Unleashing the Path to Flourishing within Organizations Part 1 with Jane Dutton and Monica Worline

You know, this relationship that we will probably touch on between happiness or flourishing and achievement becomes a tricky relationship. And I think sometimes we may have it really backwards, right? We may be thinking what makes us at our best instead of thinking how do I walk in the room and be yes, and I love you're taking people to being because if I can simply be, but it's much more likely that I'll be at my best instead of trying so hard.

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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 to unlock their inner happiness and flourishing. What value can be unlocked by enabling flourishing within organizations? Imagine if you can deliver optimal functioning and enable your teams to feel deeply alive and fire on all cylinders. That is a powerful feeling. This is the potential we seek to understand and discuss with our next guests who unleash thriving cultures. We are joined by 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 Happiness Squad episode. Jane holds a PhD and is a distinguished and award winning university professor of Business and Psychology and co founder of the center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. She's also a founding member of Compassion Lab and a strong advocate about cultivating human flourishing at work. Monica also holds a PhD and is one of the leading voices bringing compassionate practices into organizations. She is the founder and CEO of Enliven Work, an idea incubator that partners with thought leaders in the field to help organizations tap into courageous thinking and compassionate leadership and the curiosity to bring their best work to life. In part one of this conversation we have a rich discussion involving the application of Jane's flourishing triangle focused on positive connections, meaning and emotions. Monica further explores the personal development tool Reflected Best Self Exercise Stay tuned after for part two as we delve into a routine that works in classrooms and can benefit organizations and their teams as well. Let's rewire for Happiness together. Please join Ashish and I as we welcome Jane and Monica to the Happiness Squad. Well, Jane, Monica, Ashish, good afternoon. Good morning to all of you. How are you doing?

Doing fine here in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I do than fine. I would say doing great.

Awesome.

Love that. I'm amazing. Kir for Boulder. Dear friends, such a, such a pleasure to have two of the luminaries in the field of flourishing. It's such a privilege. Thank you for taking time and joining us.

Our pleasure.

One of our favorite questions that we love to start with whenever we introduce our guests is what does happiness or flourishing mean to each of you and how has it changed from your younger years till now?

Yeah, well, I'll start, you know, the academic. I can't help it. I've been an academic for 40 years, so I'm going to come at it with it. The first answer is flourishing is a state of optimal functioning. That's what what is normally used as a definition. Right now I'm speaking to individual flourishing. So that's what the academics, how they might define it. But I know personally, when I'm flourishing, I am literally, these are moments of being at my best. I feel deeply alive. I'm basically firing on all cylinders when I'm flourishing. And if I think about how this has changed, my understanding of this has changed over my life. I mean, I never thought about flourishing. And literally until the last 10 years, 10 or 15 years, partly when it came into the academic literature. You know, again, I'm an organizational researcher, so flourishing was not even on the map of organizations until maybe the last 10 or 15 years. But even thinking about it as an individual, I mean, I was all about, you know, just moving forward, progressing in my life, whether that was into my home life or that was in my work life, I was never thinking about in my journey, in my life. You know, was I in a state where I was sort of maximally healthy, healthy, you know, cognitively, physiologically, was I being kind of the best? So I would say it's in my lifetime. The focus on flourishing is relatively new. I hope I have more years of thinking about it. I'm 70 now, at least another decade of thinking about flourishing. And I hope it will progress. My understanding and appreciation of it will progress.

How about you, Jane? For all of our listeners and for the world and for me, I hope it is not a decade, but another 50 years.

That's scary. Ashish.

I think that my view of flourishing was born in rural Western United States town that taught me as a young person a lot about the power of community on the one hand, and the constraints of community on the other hand. And so I felt that I learned early that being with others and living a communal life with others is all about flourishing. And it can also inhibit our flourishing. It can easily become a double edge in that way. And I wouldn't have had language to talk about it that way then. But I feel like much of my work and much of my understanding about flourishing as I go forward has to do with really understanding the communal collective infrastructure that shapes and constrains how much human beings can flourish. And so I have a different vocabulary for it now, but it's very, very deep in my early days experience.

Yeah, I love that. Right. And you allude also to this. You know, we've sensed and we've known we can sense into them. And then research comes and catches up and kind of gives us word, gives us language. Like refer to the Waldinger study, which now is talking about how important community and relationships are and a pivotal driver in individual flourishing. In fact, Monica Jane knows it. But for many of our listeners, this is precisely the reason. The importance of community in the midst of a loneliness epidemic that we are actually experiencing around the world, especially in the US is earlier this week, we actually launched our happiness program in a community platform. And it is all about helping people together go from knowing to doing to being, to kind of cross that chasm. But, yeah, I mean, community. And I love, Jane, how you said the technical definition about when I am really at my best performance, when I'm doing well, you know, healthy, it's. It is. It is beautiful. Right. When you're at your best, truly is when you know and being attuned to what makes you be at your best. Right. Hence the whole art and science of happiness. There is all the scientific literature on what helps us be happy, but that doesn't mean everything that works for Monica works for you or works for me. I think we have to find our own version and elements of that.

Well, also, Jane created something some time ago with others at the center for Positive Organizations called the Reflected Best Self Exercise. And one of the reasons I love that exercise so much is that we don't know when we're at our best. Most of the time, we have to be so humble about this. We have our perception of ourselves. But repeatedly, when people have the chance to experience that exercise what they see is that moments when they are at their best, witnessed by others, are the ones that they don't even remember in their own lives. It just, it comes so naturally, it's so effortless. It's so much the essence of who we are that we discount it as our best. And so that's, you know, this relationship that we will probably touch on between happiness or flourishing and achievement becomes a tricky relationship. And I think sometimes we have it, you know, we may have it really backwards. Right. We may be thinking what makes us at our best instead of thinking, how do I walk in the room and be. Yes, and I love your taking people to being, because if I can simply be. But it's much more likely that I'll be at my best instead of trying so hard.

Yeah. Monica or Jane, talk to our listeners a little bit about it because I love that exercise. I've gone into it. It's a beautiful, beautiful exercise. Talk a little bit about the notion of that exercise where people can find it because I would love more of us to tune into that and experience the power of that.

Yeah, I'll let. Monica has, although we, a bunch of us, originated it, Monica, as she does, always has taken it to a whole new level. So that organizations and leaders around the world are using this in both in educational institutions and also in business organizations as a way to help people again recognize and build on their innate goodness, but also their innate excellence. Monica, do you want to just.

Yeah. How can people find this tool? How can they engage with it and how can they use it to be more.

Yes. The tool is available at reflectedbestselfexercise.com and you can read a little bit more about the research if you visit that link. You can also purchase it as an individual or you can take a team or an organization through it and you can link to people who can tell you more about it. The essential premise of the exercise is that you ask people from across your social network, not just work colleagues, but friends, family members, mentors, former teachers, past supervisors, present supervisors, peers. You select who you want to ask and you ask people across your social network to tell a story or two or three, up to three stories about moments they witnessed you at your best. And then you receive a report that is simply all of those stories aggregated into one place. And you do the self authoring of reading the stories, understanding them, looking for themes and patterns that matter to you. And many people report that this is a life changing exercise because as I said, the things that are mirrored back to Them in the stories are things that they never counted as strengths. They never saw those as moments of flourishing or moments of being at their best because our strengths are often invisible to us. And what they also have happen is that many people will say, monica, this was like attending my own funeral. But I get to be here for it, right?

It's.

We don't take the time as a culture here in the United States to, unless it's a very big milestone, like maybe a wedding, to gather together people from across our social network and then to have them share stories about us and the way we have impacted them. It's just an absolutely beautiful exercise for opening up this idea that our strengths are invisible to us, but that we're impacting the world all the time through how we are. And we can become more mindful of what we bring effortlessly with us in terms of strengths and flourishing by using an exercise like this.

You know, what I love about that also, Monica, is, you know, there is tons of tools out there. Like you can do the strength finder, you can do the Via character strength. You can do so many of those. But what I love about this is it. This is, you know, many of them, I experience them as cognitive, right? You kind of think about them. You kind of rate yourself. You might even ask other people what I love about this tool and the power of stories. It actually appeals to our limbic. We can emotionally sense into that. And once we start to, you know, because cognitively, to your point, half the time we do it and we're like, oh, yeah, that was just whatever. But when we hear the stories of the impact, I think it just so deeply sees something, shifts in us. We can finally be tuned into our own greatness. Right. I'm reminded of this poem, which I'm going to completely butcher, but, you know, but this notion of it's not our. It's not the darkness that we're afraid of, you know, it's the. This notion that we're afraid of our own light. We're afraid of our own greatness, of what we can become and what becomes possible. So thank you. I mean, I will definitely encourage everybody who's listening to do that exercise. Take that assessment. It will change your life because I think you will stop beating yourself down and letting your ego hold hostage. Instead, you'll tune into the heart and the lives of so many that you've touched.

One more thing. While we're talking about business, I'll just, you know, I know that some people listening are thinking about business and work and something that makes this really different than organizations that say, well, we already do. A 360 assessment is that the stories are of you as a holistic, integrated being. So you're getting stories not just from work colleagues, but, but from people who have known you in many different contexts. And you also get to choose the people that you want to ask. So there's some important differences from 360 assessments that businesses typically use.

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I love that. Jade, you were saying something.

I was going to say two things, really. One was, I know we're going to get to this question of what fosters flourishing. One of the major contributors to flourishing is what we might call positive meaning. And by positive, I just mean imbuing something with value or significance. We can think about the power of positive meaning that we assign to ourselves, positive meaning that we might assign to our jobs, positive meaning that we might assign to an organization. This tool is an example of trying to increase flourishing by increasing the positivity of the meaning that we apply to ourselves. So it's inherently a valuing of ourselves through the eyes of others. And again, it's a powerful uplift and it moves people because these portraits that people make of themselves from these Stories are so powerful, you know, people don't forget them. No. So they are part of people's battery packs that they carry with them going forward. And so I'm just using the reflected best self exercise as an example of a way that organizations or individual leaders can make small changes in ways that puts people on a different path towards more flourishing by in this case, increasing the amount of positive meaning. And the other point I was going to make is the other thing that we haven't mentioned yet about this particular exercise, and I know we're talking a lot about this exercise, but it can be unpacked as a way to look at what contributes to flourishing is that by asking people to share these stories and people being so grateful for having the chance to give the gift of this story to this person before they die, but actually now it actually changes the reciprocity dynamic between the individual and their network. In some sense, you've lit up the network such that people want to again give back to each other. If you could think about again, the tie between people that's been lit up by this intervention, at some level you are actually strengthening the amount of positive connections that people have with each other or one particular person has with again their support network. And so that's another major contributor to flourishing is the number of or the frequency of these, what I often call high quality connections or positive connections with other people. So this is an invitation that actually changes the amount of or the strength of the positive connections that people already have.

You know what I loved about those two points, Jane, that you mentioned and Monica, the piece that you said about this 360s, right? I mean, the other one, you didn't say it. But what I love about it in our model, both individual as organizational, we have awareness at the heart of it. And what I love about this tool that you both mentioned, the first of all, is it's a beautiful way to become aware of who we already are. Right? Because these stories about who we are and most developmental tools on our own search, we're trying so much to become somebody else, to fix a deficiency, to grow into something bigger. And this is about. No, you don't just stop. Just first acknowledge the beauty of the human being you already are. And that's what I really love, love, love about what you both articulated here, right? It's truly just connect with who you are. We're always trying to get somewhere we don't need to. It's right here you are, there you are.

You know, just, just to build on that. So Ashish and I, we spoke with some London Business School alumni just prior to chatting with the two of you. And one of the questions that came up when we shared the nine practices with them was what do you mean by fuel up with compassion? And just listening to each of you talk about this, the example Ashish gave was exactly that. He's like, you know how many of you, when someone trips and falls, you immediately rush their aid. When you trip and fall, you think, oh, leap. And you know, you start to beat yourself up. And I just think what's beautiful about what you just shared is people looking inside, appreciating, understanding what, how they're seen can really change their frame of mind and find that that self belief inside as opposed to thinking it needs to come from the outside. So I just think it's a real powerful story on that. And just on the back of that, Jane, you know what I'd like to maybe understand better is Ashish and I, we were talking about your research and your work, and he shared with me your work on the flourishing triangle that you created. And this was brand new for me and what I'd love for our listeners to understand. And maybe through your words, what are the three elements that make up the triangle? And just from your perspective, maybe what could they potentially implement from it, like right away today?

Yeah, the flourishing triangle. It's funny how sometimes when you label something, they have a life of their own, really. I just wanted some way to remember what I would say as a betting person. Are the three most important predictors of flourishing at the individual and collective level. This was my so a triangle has no meaning other than three. And so the three sort of things that I would bet on as major contributors to flourishing and they're a subset of actually what Marty Seligman and the PERMA model has identified as contributors to flourishing. I'm trying to sift out what I think are the most potent contributors. The first is positive connections. And I'm purposely using the word connection as opposed to relationships because I want people to understand that very short term, like less than a minute interactions and connections with another person can have huge beneficial impacts in terms of fostering flourishing. So I'm going to go through the three elements and then I'll come back to your request for examples. And I'm sure Monica has other great examples too. So positive connections, more positive connections in our life, in our workplace, are hugely powerful in terms of fostering flourishing. Second is positive meaning. I already sort of tried to identify that. That's in few we are Meaning makers. You know, we interpret even like objective things like my phone. The meaning I attribute to my phone is, you know, can be really different than what you attribute to your phone. When we're talking about positive meaning, we're infusing something with value and significance. Again, in work organizations, which is what I mostly care about, we can talk about three particularly important sources of positive meaning. Positive meaning about the self. So who am I when I'm in this workplace? Positive meaning about my job. What is the meaning I'm attributing to my job? And we all know that can be really variable. And what is it the essence of this organization? What, what does this organization mean? What is it doing in the world? What's its impact? Positive meaning more positive meaning more different kinds of positive meaning. Increased flourishing. Then we've learned a lot from emotion researchers and people focusing on positive emotions. In particular, the more positive emotions that we can experience during the course of a day or two or any other time period, the more likely we are to flourish. And Barb Fredrickson's work on broaden and build, and there's a number of researchers working in that space that I think have given us wonderful sort of studies that help us understand why that's the case, why positive emotions are so generative for people. Okay, so what are examples? Positive connections, I mean, I would say because first moments in any human to human interaction matter a lot. They matter disproportionate to any other time, kind of in a connection. One thing we can do is how do we prime ourselves before we even interact with someone to believe that, to think about them in the best possible terms. Because that priming actually the way our mirror neurons work and stuff like that, in terms of how humans to humans connect unconsciously, will actually be self fulfilling in terms of making it more likely for us to show up in a more authentic, curious, interested, caring way. So one of the stories you tell yourself before you go meet a new person, what are the stories you tell yourself before you go meet a person that you know, that you may not think very favorably of? We can make a huge difference in terms of how we prime ourselves, how we recall good stories about that person or imagine good stories about that person. Okay, that's one example of how to foster more positive connections. And I have to say, organizations do this all the time. So how do you onboard people, how do you prime the oldsters in an organization to understand this newcomer that's onboard? 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 there. 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. Okay, second thing, how positive, meaning, Jane.

If I might pause you before you go there, you know, there is so much beauty in that because you talked about, about how do we build in rituals that allow these to, you know, so they are not happenstance. Right? We all remember some great onboardings and not. So I really like this notion of how do you actually hardwire these things into organizational processes so they happen, right? They truly, truly happen. And I also love this notion. You know, what you just talked about stories, right? And for our listeners, dear friend thinks about it. There's so much beauty in what Anais Nin said. We see the world as we are, not as the world is. And a big part of how we see the world is through the stories we tell. So think about the next meeting that you're going to, especially if it's a meeting where you worked with several others in a contestant setting before. What's the story you're telling yourself before you go into the meeting? Are you wiring yourself for a positive connection or are you already biased yourself to not having a positive connection because you walked in with a story about other people? So this power of stories as a way to kind of really prime yourself for more positive connections, but also hardwinding them. So I just want to share that with people to think about. And Jane, then on to the next part of what you were going to.

Say or I'm going to actually pause because we'll get to the other side. Invite Monica in to share the routine that she uses in teaching, which any organization could use, as well as where she has before you meet people, people load up a short video where they're introducing themselves. So before you even come into a classroom, or before anyway, I'll let her tell it because it's a beautiful example how you build in a routine in an organization before you meet people the first time, that already moves them towards flourishing. So Monica, do you want to use that?

Sure.

Very vivid right now.

So one thing, Jane. The triangle means three. But the triangle shape matters because all the lines connect. And it's true in the flourishing triangle as well that these separate drivers of flourishing interrelate with one another in important ways. So when we're bringing a class together, we give the students who don't know each other yet and haven't yet joined the class. The question what gifts do you bring to this class that you want to share with others here? And then we give them a video sharing platform, an academically appropriate, secure video sharing platform. And if you're enrolled in the class, your first assignment before you ever step into the classroom or join the Zoom Room or whatever it is, is to post a short video narrating what contributions and gifts you bring that you want to offer the class. So we have built more positive connections because the students watch each other's videos, so they're building positive connections and views of each other before they ever meet. They're answering a question that sparks generosity in the network and we're cueing them to make more positive meaning of themselves and each other. So it's a positive meaning intervention. And because I'm watching all these people I'm about to go interact with, talk about these incredible gifts, I feel filled up with positive emotion and I want to go to this class. I'm motivated and inspired to learn together with these people. So we have all three angles of the flourishing being lit up in this one simple intervention that readies people to come together. And then they come together and they're going to do demanding work, right? They're going to do demanding knowledge work. So if you're an innovation company, for instance, this is such a powerful way to bring people before they ever come to the meeting, right? To get them ready for that meeting in a way that can just explode your capability.

Hey squad, thanks for listening. I invite you to join us in the next episode, which is part two, where we pick up this powerful question and routine that Jane alludes to. And Monica is ready to share something that organizations can learn from the classroom and use it in their own setting before people come together to work with each other for the first time. We'll also learn more from our luminaries of flourishing around awakening compassion at work. See you soon.

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