Why joy matters to me

Pick a phrase to describe myself? It would likely be “joyfully relentless.” But joy is the juice. That’s why joy is a topic I’ve been actively exploring for the past five years—and implicitly for decades before that.

Why joy? Why joy at work? Why now?

The short answer is: Why would we settle for anything else?

When there is a clear lack of something in the world, it’s human nature to seek it, anywhere. In the recent past, there has been no shortage of mayhem, uncertainty, and despair of semi‐biblical proportions. Is the pursuit of joy a kneejerk reaction to the day and age, or is it more fundamental? We are born happy, in our parents’ arms. As children, we’re brimming with joy. Even when we face big firsts—first day of school, first day on a new job—we’re optimistic and can find joy in the unknown opportunities ahead of us.

What happens as adults that makes us despair and disengage?

I likely inherited my calm sense of optimism from my dad, whose life certainly was not easy. Growing up as a poor peasant in rural China, he had 10 siblings and was the only kid in the family to get past an eighth‐grade education. My parents came to the United States as immigrants from Taiwan when I was a baby, and my father built his career as a professor, teaching at historically Black colleges and universities in the US South. Because he was not white, he wasn’t allowed to teach white kids. Having endured wars, revolution, racism, and hostility in various doses throughout his life, he always kept his cool in a way that steeled all those around him, including me.

My life certainly has been much easier than his, but it wasn’t always sunshine and roses. I was the only Asian kid in my North Carolina town in the 1960s. I looked for ways to build belonging, mostly through sports. Early in my life, I learned the power of teams to build rapport and learn the unwritten rules about acceptance. If people looked at me funny when I walked onto the Little League field, all I had to do was start fielding and hitting, and then I became just one of the team.

My dad taught me this: Regardless of the things you go through, you’ll find peace if you’re happy with where you are, grateful for what you have, and find a way to belong.

Those childhood lessons have stayed with me throughout my career.

The most renewable energy resource is human energy. Finding a way to uncork your energy is important, especially in tough times. Life isn’t a linear progression, where every day is better than the one before. We go a few steps forward, then a few back.

That means life is more like a vector. A vector is a mathematical term for an object that has both force and direction. It’s an arrow. Your direction might be toward fulfillment, happiness, connection, and belonging. But that’s not enough. You need the force of day‐to‐day energy and purpose: What’s my sense of meaning when my feet hit the floor every morning? Even when times are tough, I need to have something to look forward to. And it’s up to me to adapt and keep my energy, my force, and my direction moving.

For me, joy is my momentum and my life force. Joy gives me that energy. I re‐create that energy and come back to it every day. I want the people I influence to capture the same moment. I don’t want to settle for anything less. None of us should.

Joy at work

Joy isn’t just a personal pursuit. I quickly learned the importance of joy at work, too.

After college and business school, I stumbled into consulting. I loved it because I was constantly encountering new ideas. Consulting is the hidden growth industry. It’s an index for change in our broader social and economic universe. When companies are facing major change and transformation, they often call on consultants to help them make sense of it, and to adapt.

Coming from a family of teachers and coaches, I loved an industry that’s all about helping companies, teams, and individuals achieve their full potential. I embraced the team environment, just like on a Little League team: Are we gonna win the championship this year?

In my early days, people called me the “mood manager.” I was the class provocateur and jokester, throwing my rugby ball around in the conference room, making friends, and enjoying my time on teams. I knew that I had to stay open and curious to be good at my job and to enjoy it. My models and mentors showed me how to stay open to learning and to my natural curiosity.

A few years ago, I took on the role of managing partner and chairman at Kearney. Leading a global team of teams—a global people business with thousands of colleagues—provided me a perfect platform for joy as an inspirational touchstone and guiding principle. Consulting is a people business, but I don’t want the people at the firm to “perform.” I want them to thrive.

As a start, we did some research to understand the current state of joy at work for people around the world. We asked people what they expect from work versus what they actually feel. We quickly identified a troubling joy gap: More than half of the working adults we surveyed feel less joy at work than they’d expect—across all generations, geographies, and organizational levels. That original survey was in 2018, and when we surveyed again three years later, the joy gap had grown even more. The joy gap is real and has been for a while.

It affects people in all kinds of companies: small businesses and big companies, start‐ups and established firms, in all industries. And it affects people at all levels in an organization, from entry level to the C‐suite.

Most people want work that is fulfilling, positive, and inspiring. So why do so few of us actually have that experience?

I have a few ideas.

People, praise, and purpose

Our firm has doubled down on understanding joy at work, and our research has found three major difference‐makers: people, praise, and purpose.

First, people. The pandemic banished us all to our distant corners, and through that isolation, we learned the value of community and social connections. We missed our neighbors, our colleagues, and our friends.

Finding a way to foster social connection at work is a primary way to keep the forward force of joy in your organization.

Second, praise. We all want to be acknowledged for our efforts, contributions, and successes. Leaders who are generous and specific with their praise build more joyful teams.

Finally, the big one: purpose. We’ll talk a lot more about purpose in this book because it’s such an important baseline condition for joy. When we understand our organization’s purpose and our very specific role in that broader purpose, we can unlock new motivation, satisfaction, and joy. I am inspired by the Japanese word ikigai, which roughly translates as “a reason for being.” We’ll explore ikigai more in Chapter 5.

Joy, justice, and a better world

That’s the baseline for why joy matters to me—personally and at work.

But where does joy fit in a world that is navigating complicated, painful divisions and reckonings?

In 2019, I started hosting a podcast called Joy@Work. In those pre‐pandemic days (remember those?), I wanted to explore how to build more joy at work. In my conversations with podcast guests, I asked questions about how to design a happier office space, how to capture passion and creativity, and how to build community at work.

Then the pandemic hit. As the world spiraled and the inequity and pain hidden just below the surface started to bubble up, “joy” took on a much deeper meaning.

I still interviewed guests on the podcast, but suddenly, we weren’t talking about happy paint colors or how to plan office team‐building events.

Joy led to justice, to mission and purpose, to building work in a way that is sustainable for the human spirit and sustainable for our planet.

We explored what I call the ABCs: allyship, belonging, and culture.

As my Kearney teams hunkered down in their homes around the world, I started writing a weekly email to my colleagues. I focused on the ABCs and asked for insight: How could we build more belonging at Kearney and do the same for our clients?

In the summer of 2020, I wrote:

Let’s continue to be great allies to each other in all ways, as we strive for and achieve greater belonging for all of us. We deserve that aspirational culture.

Like many leaders around the world, I worked on reflecting and listening. And I heard that people wanted to feel seen, supported, and inspired. They needed to feel cared for and respected. I take that challenge seriously, and it has become my driving force.

The future of joy at work

So how can we think about building a future of work that is joyful? To answer that question, I look to the generations that are coming up behind me.

As I write this, I am almost five years into my role as managing partner at Kearney. At this point, I think I’m one of the oldest people at the firm. Seventy‐nine percent of our colleagues are Millennials or Gen Z. Most of the work at the firm is done by these future generations.

Leading the next generations has made me humble. I hear a few standout themes loud and clear from my Gen Y and Gen Z colleagues at Kearney:

• We need a broader definition of corporate success. Revenue and profits aren’t the be‐all, end‐all. Ditto for shareholder value. Instead, there’s a push for sustainability, stakeholder capitalism, multilateralism, and inclusivity. Employees are not going to settle for being a cog in a company, churning out corporate profits.
• Work should make people feel psychologically and physically safe, supported, and inspired. The pandemic drove home the need to keep people physically safe, but there’s an equally important psychological and emotional element: treating people with respect, seeing them for who they are, and supporting them as they grow and evolve.
• The future of work is about purpose and meaning. Increasingly, people demand work cultures that are rooted in purpose. And leaders around the world are paying attention. As Unilever CEO Alan Jope said in 2020, “Brands with purpose grow, companies with purpose last, and people with purpose thrive.”

In this book, I’ll use these noble and inspiring goals to guide our exploration into joy at work.

As I said, leading the next generations has been humbling for me. I’m determined to continue my lifelong focus on joy, friendship, teamwork, curiosity, and learning. Instead of shutting down the next generations’ push toward change, I’m responding: “Tell me more. Help me build it.”

And: “Why would we settle for anything less?”

Who you’ll hear from in this book

This book started with my perspective as a leader, backed by my firm’s research about joy at work. But as you’ll see in the pages that follow, I called on many other people to share their stories, perspectives, and ideas about shifting to joy. I’m grateful to my friends, old and new, who reflected with me and agreed to let me print excerpts of our conversations here.

In this book, you’ll hear from the following people:

• Crystal Ashby, former CEO of the Executive Leadership Council (ELC)
• Dr. Dan Cable, professor of organizational behavior at London Business School
• Ken Davenport, Tony Award–winning Broadway producer
• Gerri Elliott, former chief sales and marketing officer at Cisco
• Callie Field, president of T‐Mobile’s business group
• Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy and author of The Heart of Business
• Laura Lane, chief corporate affairs officer at UPS
• Ingrid Fetell Lee, designer and author of Joyful
• Jon Levy, behavioral scientist and author of You’re Invited
• Kathryn Minshew, co‐founder of The Muse and author of The New Rules of Work
• Michael J. Nyenhuis, president and CEO of UNICEF USA
• Kathryn Parsons, founder of Decoded
• Andrew Suniula, USA Rugby coach
• Stephen Tang, former CEO of OraSure
• Alicia Tillman, former CMO of SAP
• Brian Tippens, former chief sustainability officer at HPE
• Dr. Ashley Whillans, professor at Harvard Business School
• Dr. Anthony Wilbon, dean of the Howard School of Business

Who this book is for

If you’re interested in creating more joy—in your own life, on your work team, and in your broader organization—this book is for you.

I wrote this book for a variety of people:

• The leaders who hear the demand for more joy, meaning, and purpose, but aren’t sure how to shift their corporate cultures
• The managers who are facing pressures from above (better margins, higher productivity, more results) and pressures from below (more work–life balance, more joy, more meaning)
• The young people who are adamant that they can have a life and a career that’s centered on joy and meaning
• And anyone who thinks “joy at work” is a near‐term possibility, not an impossible oxymoron

Let’s build more joy.

Throughout the book, you’ll find specific ideas you can try on your own team. Look for the