Raising the Bar on Organizational Happiness with Lars Kure Juul

Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspiration to help you operate at your fullest potential. Integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. I'm your host, Ashish Kothari, the founder and CEO of Happiness Squad and author of the bestselling book Hardwired for Happiness. I will be your personal guide on your journey to explore the many facets of happiness, wisdom, well being and flourishing, from personal growth to building more positive environments at work. In each episode we will share powerful insight, tips and stories from our guests who are leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge. Whether you're looking to overcome life's challenges, to go from good to great, or to enhance your team's performance through flourishing, this podcast is the place for you to find more joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do. Join us every week as we rewire for happiness together. Welcome to the Happiness Squad Podcast. Today we are joined by Lars Kurcio, a globally recognized advisor, author, facilitator and leadership coach based in Copenhagen who focuses on helping organizations unleash the power of happiness to help them operate at their fullest potential. Lars is the best selling author of Organizational Happiness and serves as a visiting professor at the UN mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica. In this episode, Lars delves into his model for helping organizations find what he calls their sweet spot that lies at the intersection of purpose, compassion and strengths. He shares a compelling case study from Boston Scientific showing how investing in happiness help them boost retention, performance and innovation. In this episode, we'll also delve into the importance of using metrics and real time insights into employee happiness to make progress on what can be a complex topic and really inspire and capture the imagination of boards and leaders to truly prioritize organizational flourishing as a core part of their strategy rather than just an employee service that they are providing. Stick around till the end, dear friends, to hear a powerful story of a personal transformation that one of the leaders Lars coached went through and what became possible for them and their organization as a result of creating a happier culture. Hi my dear friend. It is so lovely to have you on our Happiness Squad podcast.

Hello. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation this afternoon in Denmark. It is so. I think we always have, you know, meaningful conversations. I. I like that.

Yeah, same here friends. For. For those who are listening or watching, hopefully you can see the amazing energy that Lars exudes. I had a chance to meet Lars About a. Almost a year and a half ago, I guess at this point two years ago, we were taking a trip through Europe. I had taken three months off. So it's on my. This was while I was on my way out of McKinsey to start happiness Squad. And you know, I was connecting with all the different folks who do work around happiness and flourishing and to learn from them what they were doing. And I had a chance to meet Lars on LinkedIn and then I emailed him and I said, hey, I'm gonna be in Copenhagen. Are you around? And Lars kindly came over with three of his books, which became one of the highlights of my trip. And that's where our friendship started. And so this has been a long time coming, you know, since then we've set an intention to record together. Earlier this year we had a chance to meet together. We were co presenters on a panel on organizational happiness at the University of Peace in Costa Rica as part of the Gross Global Happiness Summit. So I'm glad to finally have him here and for him to share his wisdom. Lars has so many years of experience in this field. Lars. But I want to start by your origin story a bit share with me around how you decided to focus all of your energies on this topic around flourishing and happiness. What got you here?

Yeah, so this could be a very long story. Right. In my age. But let me try to give you a few highlights or a few defining moments. I think so. Originally graduated as a lawyer working in mergers acquisition in the early 90s in the IT industry and you know, looking at merchants and acquisition and what I was doing from a legal point of view was yeah, I was good at it and it worked well. But what I also recognized or discovered was that it was not really the lawyers that made the difference. Right. It was the people in the organizations and how do they fit together. How do we make people work together? How do we make them stay? How do we make then flories perform? You know. And from there on I really moved into a more people HR role. And so the last 25 years I've been in corporate executive roles within the HR field. I've been in. In management consulting like you. And you know, at some point I. And for me it's always been about unlocking potential. How can we do more with what we have here? How can we do more? How can we, on an individual level, on a team level or in an organization, how can we do more? So that's what I spent most of my awake hours on the last 25, five years.

I think 25 plus years. Yeah.

And I think, and I think just to answer your question, at some point, it kind of, I think 12 years ago, I started looking into some of the work by Dr. Martin Seligman and, you know, some of the signs of happiness around that and connecting it with Engage, engage employee engagement. And I talked to some of my clients around this organizations, and how can we find a sweet spot for working with the PERMA model, which is really. Simon Silver, Dr. Martin Seliman's work, a sweet spot for organizations. So we can really tap in to that power of the science of happiness as a leader and as an organization. And that's where I kind of, I'm not sure it's the right word, slippery slope. But it's like when you get into this, it's like it's just getting bigger and bigger and you're having, of course, fun with it, but also it's a cool, complex thing that you need to make quite simple for organizational leaders to work with it in an effective way. So that's been my angel.

Yeah, no, look, and I think it's, you know, you talk about a slippery slope. You know, vortexes can be negative, which oftentimes workplaces can be filled with, you know, they suck you down. We get into the. We bond over complaining. We bond over like, oh, my God, how busy we are. Right. This used to be the most common thing you hear, you know, even at consulting firms. Right. How are you doing? Oh, I'm busy. Because somehow busy was you being productive. You're doing work and that's good. Right? Which is, I'm not sure. We were born to be busy. So oftentimes I used to get like these eyebrows raised when I said I'm amazing. They're like, why? What are you amazing? What are you on? Right. I'm like, would you rather be amazing or busy? Right. Like, you know, but anyway. But I think with this work, you, what you're describing is you can also create these positive spirals or vortexes that actually take you up. And then collectively and individually, you are creating amazing impact and really operating at our fullest potential versus interference that get in the way. In your book, you wrote Organizational Happiness, which I absolutely loved. It's the happiness sweet spot and your motivational landscape. So we're going to get into that a fair bit. And you describe that sweet spot at the intersection of purpose, compassion and strengths. And I think that is so powerful. I think it's a really simple, simple, simple model. Talk to me about how you arrived at that and how you took perma and as you started to apply, it came to that organizational sweet spot model.

Yeah. So it was something that we spent quite some time on and it was almost like it was a model that I developed on a walk in nature or something like that, that it came to me, but on a beach actually in Costa Rica. I remember that clearly. But it was like, what if we could have a simple enabling platform for leaders and organization to stand on so they're able to tap into that power of happiness, the power of the science of happiness. You spoke to it clearly before because I think, at least I think it was like in 2012, Harvard Business Review had like a couple of COVID issue or cover. Yeah. On the Harvard Business Review, talking about the happiness dividend or something like that. Shaker did a lot of that work in the beginning. But I think it, it took us. We're still talking about it. Right. We're still trying to define the problem or defining what it is. And I, and for me, I take a pride in being a practitioner. I take a pride in making things happening. Going from talking about it, talking about it to actually creating a change in behavior. I mean, for the benefit of, for the purpose of the benefit of the individuals, of course, in the organization. But also it's a huge opportunity for organizations. So I wanted to offer that platform and it for leaders and organization. And it almost like it developed while we were doing projects, you know, organization development projects with a few clients. So it took off and then at some point I promised to write the book. You know, that process. It's not an easy process.

Yes. No, it is not. So talk to me. You know, let's bring it to life for our listeners. Lars, take me through a case study. Take me through a client either named, or if you can't name them, the industry, and take me to the study of the impact that they experience and actually the journey that you took them on.

Yeah. So very often. So, you know, in the beginning when you do things like this, it's a little, it's a little, you know, trial and error and. But now I think we have a solid platform, an effective framework to look at and use for organizational leaders. And it, like you said, it is a sweet spot between purpose defining or developing or storytelling your purpose, tapping into strengths based leadership and cultivating a culture of compassion in your organization. We can maybe get back to some of that. But I think it's important to say that it's not a one size fits all. It's a framework where you say, okay, for me, my organization, where am I in this connected to that sweet spot. So very often a good example is an organization. We have talked about this before, so I can mention Boston Scientific. I think they are role model and a lighthouse and a first mover in some of this. So we've been working with them for five years. But that started with a scoping and training workshop with a T key team from the organization. So we took them away for a couple of days, said where are we? We scored each other on the three.

Areas on the three dimensions.

Yeah. And said, where would it make sense to start here? And they, they talked about, okay, we need to be better at. This was four years ago. So they have moved since then. But they said we need to be better at our employee value proposition. What is it that we offer to the market? So we're able to attract how the top talent in that market. And so we made a game plan and we facilitated that game plan. But more or less they had their own internal project team to work on organizational happiness. And then we meet, of course we train all the leaders and things like that and.

Sorry, Lars. And so when they were defining the employee value proposition, I'm assuming they used purpose and what's their why? As a key part of the employee value proposition, right?

That's right.

Or why should you come to choose us? Why work here? Why be a part of this team?

That's right. Thank you for clarifying that. I think. And in this example, and of course you can look at your own organization, if you're listening to this, think about your own mission, vision. Why are you here for your organization? For some organizations this is very easy, right? I mean like you and I, we've just been together with you and connection. It's easy for you and to serve a purpose, right? For some organizations it's very difficult. So they need to develop that meaningful story that makes me want to work for you and being proud of being a part of that organization. For Boston Scientific, that was not so difficult. I mean they're doing amazing work. They're saving lives every day, right. They're making life saving devices. That's. That's their business, right. I would say looking from the outside, but sometimes it's also about telling that story in the right way. So you're telling the story to all your stakeholders, employees, future and current employees, but also to your customers and to the families and you know, so we worked a lot with that stolen.

Absolutely amazing. So that was year one. And so then take me through the journey. What happens in the year two.

So it's a good example of like I said, it's not a one size fits all. So it's diving into it and say where would it have most effects on these trails of three dimension if we take one of them, where would the. You would say the business case be best? Right. And for most organizations I think the business case is on retention. It's on. I mean there are a few KPIs but maybe we can talk about that the KPIs later in the business case for Boston Scientific where they are right now started. Yes. Last year was we can see because they measure on it on a regular basis. They measure an organizational happiness and they could see the scores on compassion was going down a little bit for a lot of reasons. There could be many good reasons for that. You know we had. We are all still talking about Corona and things like that but the scores went. Was a little low on that. And they said that that will be our strategic priority, priority and focus area for the next year. And we developed a training session for. For the leaders and, and they are going back and committing to do something with their team. So they kind of move to. From purpose a little bit of strength based leadership. But they're very, very good on that. And then they move into the compassion part and say how can we cultivate a culture of compassion here? And right now we're talking about it as tapping into the power of belonging. Actually we're taking a little bit of a deep dive into compassion and talking also about belonging the there and some of the cases. I. I cannot share with you the data from Boston Scientific, but I have another case that we just did on retention because very often when you have to deliver on the business case on organizational happiness, I very often take the KPI as retention or attrition, whatever you call it. That. That's the other side of that. Right. But there we just. We worked with the happiness switchbots we implemented. We did a baseline survey and then one year later we tracked again the. We tracked it on a. On a quarterly basis. And then of course the retention or the, the attrition was that matrix went down and they saved it was US$708,000 in a year. Right on that. So building that business case, it just makes it. I'm just saying that figure because it makes it a no brainer to do it. Right.

Yeah. So let's go down that path of business case for investing in organizational happiness. Right. You mentioned one of the drivers being retention as kind of a big one. What are some other ones Lars, that when you are working with organizations or any of the leaders who are listening to this, you want to bring the science of happiness to your organizations. What are some key elements that you would encourage them to include in the business case?

Normally I would advocate to make a business case where you under promise and over deliver. That's my approach to business cases. I think it works best and I think for HR and we, you know we are in hr, right? We're coming from hr. We are part of that sometimes very difficult for us to build a business case that we can present in a boardroom or to the cfo. So very often I'm using retention because that that just gets, gets it and we can see it and we can see so. So that in itself usually is enough to kick an organization happiness project off. But I would say some of them, I would say some that is probably more return on investment. I would say is on high performance in teams. I would say it could be customer satisfaction, it could be, you know, innovation, things like that. Some things that are pretty. Of course you can measure on it but. But then can you kind of identify that it's really the organizational happiness project that delivered on that. But what we see is that these things are going up. If you work with it especially I would say compassion. I think it's an interesting. Maybe it's because I'm right into it right now with an organization. But you know we talk about psychological safety, we talk about high performance in teams and I think very. And we also talk about workplace that is broken. Right. In many ways we talk about a global workplace. You could look at the Gallup figures, we all refer to those. But I think the fix for that broken workplace is leadership. And I think in there the compassion part is so important. To lead with compassion.

Yeah. And look, I think we have to, you know, I think in our own work Lars and the models that we're building, you know, in our own work, the business case is really needs to be very clear. So often when I'm doing this work I build a case around profitability, productivity. We know that organizations that are happier are 20% more productive, 20 plus percent more profitable. They have 2x higher stock market returns. Alex Edmonds work in London business school proved causation two to three and a half percent higher shareholder returns versus competitors year over year only holds if it's over. It has to be over a longer than four year horizon. Organizational happiness is not a fix for short term, but long term. I think it can create a Powerful strategy to create an alpha of 30 to 50% over the long term. I'm not sure of any other strategy. Truly a strategy that can actually deliver that level of performance while making everything else go better. Right. It's almost that lubricating wheel because we sometimes forget that what connects strategy to execution is people. And if people are engaged, people show up fully aligned and happy, they get higher performance. I had another expert on our call, Ali. Ali is doing some really, really amazing work. So friends, if you haven't listened, I that podcast should be released a couple of podcasts before this one. So go back and take a look at it. We'll tag him. It's there. Ali's building a very quantitative tool around this. And he loved. He. He builds his business case around what he calls we help organizations eliminate crap. And he says crap. And so what's crap? C is claims risk. If your people are happier, you're going to have less mental health burnout and health claims. R is he calls retention. So as you said, Lars, it should reduce your attrition. You should be able to keep more people around. A is absenteeism. You're going to have less people take time off or like not actually show up and be present when they're showing up. And fourth is P. He calls it performance risk. Again, high performing teams, you're going to be more productive, you're going to be more profitable. The invitation is to really build the fact base around where you are and where do you want to go so we can, Lars, to your point, stand in front with the same level of base with boards and engage the leadership teams to truly make this a leadership led effort. We've got to build the business case. But the business case is there. We just need to build it for our organization. Because as you and I, through all the work that we've done, know that that exists. And I think these organizations can win with it.

Yeah, I think. Very good point. And I think maybe we can speak to that because I think, you know, organizational happiness, it doesn't resonate in all boardrooms. Right. For sure. I think that, I think we are getting there and I think there's something happening. But you know, the ability to talk about happiness in a boardroom or in a C suite meeting, we need more of us, more of the people that are able to take that conversation on a business case level in those meetings or in those rooms.

Absolutely.

Because. Because I think that too much and I have to be a little careful here because I love yoga, I love mindfulness. I do it myself, things like that. But sometimes some of the organization happiness that are promoted out there, it looks a little bit like a yoga class or a mindfulness class. And that's not, I think that's not how we are going to deliver on the business case because that's just an employee service that we are offering to the organization, right?

Yes.

We need to make it a strategic priority. We need to do the business case, we need to measure on it and we need to deliver on the business case. Right. So a little bit of that. And it's a discipline that I know you and I as you, we have been doing this as management consulting, consultants and things, but it's a discipline that we in HR is not very used to doing the business case. I think it's getting much better and I think that we have some great people out there doing great work.

We hope you're enjoying this episode. If you'd like to start building habits and integrating the hardwired for happiness practices into your life, come check out Rewire, our program on the Happiness Squad website. Rewire contains 35 minute micro practices that can help you truly build habits for a happier, healthier life filled with more love and meaning. The program uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to support you in moving from knowing to doing to being. Now back to the episode. Yeah. So look, in business cases, you know, you talk about and you've written about the motivational landscape platform, right? An instrument that you've designed that actually allows people to be able to quantify, assess and quantify, you know, this work, right. So it's truly grounded in real performance shifts and impact that you can see. Talk a little bit about that landscape platform. How do you define that and how do you measure that and what's your advice around that?

Yeah, I think so. The advice without referring to a specific product, I can talk about the motivational landscape. But I think.

Yes, please, from the top.

I think we need to as an organization to have a listening strategy. Right. We need how do we listen to our organization? And one way of doing that is having regular Pulse survey. I think that's best practice now in most organizations, I think the year.

How often would you do that, Lars? How often would you pulse?

I would pulse at least once a month, depending a little bit about how many. The motivation landscape has 10 questions. It takes you as an employee 90 seconds to go through it. So it's not a huge effort to do it, but it gives you motivational landscape, right? It gives you, you can look at your Organization and say, where is there a smoke before it becomes a fire? Or even I would say also. And I think we also have to look at that. Where is. Do we have our lighthouses? Who are the leaders that we can learn from? So the motivation landscape is, you know, setting up your organization and asking the 10 questions to your teams every month or every quarter could also work if you're coming from a very yearly based employee engagement survey. I just wanted to say that I just heard, you know, Nick Marks in London last week and I know that he has a notion and I subscribe to that, talking about that a yearly employment engagement survey, employee engagement surveys. It could actually be harmful. We're spending so much resource and time on that. But what we are acting as, I mean we are asking the questions and, and these are a lot of questions, right? Maybe 50, 100 questions to every employee. Then to get produce the data on it, it takes us, us, I'd say hr it takes us a month or two and then we have to go through it with the management team and then we kind of announce it and give it back to the leaders. Right? That's sometimes there's a long lag.

There's a long lag and comes at a high cost.

Yeah, and that's. Right. And not just that I think that's one thing, but the other thing is that then the rest of the year we are acting on old data. We're kidding ourselves, we are lying to ourselves because it's just old data from half a year ago. Of course it gives you a picture, but I would say that use less resources and then just ask maybe three to ten questions every month. That would give you that pulse. Or as a manager that gives you. What is it that I need to speak with my team about in my next team meeting? Because sometimes it's, you know, the food in the canteen, I mean, or sometimes it's a really serious leadership problem. Right, but. But you don't know. So you have to ask.

You have to ask, you know, and look, I mean this is something that I, you know, at the work we're doing in Happiness Squad where like this is front and center, right. I like and I friends, I invite you to just think about the following. I think @Lars is highlighting and inviting us and encouraging us to do the same. Which is when it comes to physical assets, you look at data continuously almost every hour, if not every minute. You know, if you've ever run a factory, you know, we have now sensors that are literally or marks that show how many units Per hour is this line running versus the rated capacity versus the target. But somehow when it comes to human assets, we think one year is okay. Imagine if you ran your physical assets at the same cadence and with the same lag. Six months after looking at one snapshot, you take action. Where would your business be now? Think about where your investments are. Are you investing more in people or machines? And if you're investing more in people, what would it take you to get to a more rigorous, more accurate, more real time insights into where people are? I'm also going to highlight something else for you because this can become quite, it can feel very overwhelming. Many HR departments are under resourced and so this can be a real challenge. Like hey, it takes us so much just to process the engagement survey. How the hell are we going to do this? And for that one, I offer you a real example. So. So at my time at McKinsey, all 17 years, we did not measure organizational happiness, but for sure we measured something using an instrument called the team Barometer on how as a team we were operating all teams. Almost 20,000 teams at some point that were deployed got their team barometer. It was a team specific thing. No center person was involved in actually making sense of it. Overall, the team got their barometer benchmarked against other teams in the industry or in the, in the particular office complex they were part of. And it was really, as Lars said, a way for the team to have a conversation around, hey, what's getting in the way of us operating at our fullest potential? What's an action I can take? So it's real time and we really use our people who know the small steps that they can take. We put the power back to them and we resource and reduce the resource load. So I love the work you're doing Lars around this, I think more and more companies, I think if we go to a continuous listing strategy rather than a once a year listening strategy and we truly democratize and create autonomy for teams to take action, I think we see faster response, we see a more nimble and effective way to implement this work that we are talking about.

Yeah, I think great, great point as you put it, much better than I could. So I think that you know that board meeting or management meeting where you kind of evaluating your KPIs, I think you always have the financial performance and your customer satisfaction right almost in real time data now. But on employee engagement or happiness with flourishing or performance, you accept that it's a, it's a yearly thing or maybe a. So thank you for pointing Out. So clearly, I think that's, I think that's very important. And I think if you are an hr, I think looking into best practice in this area is a big thing. It makes a huge difference for the conversations you actually have in your organization.

Yeah, Talk to me a little bit. I'm quite curious. I want to go, you know, we can go deep and we can just have a whole series of conversations here right around purpose and strengths and compassion. But compassion is something that is not commonly talked about in the workplace. And in fact, there might be many leaders who say compassion, compassion is a weakness. I would rather drive my teams to get to the performance that's always worked for me. What's been your experience as you've talked about compassion? And some real practical tips, Lars, through which we can create compassionate workplaces.

Yeah. So first I think, think we have to look into the research around it. I mean, first we need to define what is compassion. This could be a longer conversation among a lot of wise people. But from my perspective, working with leaders, organization, the definition of compassion is an interest in other people's difficulties and a burning desire to do something about it.

Yes.

So there is both an interest, you know, that's the empathy part, I would say. But there's also an action part which is I have a desire to do something about it. So that I think if we want to talk about this, we should talk about the definition also. And then I think we need to, as leaders, accept or look into the research and say compassionate leadership is one of the most effective leadership styles that you have. And this can be a little mind blowing, especially for when I do leadership training and we talk about effective leadership styles. Right. How can you work with people? How can you influence people? How can you make people work with you in the team and things like that. How can you have high performance in teams? And I think from there there is a direct correlation between projecting warmth, which I think is a part of compassion, projecting trust. So you're connecting with people, which is a building block for psychological safety. Right. Which is a building block for high performance in teams. So there is a direct correlation. So if you kick off your team with projecting your own ego or your status or your power, the this, whenever your Harvard certificates or whatever you come with. Right. That's not projecting warm. It's not connecting you. That's just your ego speaking. Right. As a leader. So I think that how do you connect with your team to actually create that trust and psychological safety and high performance?

And when we do so, if you're a leader. Right. So if you're a leader. Lar, sorry to interrupt you, but like if you're a leader, like what are a very specific, like what are some two, three ways in which you can both cultivate your own compassion capacity but actually show up that way with your teams? Like what would they do?

There are two things when we work with cultivating a culture of compassion in organizations. The two things I usually say and that we are working on, it's paying attention and being present. And these are two different things. I think, you know, the presence things is something that we don't feel a lot. I think you and I have it right now here in a virtual form. Right. But it's not something that we feel very often and it's more and more difficult for us as a leader to, to be present with another human being. But if you are able to do that just for two minutes, it's not a one hour thing, but for two minutes you can move mountains. And this is where, you know, that's where performance is, but that's also where connection is. It's also where you start to understand what's going on with the people in your organization. How is, how do you best manage and lead and serve the people in your organization? So the, the presence part and of course this is something you can train, you know about this as maybe you can see a little bit about that. But it's something that it's, it's almost, you know, it's a listening skill, it's a mindset and it's also, you know, taking away a little bit of the electronic around us when we speaking to other people because, you know, we have, I have a watch that tells me that there is a text on my phone. And immediately when I feel that little, I might be able to juggle it and try to keep attention. Right. But there's something here that makes me think about what's going on. Is it one of the kids that are. Is it what's going on? And immediately we lose the connection. Then I'm not present and then I lose the opportunity for the connection. Right?

Yeah. I love it. Attention and presence are two important elements. And oftentimes we are not paying attention to the human. We are often paying attention to the problem that needs to be solved. And that problem is often creating a triggered response in our bodies and in our minds. Right. So we're not regulated. We are in the grips of the sympathetic nervous system. Fight, fight, please. Which is then getting in the way of being present because we are Already I'm talking with you. You're sharing your problem. I'm not really present with you. I'm already thinking about all the different ways I've solved this before. I'm thinking about maybe judging, like, why can't you figure this out? I have seven other problems as a leader I need to solve. Why are you making my life hard? And I'm thinking about the future of what is going to happen if this doesn't get solved. I am not present. I am not present. I am somewhere there. My body is here, but my mind is not. And so I think what you're inviting leaders to do is be present. And I think for me, what I have been practicing a lot of, Lars, is just consciously bringing attention to my breathing and to the quality of my breathing. So I constantly, every 30 minutes to an hour, at least, take five or six deeper breaths. You know, in fact, when we are dealing with a problem, my initial reaction always used to be to jump in. And now I always try and take six breaths because still my nervous system is regulated till I am really present, till I'm really sensing the most creative set of solutions that I could offer or inquire about. Those are not accessible to me. They're just not there. I'm practicing that a lot myself, of trying to be present. And by the way, so often we are not even. We don't want to know sometimes about hardships outside of work that somebody is going through. Because even when we talk about detention and present. I want to talk about your problems here. How often do we really want to engage? And I have many leaders who say, why do I care about that? It's not my job to solve somebody's personal problems. No, it's not your job to solve somebody's personal problems. But we all care about person more than the office. And if that person is showing up here with a personal problem, they're not fully here for you. They're not resourced. And so it's not an invitation to solve a personal problem, but at least sense it and offer a bit of space to that person. You know, if they're dealing with a sick parent or a sick child or whatever, they're going through it. Sometimes compassion is not about acting to solve. Compassion might be just acting to create space.

Yeah, I love that essay. And it makes me reflect a little bit on some of the work we're doing with some leaders right now. It's like a big part of that compassion, part of feeling that is also being seen right for who you are. And I think that's the whole person. And you need to accept that I'm a whole person and I bring everything to work. Right. If we're talking about it in the organization and workplace. So somehow we need to feel that we are being seen as who we are because that's also a part of how do I contribute best to my team, to my organization and how can I perform best right. In my given situation. Thank you.

This has been an amazing, amazing conversation, my friend. So talk to me about a leader. As we wrap up, I want to leave friends with our listeners with a story about a leader who went through a journey with you. Right. A transformation and the impact of them out there, but also the impact of them in here. Like what changed in them?

Ah, that's a great, great question. So let me start in another because this is something that you very often it's in a one to one session or it's in, you know, like a training session that we're doing. We talked about earlier, I think positive leadership and organizational happiness and sometimes, you know, having leaders in that room for a couple of days and even have ongoing one to one sessions and then you meet them five years later and they tell you it's something I've been using every day. Right. And one leader I can, I'd share that. It's, it's in a, it's in Asia. It's a leader in Asia. And when I met her, so she was in a difficult environment, but in a very male dominant environment, I would say. So the values projected there were very high performing, very directing, as you mentioned that as an example. And we talked about how can you in that environment be effective in having a different leadership style? How can you be a role model for other leaders, including other female leaders, of course, but other leaders, how can you be that? And we talked about servant leadership, we served, talked about what can I do for you so you become a success. I like that approach because that's compassion, right? The big, big part of compassion is servant leadership. And we, I think we, we were able to give her the tools and she was able to put that learning, that reflection into her everyday leadership role and later becoming that top, not the CEO, but becoming that divisional executive for a big part of the organization because of her leadership style, because of creating high performance in teams by projecting compassionate leadership, I would say. And now we're working, of course. I think that's a big part of organizational development, is also creating lighthouses and role models that you can look at. Right. And how do you do more of that. So we have some examples.

Nothing else. Yes. No, that'll be amazing. Nothing is possible out there, right? Organizations are made up on individuals and that's kind of where I wanted to kind of make the arc. Often things we are working on, things out there. No, nothing is possible there till you change the person in here, right? How we show up. And sometimes that work is not easy, as you and I both know, and can take a long time. And it's also not a linear process, right. It's not that you take on a journey and it's all you emerge.

Great.

You know, it's a messy process. Caterpillars don't become butterflies in a nice pretty setting. The cocoon is a pretty messy place to be. It's gooey and there's a lot of breaking and there's a lot of emerging. And I don't know if it's painful for it or not, but, you know, I'm not sure it is pleasant to say the least, but I think we have to be brave and courageous to be willing to do the work. We end up hitting a wall of individual and organizational constraints that truly keep us from operating at our fullest potential. So, friends, as we wrap up, Lars, it's been amazing to have you check out. I'm going to pull up and we're going to put the link in the podcast show notes. Lars, book Organizational Happiness. It's a really simple, easy to read book. It's filled with tips. That's one of the things I loved about Didlars is it's filled with tips and things that anyone can start to implement right away. And then of course, if you want to engage and do this work and you feel called, we'll have information, Lars, on how people can reach you. But my friend, this has been such an amazing conversation. I am so grateful for the work that you are doing. I look forward to seeing you in person, hopefully at the GGH next year, if not even sooner than. But thank you. Thank you for giving us the gift of your time and your wisdom of your years and sharing that with our listeners.

Thank you so much, Ash. It's been a pleasure to. We could have this conversation forever, right? Because there's so many things and I think you spoke just to that. I think we just to invite more change makers, real change makers into this field. I hope that what the work you're doing here and the conversations we are having are inviting more people into this space as real change makers, both in organizations in the world. So thank you for doing that effort. I really appreciate it.

Wonderful. Be well, my friend.

Thank you. Thank you, Ashish.

Bye. That wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us. Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.