“If you are joyful, it will shine in your eyes and in your look, in your conversation and in your contentment. You will not be able to hide it because joy overflows.

Joy is very contagious. Try, therefore, to be always overflowing with joy wherever you go.

Mother Teresa. (2010). In the Heart of the World (eBook). Novato, California: New World Library. p.28.

February is that awkward month. It always seems to fall short of a couple of days, suffering burnout from the juggernaut months of December, ending one year and January starting the next. In the middle of a 28 Day month, we celebrate love via Valentine’s Day and more broadly the quality of our relationships with other people. It’s almost as if the calendar periodically reminds us: “Don’t forget to be loving! Don’t forget to let the people you care about know that you do care about them!”

If you see leadership as a process of influence, you are not going to influence people if they are not listening. To get them to listen to you, requires you, the leader, to have a positive relationship with them. There is a subtle difference between hearing what is being said by a leader and actually listening to them. Leadership is about relationships. So here is the next question. When you find yourself in either a professional or personal relationship, do you find it works best if the other person is also generally happy, calm, and grounded, giving lots of positive energy, or does the negative unhappy person work better for you? Most people would go with the positive energy, the happy, calm, well-grounded person and as a result, buy-in of the leader is more likely and the process of influence is more achievable. For the bonus question: as a leader, when was the last time you smiled at your staff, maybe even shared a laugh with them? All of this points towards notions of being a joyful leader.

This information isn’t just useful to those in leadership. It is just as valuable in the recruitment process. Generally, interview panels are trying to ascertain if you would be a person that others on staff could warm to, relate to, engage with. The person that has an abundance of positive energy is more likely to engage with the panel and present a positive, life-giving vision for the role should they be appointed. It’s not really ‘Rocket Science’ but it is Neuroscience, as Paul J Zak, Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology, and Management at Claremont Graduate University, explains.

“I have tested oxytocin release in the bedroom, board room, and bivouac. It occurs everywhere. I have documented more than a dozen ways to stimulate oxytocin production in my experiments. All it takes is a positive social interaction without too much stress or testosterone. Oxytocin just might be the molecule that makes us human. At least it is the molecule that creates our humanity. By understanding a little about the neuroscience of oxytocin, you can harness humanity at work. Believe me, the people at work want this. A key takeaway from this chapter is that culture is not static. It evolves as the people and purpose of the organization change.”

Zak, Paul, J. (2017). The Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies (eBook). New York, NY: AMACOM. p.25-26.

So, Mother Teresa was spot on in her statement about joy. It fuels a positive emotional state, triggering the neuroscience of Oxytocin to kick in and through iterations of joy-filled moments, it soon becomes contagious. The upshot of course is that people like to work with and work for, someone who is full of joy. Sure, every now and then that leader’s humanity will show a more somber side. That degree of vulnerability, that reflection of a leaders true ‘humanness’ is not a sign of weakness. It reminds us all that we are human and empowers others to embrace their humanity. It makes the leader more endearing. It also contributes to the building of a culture of ‘Psychological Safety’, one in which the power of positive interactions can be learned, according to Harvard Business School Professor, Amy C Emondson, in her book “The Fearless Organization.”

“My view is that, yes, most people can learn. And that includes learning to better understand the positive and negative effects that one’s mindset and behavior is having on others. Most people would prefer to have positive rather than negative effects on others, and most are also able to gain insight on how to do that, with training and coaching.”

Edmondson, Amy, C. (2019). The fearless organization: creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth (eBook). Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. p.196.

From a cursory glance of some of the available literature, it is not a stretch to suggest that as humans, we prefer to be in an emotional state of joy. What’s more, our brain enjoys it too! Joy is often associated with other positive states of being. How many times have you seen a Christmas card that wishes you the ‘Peace and Joy of the Festive Season’? Joy and peace often go together. They occur through internalization. Put another way, your interior life is where they are processed and reside. As a leader, they become manifest for example, in your ‘Adaptive Leadership’. Joy is that place where all seems to be right with the world. Its cousin, happiness is from an external trigger. Anthropologist Victor Turner explains with eloquence, happiness as a state of flow. The trigger is external but secondary to the sense of flow that it creates.

“To flow is to be as happy as a human can be – the particular rules or stimuli that triggered the flow, whether chess or a prayer meeting, do not matter.”

Turner, Victor (1982). From Ritual to Theatre, New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications. p.58.

Another Anthropologist, Douglas Davies, working from a Phenomenological perspective, likens states of joy or sorrow to a ‘smell of emotion’. What he demonstrates and concludes is that joy is found in and manifested from a deep internal place for us humans and its liminality or threshold is unique to the individual. What might be found joyful for one person might be sorrowful for another.

“In a smell, my emotion and my ideas cohere to yield a joy or sorrow, as the history of that smell may dictate. And it is just such smells that cannot be ‘interpreted’, language-like, for others to understand. As such, the concept of the smell serves a fundamental purpose as a symbol of and for an entire category of human life experiences that are profoundly important, but that cannot be directly ‘interpreted’ for others.”

Davies, Douglas (2020). Anthropology and Theology (eBook). New York City: Routledge. p.190.