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Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

sloanreview.mit.edu

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Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#31

Post by Bancakes »

avgcorrection wrote: post #25
pella wrote: post #2

suggestions ( via MIT Sloan ) 1. Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. 2. Develop happiness in your workforce. 3. Retain employees who are happy.

Fitter, happier, more productive Comfortable (Not drinking too much) Regular exercise at the gym (Three days a week) Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries At ease Eating well (No more microwave dinners and saturated fats) A patient, better driver A safer car (Baby smiling in back seat) Sleeping well (No bad dreams)

Exercise doesn't have to be at the gym. You can do fairly high level calisthenics with a weighed bag and/or Olympic rings

Excellent books on the topic like Your Body is Your Gym, Overcoming Gravity, and Paul Wade's ultimate isometrics.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#32

Post by ant6n »

pella wrote: post #2

suggestions ( via MIT Sloan ) 1. Measure happiness in both employees and job candidates. 2. Develop happiness in your workforce. 3. Retain employees who are happy.

Reality of how management creates a happy force:

1. Create company where you say u care about happiness but you don't actually do anything to make ppl happy. Due to randomness, some ppl will be happy, and those who happen to be treated badly will be unhappy.

2. Measure happiness (perhaps with an "anonymous" employee satisfaction survey)

3. Retain ppl who are happy.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#33

Post by NalNezumi »

>You might dismiss these results if you believe that military data somehow doesn’t apply to the business world, but you would be wrong to do so. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the world, dwarfing Walmart by nearly 1 million employees

I don't think anyone dismiss the data taken only from the military because of their workforce size & variety of positions (as indicated later) but because their task/goal is very unique to other private companies where the (primary) goal is making a profit, and the fact that at the military, sizable proportion of the employee might be in a high stress, life-or-death situation (the data was taken under Iraq/Afgan war) .

All in all this seems like a "checked all the boxes for a good study; but still whimsical result" kind of study. (I guess that's why it went to a low impact factor Journal)

I still would prefer HR people take recommendations from this article, such as: "Measure happiness in both employees & job candidates" at face value rather than wasting their time in BS Personality-type and pseudo-IQ tests for hiring/managing project groups

Edit: Might also add that (to me) it makes no sense to equate "getting a medal" to performance, when they also claim "Military also have non-combatant jobs!" as the basis for generalization of the study; yea but your success metric doesn't take that in to account? Does military-chefs get medals for extra-ordinary dishes? Does safety technicians get medals for "extra-ordinary safety"?

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#35

Post by FeepingCreature »

jesseendahl wrote: post #13
drewcoo wrote: post #5

Happy people don't change the world. They maintain the status quo. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - Shaw https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-a...

I think you are conflating “unreasonable” with “unhappy”. It’s absolutely possible to have unreasonably high standards/expectations for “how things should be” and fight super hard for change/progress, while still being a happy person.

Fighting for change profits from desperation at the state of the world, which tends to be incompatible with happiness. It can work out, of course.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#36

Post by ThinkBeat »

Most people, esp. in the US especially and in Western Europe in general fake happiness. esp in public. With true friends less.

US: I lost my job. I am so happy. It was time for a change, and I know there are so many better opportunities out there.

Russia: I was fired from my job. It sucks. How am I to find a new job in this economy? What am I to do? Followed by vodka with friends.

(Stereotypes that may or may not be exaggerated)

Managers reading this will demand happiness, so people must fake it even more. and they must fake it all day long at work.

Work Survey: Are you HAPPY?

Yes? (Manager wants it) No? (Won't get promoted, won't get anywhere)

It is impossible to engineer long term true happiness. Or at least nobody has figured it out yet.

Drugs, floggings (must improve your happiness), bright colored cubicle, A new Ferrari every quarter.

One could aim for "contentment". Even that is unattainable for most people.

When it comes to soldiers WTF? Victim shaming?

Soldiers are successful because they are happy? Thus if you are unhappy, depressed, PTSD, all that happened because you were not happy.

(Stretching it a little for effect).

This all reminds me of evangelical churches. (Who also forces people to be happy)

> God Heals the sick.

But God has not healed me, and I prayed, and people prayed with me.

> That is because your faith is weak, and you have too much sin in your life. If you were a true believer, you would be healed.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#37

Post by [deleted] »

keyraycheck wrote: post #11
jimkleiber wrote: post #9

> We first asked them to rate their well-being — their happiness, if you will — along with their optimism, and then tracked which soldiers later received awards based on their job performance. I'm curious to dig into the paper more because at first glance, I feel somewhat confused they seem to say happiness and well-being and optimism are all essentially the same thing. Again, maybe their paper doesn't say that and i…

or is it other way around? i.e. High performers are happier and more optimistic. So cause and affect is reversed

[deleted]

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#38

Post by endymi0n »

NalNezumi wrote: post #33

>You might dismiss these results if you believe that military data somehow doesn’t apply to the business world, but you would be wrong to do so. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the world, dwarfing Walmart by nearly 1 million employees I don't think anyone dismiss the data taken only from the military because of their workforce size & variety of positions (as indicated later…

While you're entitled to your own opinion, I can safely say this study matches my own observations 100%. Having hired and led over a hundred engineers, I wasn't surprised of the magnitude of this finding at all.

Yes, happy people get easily worn down in bureaucratical organizations.

Some of them adapt and get cynical.

Some of them quit and join organizations where they can be happy and effective. It's the best part of my day to work among many of them.

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#39

Post by coldtea »

xmprt wrote: post #30
foo_barrio wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chicken/egg question always irks me. Eggs came first. Eggs have existed far longer than chickens (eg dinosaur eggs). Whatever the first thing we could possibly call a chicken came from an egg.

You're right but for the people who are confused, it's because of the semantics of the question. If you specify the question a little more and ask "What came first? The chicken or the chicken egg" then the question is how do you define a chicken egg. Is it the egg that comes from a chicken or the egg that a chicken hatches from. In the first case, the chicken came first and in the second case, the egg came first. I t…

The deeper question is not really about which came before in any random pair of "chicken and its chicken egg" or "chicken egg and its chicken".

It's about how chickens and chicken eggs emerge (first means "very very first"), and it's supposed to point to this paradox: If you need both chickens to have chicken eggs, and chicken eggs to produce a chicken, how did either came about?

E.g. did something non-chicken-yet that could lay eggs suddenly laid a chicken egg? Or did a non-chicken egg suddenly produce a chicken? and so on...

Re: Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

#40

Post by MaxHoppersGhost »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #36

Most people, esp. in the US especially and in Western Europe in general fake happiness. esp in public. With true friends less. US: I lost my job. I am so happy. It was time for a change, and I know there are so many better opportunities out there. Russia: I was fired from my job. It sucks. How am I to find a new job in this economy? What am I to do? Followed by vodka with friends. (Stereotypes that may or may not be…

I think Americans are more optimistic and thus are happier. Someone somewhere said it was America’s super power, that we believe things will always get better and it creates a self fulfilling prophecy.
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