The Road To Joy

Chief Joy Officer – How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear – Richard Sheridan – (Portfolio)

“Joy – a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.”

So, how’s your work place/work life? If you’re a leader, what’s your perspective? What would your staff/employees say? Does the definition of joy apply? If the concept of joy and work in the say thought seems like a foreign concept, then it might be time to re-evaluate where you are at.

One starting point on the road to re-evaluation would be the guidance offered by Richard Sheridan in the form of Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear. Sheridan takes what you think might be a daunting task and boils it down to a simple, focused step by step process.

One of the best places to start is with developing a level of self-awareness as a leader. What is your purpose? If you can’t clearly articulate the answer then how can you expect your team to. The root of joy stems from leaders defining purpose, aligning people to “get real work done” by inspiring, motivating, and developing your team.

I loved Sheridan’s sentiment that joy cannot be found when people lead with fear. If you have been working for any length of time, you have likely encountered this type of “leader.” They seemed to be inordinately fixated on things that don’t move the needle other than what they deem as a hot button issue.

One of the best (worst?) examples I can think of was an over-weight, sloppy, CFO who was fixated on the company dress code of all things! The failure of leadership was compounded by a weak CEO who could have cut off the discussion to return focus to what really mattered, instead of allowing the senior leadership team to be dragged through countless hours of discussion and policy drafts only to end up with an over-long, confusing mess that the front-line staff found onerous and off-putting; it was a soul-sucking, nightmare that engendered no joy as they feared making the wrong choices.

GM CEO Mary Barra simplified things with a two word policy; “dress appropriately.” This is an example of a leader engendering trust, a building block of joy, and keeping focus on much larger and more important things. If your dress code is an issue, it may really be a people issue rather than the way you lead them.

Sheridan correctly makes the case that leaders make more leaders. It no surprise that leadership guru Tom Peters, who made that a cornerstone principle of his teaching, authored the foreward to Chief Joy Officer.