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February 12, 2006
What is happiness?
This BOSS article has turned my attention once again to Martin Seligman, author of
We all seek to be happy, but how happy can we be and what can make us happy? Seligman suggests there are three components to happiness. He calls them the "hedonistic life" – searching for happiness through material wealth, the "engaged life" – being absorbed in what your are doing, and the "meaningful life" where you serve something bigger than yourself.
According to Seligman
"the amount of meaning and engagement you have are vastly more important than the amount of positive emotion you have."
and,
"there is reason to believe that productivity follows very similar laws to life satisfaction. That is, it's related to the amount of meaning you have at work, to the amount of absorption and flow you have at work, and to a lesser extent, the amount of positive emotion you have at work. That means to me that if you're a manager, you need to be attending very carefully to how much meaning and purpose your employees have. You want to be designing what they do every day to have more engagement, more flow, more time-stopping. An you also wnat to think about how much positive emotion there is on the job."
Look at the banner at the top of this page. Seligman's words strike us as reflecting our own beliefs and values. We have believed for a long time that providing workers "meaning and purpose" in their jobs is a good thing to do for its own sake. If you value the dignity of human existence, it follows that you will want to give people meaningful work. Work they can engage in and be proud of.
Seligman's point here accords with another deep belief of mine — providing meaning and purpose in work increases workers' productivity.
In recent days I have come to believe that not only is their productivity increased but it, and that of the organisation they belong to, is applied in a fundamentally better direction. A direction that resonates with the needs of the world at large.
This is something I hope to develop more in future articles.
Posted by chriscurnow at February 12, 2006 9:14 AM
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