., 191 Teams culture of mindfulness for, 104–106 diversity in, 61–62 effectiveness of, 122–123 managing team energy for health, 80–83 10X effect balanced approach to, 149–158 for changing behavior, 161–162 for changing workplace, 26–27 for growth, 191–196 for individuals and organizations, 20 The Joy of Leadership (Ben-Shahar, Ridgway) on, 9–13 overview, 3–6, 12–13 Potentialife inception and, 6–9, 29–30 program length, 185 self-leadership and, 17 See also SHARP (Strengths, Health, Absorption, Relationships, Purpose) Tepper, Bennett J., 34 Thich Nhat Hanh, 38 Thompson, Jeffery A., 134–135 Thrash, Todd, 191 3M Company, 141–142 360-degree feedback, 47

INDEX

Time affluence/poverty, 164 Time management, managing energy versus, 68–70 “Top-down attention,” 94 Towers Perrin, 88 Tucker, Anita, 123–124 24/7 Wall St. (website), 108 Tyler, Tom, 102 “Tyranny of the OR,” 10 Uber Technologies, 16 Unfreezing tactics, 179–180 University of California-Berkeley, 69. See alsoindividual professors “Upward spirals,” 122 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 17 The Verdict (film), 181 Vision, 145–146 Wagner, Rodd, 107 Warren, Rick, 131 Washington Post, 153–155 Watson, David, 139 Wawrinka, Stanislas, 167 The Way of the Peaceful Warrior (Millman), 183 Weakness, myths about, 30–31 Weight loss, perfectionism and, 166 Welch, Jack, 143, 151 Western Electric Company, 116–117 The West Wing (television show), 181 Williams, Mark, 96–97

INDEX

Wiseman, Richard, 182 Woollett, Katherine, 172–173 Workplace as disaggregated world, 3–6, 12, 15–27, 19 friendship in, 107–111 (See also Relationships) as psychologically safe environment, 123–124, 127–128 Worstward Ho (Beckett), 167

227

Wozniak, Steve, 61 Wrzesniewski, Amy, 36, 132–133, 140–147 Yale University, 36 You Are Not Your Brain (Schwartz, Gladding), 174 Youssef, Carolyn M., 131 Zenger, John H., 47, 49 The Zen of Listening (Shafir), 103

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