The Joy of Leadership

How Positive Psychology Can Maximize Your Impact (and Make You Happier) in a Challenging World

Tal Ben-Shahar, Angus Ridgway

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781119313007
• eBook ISBN: 9781119314486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Think of the last time you were at your best and working in the zone. Now compare that to all the time you've spent just going through the motions. How would you quantify the difference between the two in terms of how you felt and what you produced? Would you rate it as a 5% difference... a 50% difference? Most people would describe the gulf between those two states of being as vast—as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon. For quality of experience, engagement, productivity, and just the sheer joy of living, the majority of people asked to rate the difference between flourishing and floundering found it to be around a factor of 10.

In their work with managers and executives at leading companies around the world, authors Tal Ben-Shahar and Angus Ridgway have identified a select group of individuals who consistently perform at their peak, and who make work seem effortless and working with them feel easy. The name they've given to those lucky few is "10X Leaders". You know who they are. They're the team leaders who bring out the best in everyone. They're the senior managers who drive growth and innovation. They're the dream bosses, dream partners, and dream colleagues. There's a good chance you've encountered at least one 10X leader in your career—you're probably thinking of one right now. And you wondered how they did it.

Dr. Ben-Shahar and Mr. Ridgway believe they know the answer. They have identified the core characteristics, behaviors, and cognitive styles that all 10X leaders share. Even better, they've developed a way for virtually anyone to cultivate those traits and ways of thinking in themselves to become happier, more effective, and more successful.

In this powerful new book they describe their revolutionary SHARP (Strength, Health, Absorption, Relationships, and Purpose) program for becoming a 10X leader. They tell you the true stories of people at organizations around the globe who've become more effective by learning to use these performance multipliers. And they offer proven strategies for mastering those characteristics and habits for lasting change—the kind of change that can bring you greater fulfilment and success, not just at work, but in every area of your life.

Part I
THE DISAGGREGATED WORLD

Chapter 1
The 10X Effect: Performance Multipliers to Achieve Lasting Success and Fulfillment

You 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 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 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 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 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 an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: THE DISAGGREGATED WORLD
• Part II: WHAT 10X LEADERS DO
• Part III: HOW TO CHANGE—AND STAY CHANGED
• Index
• End User License Agreement