Annie McKee
Annie McKee, PhD, is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and a best-selling author, speaker, and advisor to top global leaders. Her latest book, How to Be Happy at Work: The Power of Purpose, Hope, and Friendship (Harvard Business Review Press, 2017) follows several HBR bestsellers, including Primal Leadership with Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, and Becoming a Resonant Leader. As a coach to executives in Fortune/FTSE 500 companies and public sector institutions, she uses a person-centered approach to help leaders develop their emotional intelligence, enhance their strategic thinking abilities, and build resonant cultures.
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Are you happy at work? If you are, you are one of the lucky ones. You have trusting, warm relationships with colleagues. You feel that what you do is important and your daily actions are an expression of your values. Your future is bright, and work is an avenue to your dreams. Your life is richer, fuller, and more meaningful than if you are bored or miserable at your job – as so many people are. After all, we spend nearly a third of our lives working, and for many of us it’s more than that. If those hours are full of stressful interactions with people you’re not sure you like and who may not like you either, or if you feel that you aren’t making a difference or that the future is bleak, it is very unlikely that you will feel the deep and abiding enjoyment that all of us yearn for in life.
Common sense tells us that happiness matters at work just as much as it does in the rest of life. We now have research to back this up: Happy people are better workers. We are more creative, committed, and engaged when we are fulfilled by our work. We are more adaptable, we learn faster and better, and we are more successful, too.1
With both common wisdom and research pointing to the same conclusion, it is baffling to me that so many of us are not happy at work. The now-legendary Gallup statistics paint a dismal picture of boredom and disengagement – not exactly a recipe for happiness (or success).2 And in my own experience with people all over the world, I’ve heard a common refrain: “I want to love my job. I want to be happy at work. But I am not, so I am holding back.” This is often followed up with the first reason why so many of us aren’t happy when they say, “And does it matter anyway? Isn’t work supposed to be tough? Do I even deserve to be happy?”
It’s time to debunk these myths. Happiness is a human right – a right that can and should be available to all of us, no matter where we work or what we do. Happiness impacts the quality of our lives, our health, and our relationships. It also impacts our success at work.
Our performance suffers when we are disengaged, dissatisfied, and unfulfilled at work. The destructive emotions that take over when we are in this state – emotions like fear, frustration, and anger – interfere with our reasoning and kill innovation. They also compromise our health and our relationships. And it’s not only our personal performance that suffers; our companies do, too.3 In fact, companies with happy and engaged employees outperform their competition by 20%.4
I have been truly unhappy at work twice in my life. In the more recent situation, there were two issues that pushed me from delight to misery. The first problem was that I had been overworking for so long that I burned out.5 The second (and related to the first) was that I’d made some decisions and allowed some things to happen in our workplace that were contrary to my personal values.
Stress, I found out, is a happiness killer. There is virtually no way for us to enjoy our daily lives when every moment is filled with worry, or too much work for any one human being to do. Unfortunately, I am not alone in having lived like this for so long that stress became burnout and burnout led to bad decisions and feeling trapped.
I know how this happened to me and I know I am not alone. We live in an always-on world where it is possible to work all the time. In some companies, we are expected to be available around the clock, on weekends and on vacations. How, then, can we step off the path and make sure we remain healthy?
Avoiding burnout – or pulling back from it – starts with self-awareness in the form of a foundational emotional intelligence (EI) competency.6 For me, tapping (back) into my knowledge about myself – what I needed emotionally, physically, and intellectually at work – took some time and effort. Like other leaders I’ve worked with, I had to take a good, hard look at what had happened to me over the many years of working so hard. This wasn’t easy and, frankly, it took courage. Then, I had to make tough decisions about things that affected me, my colleagues, and others that I worked with. I had to pull back. Again, this took effort, and self-management, another EI competency. It’s not easy to change patterns we’ve created and that others have gotten used to. With growing awareness of the negative impact of stress on my life and my work – not to mention my happiness – I was ready to move proactively to make things better.
To start, I had to look at some of the fallout from burnout – most importantly, that I’d gone along with some decisions in the business that were counter to my personal values. This wasn’t as easy or as clear-cut as it sounds. There was no lawbreaking going on in the consulting project we were working on, and some would say there were no ethical violations, either. But for me, what the company was doing was wrong. For a long time, I had justified our collective actions, telling myself, “We are helping people, at least,” or, “You can’t throw stones from the sidelines – get in there and try to fix things.” These justifications were sensible and reasonable, at first. But, over time, I realized that our company’s activities weren’t truly helping people or making things better. Instead, our efforts were a cover, making it look like the client wanted to make positive changes when, in fact, it became quite clear they did not.
The lesson of this story for me was that if we let go of our core values, or compromise our beliefs, we can’t possibly be happy. And, as it turns out, at this same time we were studying quite a lot of organizations around the world in terms of their leadership, culture, that sort of thing. As I began to look at these many studies, I found that, yet again, I wasn’t alone in what I needed in order to reclaim happiness: We all want to know that our efforts are making a positive difference and that we are living our values at work.
I learned even more about what makes us happy at work as I delved into the studies of the people and companies who asked us to help them improve their cultures. These insights helped me understand what had gone wrong for me long ago in another job that ultimately made me unhappy.
A long time ago, I worked for a man who didn’t like me. Of course, I didn’t realize this at first; he’d hired me, after all, and must have seen something redeeming in me and my qualifications. But within a matter of months, it was clear that he didn’t respect, trust, or care about me.
I tried everything to make the situation better. I worked harder, tried to be as pleasant as I could be, found solutions for his workplace problems. But it just kept getting worse. In retrospect, he may have been threatened by me, or maybe he really didn’t like working as part of a team. In the end, it didn’t matter why he treated me that way. What mattered was that I became so frustrated and fearful that I started losing my edge. I stopped being able to do my best work. I lost my energy and creativity. Ultimately, I got sick.
Happiness is impossible when our relationships are toxic. Unfortunately, there are far too many people like my old boss in our organizations – and they get away with murder. There’s hope on the horizon, however, as a growing body of scholarly and practical research is showing beyond a shadow of a doubt that relationships impact individual and collective success.7 We need love – companionate love – at work and in life.8 We need to both feel cared for and to share our care and concern with others, to help them and support them, too. We need to feel we belong – that people like and respect us for who we are.
We do need friends at work. We also need to be able to see how what we are doing with people in our workplaces feeds our dreams, our very personal hopes for our future.
In order for us to be truly happy at work, we need to see our work as an integral part of our present and our future. We need to feel that what we do at work helps us to get somewhere – and not just to the next rung on a career ladder.
When I was unhappy in those two jobs, it was difficult to see where I was heading. During my lowest points, I felt stuck and couldn’t see past the misery of the present. I realized, though, that to lose hope is to lose life. So, even when things were really bad, I tried to focus on what I wanted in my life, what I wanted in my job, what I wanted in my relationships. I tried to hold on to hope, to have an optimistic vision of the future, and to make plans. And in both situations, it was this vision and acting on my plans that got me through to the other side – and back to happiness at work.
My experiences of being unhappy at work led me to make some decisions about what I would put up with going forward – and what I would not. I also sought to understand the essence of what I’d learned and have come to some conclusions about happiness at work:
It’s not always easy to be happy at work; I have learned this the hard way. But if we focus on purpose, friendships, and hope, we can find and stay on a path that fits who we are and what we want, while helping us to reach our potential and contribute to others and to the greater good.