Joy is Not Happiness

Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown

In the spring of 2008, Ed was in Baghdad working on the staff of Gen Petraeus, the commanding general for all coalition forces in Iraq. He was not happy. He had just completed his 20th year of service in the US Navy, which is typically when retirement is possible, but there was no retirement while in Iraq. A year before, Ed was working for Capital One as an analyst, and in the Navy he was a Navy Reservist working for the Naval Historical Center, where his job was to record interviews that would go into the historical record so that they could be used later by historians. That is as far away from the tip of the military spear as you can get.

To continue to fulfill the plot of a B-level war movie, it was discovered that Ed worked at Capital One, which made him a "financial expert" in the Green Zone.

Although anytime in a war zone is difficult, the previous year had seen a marked uptick in attacks on the coalition members in the Green Zone, both civilian and military. Mortars and rockets flew at least once a week and often daily for stretches. Al-Qa'ida planted explosives that could be heard detonating in the city. On top of that is the grinding pace of working every day and the separation from home, family, and all that is familiar.

Happiness was very rare indeed. And yet, there was Joy. Ed would not have called it Joy but, in retrospect, he would certainly call it that now. Having been labeled as a "financial expert," Ed worked with the Treasury Attaché from the US Embassy to help rebuild the banking systems of Iraq. He developed microloan programs with the Government of Iraq to get money flowing into new companies so that Iraqis could feed and care for their families. He was involved in getting health clinics, funded by the US government, to move through the various bureaucratic hurdles so they could open. When there was an outbreak of cholera in northern Iraq, Ed combined his aviation logistics knowledge with his contacts in Iraq's Ministry of Health to get vital supplies to those in critical condition.

Every week seemed to provide an opportunity to do something significant to help the people of Iraq. Although there were failures, there were so many successes that Ed looks back on that time as one where he did his best work. He experienced Joy at Work because so many of the elements that make up Joy at Work were present. Perhaps the most important being that he was working with a supportive group and boss to move the struggle of the work they had in front of them and still achieve something that, from the outside, most (maybe all) would have said is impossible. Yet on any given day, if Ed was given the choice to pack his bags and go home, he would have. He was not happy, but he did have Joy at Work.

Weather and Climate

We have come to think of happiness at work as the weather and Joy at Work as the climate. Weather changes quickly. Its fleeting nature maps to happiness, which can be up one moment from a coworker's joke or a well-timed piece of candy, but will quickly blow through with the next poorly phrased corporate communication or a boss's empathy-less proclamation about the low value of the team's work. Joy at Work may be harder to attain, but it is more resilient once established because Joy at Work is a deeper pattern that persists through the weather of happiness.

The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams provides an instructive thought. 

"Joy is in fact our birthright and even more fundamental than happiness. While happiness is often seen as dependent on external circumstances, joy is not." 

They were not the first to point this out. It is part of ancient wisdom. Aristotle called the highest human good eudaimonia, the flourishing that comes from a life of virtuous and purposeful activity. What set it apart for him was its finality, eudaimonia is the one end we choose for its own sake, while everything else we choose is for the sake of eudaimonia. Pleasure he treated with more care than he is usually credited for. He did not dismiss it. He held that pleasure crowns a good activity, coming along with the work rather than causing it. Across two and a half thousand years, that lands where the weather and the climate do. The pleasure of work is real, but it is what accompanies meaningful effort, not what produces it. Happiness is an output, not an input. 

Centuries later, the Stoics added an important idea which is critical to understanding Joy at Work. The Stoics insisted that virtue alone is sufficient for eudaimonia. Aristotle held that "external goods," such as health, safety, and good friends, are necessary to fully flourish. For Stoics, external circumstances like those are classified as "indifferents". Joy (chara) does not depend on circumstances. That was Ed’s lived experience. Joy at Work was possible in Iraq, even though all around him might indicate otherwise.

Joy at Work Lives in the Struggle

For several years, we have been asking people what Joy at Work means to them, in dozens of interviews with executives and managers and hundreds of conversations about their best team experiences. The dataset is rich, but one pattern runs through nearly all of it: Joy at Work grows out of hard, meaningful work done with a group. There is usually an expectation that the thing cannot be done, or cannot be done this way, and the team does it anyway. The high school soccer team, the Red Cross rescue crew, the group launching a new product: each remembers a difficulty they faced together and got past. This is flourishing in the older sense, Aristotle's eudaimonia, which comes through purposeful activity and not through ease.

Sometimes the hardship is not chosen and cannot be escaped. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi camps, argued that even then, when difficulty cannot be removed, meaning remains available in how we choose to meet it. He was careful to add that suffering is not required for meaning; when hardship can be relieved, relieving it is the meaningful act. But when it cannot, there is still the freedom to choose our response to what befalls us, the one freedom he believed can never be taken away. Nietzsche, whom Frankl was fond of quoting, put the same truth more bluntly:

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

That was Ed in Iraq. He could not leave, and he would have gone home any day he was offered the chance. Yet the work mattered, and it was shared, and so there was Joy at Work. Look back at your own best team, and you will almost certainly find the same: something hard, done together, that you were not sure you could pull off.

What This Means for Joy at Work

If that is so, then leaders are freed from a terrible burden. They do not need to make up the conditions in which Joy at Work arises. Those conditions are almost certainly present because successful organizations try to do hard things. They don't kill Joy at Work. They foster it.

This does not mean that leaders simply need to concoct a struggle. The work still needs to have meaning and critically needs to be shared with a group. Joy at Work comes through the struggle for meaningful work with a team. Happiness can still be present, but it is an output of Joy at Work, not an input. Leaders don't need to create forced fun. Fun will come as the team comes together to overcome the struggle. How to do this is much of what this book is about.

The Best Team Experience

Although not a shortcut, there is a way to get started immediately on creating Joy at Work. Simply consider your best team experience. Answer these questions:

• What about it made it your best experience?
• What from that experience would you like to have on your current team?
• What needs to be true to make that happen?

If you are like all of the others we have interviewed, you will readily recall a best team experience. As you think through it and even jot down the answers to the above questions, notice how you feel. Notice how your body changes. The people we interview begin to smile as they recall their best team experience. The energy in their voice increases, as does the velocity of their speech, as they easily relate the adjectives and phrases that describe the experience. Some even shift their posture. Their backs straighten, and their shoulders move back. Recalling a best team experience or Joy at Work has both emotional and physical impact.