"Happiness Advantage" Effect
In July 2010 Burt's Bees, a personal-care products company, was going through enormous
change as it began a global expansion into 19 new countries. In this kind of high-pressure situation,
many leaders bother their assistants with frequent meetings or flood their in-boxes with urgent
demands. In doing so, managers lift everyone's anxiety level, which activates the part of the brain
that processes threats and steals resources from the prefrontal cortex ( 大腦皮層), which is
responsible for effective problem solving.
Burt's Bees's then-CEO, John Wolfgang, took a different approach. Each day, he'd send out an
e-mail praising a team member for work related to global marketing. He'd interrupt his own
presentations to remind his managers to talk with their teams about the company's values. He asked
me to further a three-hour session with employees on happiness in the course of the expansion effort.
As one member of the senior team told me a year later, Wolfgang's emphasis on developing positive
leadership kept his managers actively involved and loyal as they successfully transformed the
company into a global one.
That outcome shouldn't surprise us. Research shows that when people work with a positive
mind-set (思維模式), performance on nearly every level-productivity, creativity, involvement-
improves. Yet happiness is perhaps the most misunderstood driver of performance. For one, most
people believe that success comes before happiness. "Once I get a promotion, I'll be happy," they
think. Or, "Once I hit my sales target, I'll feel great. "But because success is a moving target-as
soon as you hit your target, you raise it again-the happiness that results from success does not last
long.
In fact, it works the other way around: People who have a positive mind-set perform better in
the face of challenge. I call this the " happiness advantage"-every business outcome shows
improvement when the brain is positive. I've observed this effect in my role as a researcher and
lecturer in 48 countries on the connection between employee happiness and success. And I'm not
alone: In an analysis of 225 academic studies, researchers found strong evidence of cause-and-effect
relationship between life satisfaction and successful business outcomes.
Another common misunderstanding is that our genetics, our environment, or a combination of
the two determines how happy we are. To be sure, both factors have an impact. But one's general
sense of well-being is surprisingly unstable. The habits you form, the way you interact with
colleagues, how you think about stress-all these can be managed to increase your happiness and
your chances of success.
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