Unleashing the Path to Flourishing Within Organizations Part 2 with Jane Dutton and Monica Worline

How do you onboard people? How do you prime the oldsters in an organization to understand this newcomer that's on board? Are they priming them in a way that makes it easier for that person to build high quality connections especially quickly early on in their relationship? That's going to help them tons. So for each one of these suggestions I'm making, you could think about how do you build this into an organizational practice. And onboarding is a really potent one because I said beginnings matter.

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Hey Happiness Squad. It's great to have you with Ashish and I as we continue to discuss with our guests who are industry leaders and experts helping individuals and organizations unlock their inner happiness and flourishing. We continue our conversation with two luminaries of flourishing, Jane Dutton and Monica Werlein, co authors of Awakening Compassion at the Quiet Power that Elevates People in a special two part episode. In part one, we discussed Jane's Flourishing Triangle, a powerful conversation around positive connections, meaning and emotions. Now in part two, we continue our conversation and delve into a powerful question and routine that organizations can learn from the classroom as they look to unleash flourishing within a new team. We will learn more from Monica and Jane around Awakening Compassion at work and the capacity and shifts achieved within an organization amongst peers as we round out the conversation. Stay tuned till the end. We discuss a real world example from a corporate setting with an open invitation to every team considering how they can integrate this daily dynamic to unlock the power and potential of flourishing at work. Let's rewire for Happiness Together folks. Please join Ashish and I as we continue with Jane and Monica on the Happiness Squad Foreign.

I love that. Give me that. Repeat that question again. Monica, what gifts?

What gifts do you bring to this community that you will share?

Wow. I can just imagine, you know, I was facilitating. These two companies are coming together, they're merging, they're integrating. As you can imagine, there's a Lot of. There's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of worry. Are all of us going to be here? There's a lot of judgment. We do it this way, you do it that way. You know, they're looking for what's different. They're looking for what's similar, what's different. I love the power of this question. I'm actually going to try it already and I invite our listeners to try it as well. In your next interaction, go to your team. Even if you've a team that you worked with for several weeks, months, years, step back and over lunch, just go around and share, ask that question, what gifts do you bring right in the service of this community? Oh, my God. Like, it's so powerful. It is so powerful. I love it. Thank you.

I have to add that. So Monica and my colleague, Adam Grant. So Adam was a student with Monica. We did research on being a contribution and the importance of framing yourself as a contribution and what that does in terms of people's motivation and their behavior and what Monica is doing, part of what the magic of what she's doing is again, invoking a contribution mindset in every student who joins the class. Or again, like you said, in any company who comes together, you are priming or nudging people to be in more of a contribution mindset when they start, which is again, a very different place than looking for, like you said, differences, or how am I going to fit in here? Or there's just a whole bunch of ways we might think about going into a new group that would not be as resource producing. That's what we're really interested in. How do we unlock the resources in the room in an efficient, effective way? And we know this flourishing triangle is just one simple way to sort of think about yourself. Well, are we unlocking positive emotion? Are we unlocking positive meaning? Are we unlocking positive connections? And especially within the very, you know, like in a meeting, the first 10 minutes, you know, in the, in a, in a gathering of our team, team startup, it's in the first meeting, you know, or whatever. So. Because it changes the trajectory of what's possible.

Part of what I know that you are doing with your work and what I appreciate so much about the work is that you're giving people in organizations that have a lot of standard operating procedures on the way things have always been done a new way to imagine. Often when I get to talk with people in organizations, they just never thought that a question like what gifts and contributions do bring to this group was an Appropriate question to ask at work, like, and they can't even imagine until you introduce it. And then all of a sudden they're like, oh, I love that. I want to do it every time.

I want to do it every time. I'm going to kick off almost every new client meeting I have with that question. And, you know, absolutely. What gifts do you bring?

Yeah, no, I just, I want to bring a bit of a real life situation into this that just happened to me in the last five days. So the reason why what you both have just said really resonates. I love it. This, this, this contribution mindset. I was in a situation with a very small core team where things are done in a certain way and they're done in a certain way because that's how relationships are built. That's how the brand is built. That's how the team functions. And, you know, I came out of this week feeling a bit discouraged, bit demotivated by how the team operated. And I had a chat with my coach about this and he said, okay, so Neil, what's your role? What's your purpose? And immediately I want to go back to, oh, roles and responsibilities. We need to have a team meeting on roles and responsibilities. I was like, no, I think we need to have a. We need to go out for a dinner and have some drinks and some laughs and maybe get to know each other that way and figure out how we can overcome this situation next time. I actually want to now apply this this coming week. What? You have just shared this, you know, just to the small group. Ask them, what gifts do you bring into this team that you would like to share? And I'm really curious to see how the mindset or how the awareness or how the dynamic may or may not shift. And I'm going to come back to each of you and share that this was how the team reacted versus a standard, hey, let's have a roles and responsibility conversation. You're encroaching in my territory, or maybe I'm encroaching in your territory. So I just, I found that incredibly powerful. So I just, I ask my listeners just to stop and pause for a moment, Think about a moment where you came into a session and you do things as you always do. How could this question change the dynamic? And I would love for us to hear about that so you can comment on it later and, and tell us how it went. But, Monica, I do actually want to shift to another topic that I know you're incredibly passionate about. You both co authored with Jane, Awakening Compassion at work. Now, when I first heard this and I, I looked into this the other day talking to Asish, I was like, ashish, but what does it mean by awakening compassion at work? Like, are you, you know, is it an alarm clock? You're like, hey, wake up. Everyone needs to like, give each other a hug. You need to like, start to self, you know, self appreciate each other. Like, could you maybe just help our listeners understand, like, what do you mean by it? And similar, how could they apply this if not today, tomorrow, at home, at work, in their life?

Yes, every organization that I know right now is laden with suffering. Even the greatest organizations among us that are performing well, people are tired. The shifting conditions of the pandemic continue to create upheaval. Burnout is beyond epidemic levels. People's lives have been turned upside down, inside out, and upside down again. And organizations where compassion is awakened simply understand that it is necessary for any organization that wants to be high performing to notice and attend to the suffering that is created in work. And to that as part of doing high performing work, we create stress and distress. And the best organizations awaken our capacity to tend to and heal that stress and distress. We have, as you all know, and as people have studied, the innate capacity and desire to turn toward others who are suffering. Human beings have that. But most institutions shut it down. They tell us, don't. If you're suffering and you want to look like a professional, don't show your suffering at work. Don't cry in a meeting. Whatever you do, don't let other people see you sweat. Right? That's usually the work mantras that people receive. And by awakening compassion at work, we simply mean that we know it's impossible for people to leave their suffering at the door of work. Even though professional norms preach that what we can do is awaken to the fact that whole human beings will bring suffering with them and awaken our capacity to respond to that suffering with compassion and to alleviate the distress such that the organization can continue to perform at the levels it expects to perform while the people who need relief get relief. And rather than that being a trade off, that's a synergistic relationship that actually bolsters both the human and the organization performance.

You know, Monica, there is so much in that response. I love it. And I'm going to unpack a couple of these things that deeply resonated. By the way, when I, like just friends, get a copy of this book, Awakening Compassion at Work. Just that I first read that title, you know, it just moved my heart. I Mean. And what I loved about it, it didn't say, be compassionate, go do something. It said, awaken we all. We all, not just humans. Every sentient being has innate in them compassion, right? I mean, you might have. If you haven't, you know, you. I have read and I was moved by this study, right? Where when they studied when. If a mice is caught. When the mouse is caught in a tube and they can't get out, the other mouse will try and get that mouse out. I read about this story. I don't know if it's real or not because half the things you read, you never know, right? But I read this story this morning about this Japanese house where apparently a lizard was stuck in a place and there was another lizard that was feeding it for a long period of time. It's probably not real, but it's still a powerful story. It said five years, the lizard had a nail in its feet and it was stuck to the wall. And this man observes and sees this other lizard feed it. And that's how it had been kept alive. Don't know if it's real or not, but it's still a very powerful story. So one is. I love that you talked about awakening compassion. We thought, we forget is to reconnect with who we are. Again, this notion of being, I think also reconnect with the fact that we all have suffering, we all have things that we are going through. And when we allow others to share, we naturally feel the desire to connect through that. Right. And to be able to alleviate it, which was the other point you mentioned. As companies, as teams, there is a unique ability for us to serve each other and to make a difference. And when we do it, we really improve performance. I was having a conversation with one of the heads of HR for a company and we had a question around financial hardship, one of the biggest things that so many struggle with. And I asked them, do you ask that question in your survey? Said maybe ask a question, ask a question around that. And they're like, oh, we don't want to ask that question. And I was like, why? They're like, well, we don't. Like we can't do anything about it. I'm like, well, why not? First of all, why not? There might be something that you can do about it. But regardless, putting our head in the sand and not even recognizing if somebody is facing financial hardship, how can you expect them to show up and care and do their best job at work when they're so worried about putting food on their family's table? Right. And so I love it. It's awakening compassion. It's wake up to who you are, bring your whole self to work and step in. Don't just don't empathize. Be compassionate, which means collectively think about how we can make a difference to each other. Because you know what? Those moments will come in all our lives.

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Yeah, and I need to add that I think one of the things that excited me so much in doing this book with Monica is that I think by the end of this, the book, and we really had done research on this topic for about 10 years before we wrote the book. It's a really an organizational lens on this problem. Like there are lots of compassion training programs that are individual like that are about awakening our own compassion. But this is really about how do you design or build structures in organization that makes it more likely that you know that, that suffering can be noticed, that suffering can be felt, that suffering can be interpreted in ways that actually activate action. And again this four part process and also organizational conditions that foster effective action in the face of suffering. So it's, I think what distinguishes our book and our perspective as organizational researchers is to think about how do you build this in, in Sustainable ways in organizations beyond saying compassionate culture, because sort of like this culture is so darn hard to change.

So, Anil, if we go back to your example with your team that you were sharing, and you say you want to, you know, change the question that you start with, and then you think you have this roles and responsibilities discussion that you have to have. One of the things we do that's very pragmatic around awakening compassion at work is that we say every role in an organization can be done with compassion. So if I'm the CEO, compassion's my job. If I'm the general counsel, compassion's my job. If I'm the receptionist, compassion's my job. If I'm the designer, compassion's my job. So you can ask people to take their role and say, imagine, you get to describe your role any way you want to, but the word compassion has to appear in your description. Rewrite your role description with the word compassion in it, and then you can share them as a team. And suddenly you have everyone sharing the gifts they bring to the table and rewriting their role descriptions so that part of their responsibility is to awaken compassion. And you have changed the dynamic of your team profoundly.

I'm going to actually add, I'm going to morph a quote on this compassion, because you make such a compelling case for it. I was going to morph something that the Dalai Lama said, but I'm going to monikize it or Monica. He said. He said, love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. And my version of this for this podcast for our listeners, inspired by Jane and Monica, is love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, organizations cannot thrive. I think we need to make them be not something that is knowing. We need to integrate them into our practices, into our role descriptions, into our job descriptions, so we can practice them every day. Every day when we introduce ourselves to each other. We can start with that story. We can start with that seed. Thank you both. Beautiful.

I am going to say, you didn't steal it. We share the same wavelength, Ashish, because that was exactly what I was going to say on the back of job descriptions. So it's one thing in a role description when you're in a meeting. I would empower any listener out there who touches HR or a job description and add these words to it. Compassion, courage, like opening. These are ideas that shouldn't just be ideas. These should be integrated in our lives. And it's only then people are going to see it as important. And I also want to allude back to your point briefly, Monica, on the capacity. So one of the individuals I had a conversation with this past week in my moment was father of a child who was ill. And I said to him, I was like, mate, like, while you're dealing with the stress of all this, like, what about your kid? He's like, no, no, my kid is my number one priority. And suddenly there, like, we, we bonded on that. We had a connection on that. And I, it's like he understood where I was coming from from a professional standpoint. But I'm thinking, hey, like, forget the work bit. I have so much compassion for what you're having to deal with at home and juggle all these things. So I just, I again, I ask our listeners to think about. We all have the capacity, right? You just have to tap into it. It's not something that you need to figure out. And it can be taught, right? So if you don't feel like you know it, you have the capacity and it can be taught. Speaking of what can be taught, you know, Monica and Jane, I'm just, I've truly enjoyed this conversation. And what I'd like to do is, as we close, we love our guests to share a couple of tips that not only matter to them, but really help them in face of challenge, difficulty to flourish. What would you say from your side, Monica? Jane, would you like to share with our listeners that you take on board when you're faced with a moment of anxiety, of stress, and you're like, yes, this is what I do. This is how I unlock my internal flourishing.

Jane and I have a practice we call duetting. And in the duet, often I get to go first by request. That's how the music is written. So what I want to say as a tip is that with practices like these, one of the objections that people often have is that it's time consuming or we're busy, we're overloaded, we have a lot of demands to meet. We need to be task oriented. We don't have time for all this extra stuff. And I think it's very useful and helpful and important to bring it down to what is very small and to keep the idea that small moves matter. If you turn that into your mantra and you think every time there's a small thing that can be done with greater compassion, that can be done with more connection, that can be done with a little bit more positive emotion, those small moves change the waters that we're swimming in in ways that are unexpectedly powerful. And so the small move of making eye contact and smiling, the small move of giving yourself a deep calming breath and a grounding moment, the small move of reaching out a hand to someone else and maybe just resting it on a shoulder of someone who needs buoying. And that may be that gesture, may be all you have to give in the moment or all you have time for as you walk by in the hallway. And it's profoundly important that we do those small moves.

Wow. We're a big believer of small moves, tiny habits, small little moves. It's at the heart of the micro practices in our hardwired for happiness or happiness foundations course. I love it. I love those three, oh my God, three simple things. Jane, where would you build on that?

Yeah, so I guess I'll build on it and say my one thing to offer would be the power of micro communities. So just like micro moves matter, micro communities matter. Like I see a lot of people get overwhelmed in organizations going, oh my God, this organization is so big. It's sort of done things for such a long way time this way. It's so impossible. But this idea just start locally with a micro community. It could be a team, it could be a unit, it can be a subset of a unit, subset of a team. And don't and believe that if you make changes within that micro community that this is what David Cooperwriter now Kim Cameron would say it will be heliotropic. That is, it is like light and people lean to it. People. It is giving off energy, it is giving off light. If you really do start a micro community that flourishes and this is in some sense what the center for Positive Organizations. I mean, I remember when we started, it was like people are like studying compassion and forgiveness and all these things. And it wasn't a whole lot of people. Yes, but people were so on fire. It was contagious. You know, they were on fire. We weren't. We were still teaching, still doing research, still doing the same work, but we were doing it with a, again, an energy and a capacity, a commitment, a purpose, et cetera, that really had us flourishing. And people leaned into it and it spread. And so we've seen this in many organizations where a single sub team, like for example, the business and finance group at the University of Michigan, believe it or not, that historically was a group that was completely off the map in terms of flourishing. And it started with a small group of people in that unit. And then the next thing you know, everyone's sort of looking like, what's happening? Why are People actually asking to come work in the business finance group. There wasn't a turnover problem. It was almost an attraction problem. You had. Too many people were wanting to move in. And these are the people, a lot of the people that are taking care of the building. I mean, this is like different kinds of, different kinds of jobs. So I guess over the years of studying this, but also my own experience of when I have felt I'm in an organization that is not functioning well. And I felt sort of helpless to start with a small group of people doing small moves.

You know, I love it.

I love it that in fact it will spread. I mean, this human goodness actually does spread.

You know, what I love about that also is Jane, oftentimes companies or, you know, people will talk about organizations and say, you know, I don't belong or I don't like the organization that is. You know, the beauty of this is go find the three people you connect with, create your micro community. And right there, I love that. It puts the agency back in the hand of individuals. Right?

Yeah.

Right now, Right away.

Well, and it also. The other part, the reason I, I wanted to focus on micro community. Monica knows this. I. The soil matters. I mean, the, the it's, you know, sometimes I feel like there's just too much pressure on individuals to do this alone, you know, that you have to do this alone, in fact. But if you can create a small garden, let's just go with crazy with that metaphor. A small garden and you till the soil. So within this small group, there is lots of positive emotion. There's lots of positive connection. People have a lot of meaning, self meaning and meaning about the work, what they're trying to do. You are tilling the soil with the nutrients that is going to unleash the flourishing which is this generative resource producing process.

But just on that, Jane, and again, sorry, I'm going back to this. This past week was eye opening and now it's going to be even more eye opening with this conversation. You know, I think when you create that the key word there is positive meaning, positive connection, positive emotion. Why you might get into that little micro community and you might end up having a winch, you might end up actually bringing negative emotion, negative meaning and a negative connection. When you're feeling like you've been wronged or like the company's not acting in your best favor, you feel betrayed. So the invitation to this, to this to our listeners is reframe it. Come at this micro community with positive intent, positive emotion, positive meaning. Would you agree?

Well, I think it's really important to say that this approach is not about getting rid of the negative at all. The negative, negative emotion, suffering, all those things are part of the human experience. It really is an issue of what do you, how do you meet those negative conditions? If we're really interested in is creating human capacity and resourcefulness to not just recover, but to bounce back in a more resilient, positive way, then we need to couple it with human capacity and resourcefulness. When we have these conditions that we've been talking about that cost are flourishing, it creates the capacity and capability to deal with the negative. The negative is really important. You will never get rid of it. I mean, it's actually critical. And if you're an organization pushing the edge, you're always going to have, you know, negative emotions, negative connections and those kinds of things. The question is, what is the capacity and capability that you need to deal with those negative, problematic, disruptive conditions. And it is in the generative. And by generative I just mean resource producing states of human individuals and collectives that creates these capacities and capabilities to deal with the negative. So this is not about, this is.

Not about positive washing and pretending that negativity doesn't exist or suffering is not going to be part of life.

Embracing it, it's embracing it and saying it has to be honored and met. Yeah.

And it goes back to our small moves discussion because the small move may be to have a question that honors people's experience and then turns toward how might we do this in a way that doesn't feel so bad? How might we find a way to voice what's going on so that it could be addressed differently? How might we honor the people's experience around this table of feeling discounted and devalued and find ways to work together more respectfully? And that kind of a small turn that honors the experience in the room but introduces the capacity for flourishing to be there simultaneously, I think is the small move that does what Jane's naming.

I think this could be a conversation for a future episode to explore this further. I just want to say again, thank you, Jane, Monica Ashish for the insight. I'm looking forward to this upcoming week and already putting into practice what we've discussed. So again, from my side, thank you.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you both. Such a pleasure. Yeah. Oh my God. I am just, I've loved this conversation. I am taking away Monica and Jane the gift question. Every new meeting of mine is going to start with that. I invite our listeners to do the same.

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