CHAPTER 9
What Delights Me? (Civility and Happiness)
LEADERSHIP DELIGHT CHALLENGE
Partisanship sometimes affects organizations where there is more hostility than civility and where a we-they, win-lose, right-wrong, blame-and-shame mentality persists. Great leaders move away from hostility and intolerance toward multiculturalism through problem solving, listening, curiosity, diversity, and compassion and by bringing creativity, pleasure, humor, and delight into their organizations.
Recently, Dave’s father, Richard Ulrich, passed away. As the family gathered to celebrate his life, we were joined by an interesting assortment of individuals whose work was far removed from anything Richard did professionally: bank tellers, produce managers, teachers, and folks who worked the window at McDonald’s. Why? Because when Richard went to the grocery store for peaches, he did not just see someone putting out produce. Richard saw an individual with a name, a story, and a personality. He saw someone he could get to know, make smile, sing a song to. His favorite song was “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are gray . . . ,” and he sang it off key but with gusto. By the end of his life he walked only with the help of braces and a cane, yet he regularly gathered day-old baked goods from local grocery stores, as he had done for over 20 years, loaded them into his old truck, and delivered them to shelters and soup kitchens all over town. He never missed his grandkids’ games. He picked up stranded strangers and gave them a lift. He brought flowers to his wife every week (until she pointed out to him that she was allergic to them). Of the hundreds of people at his funeral, virtually every one had received a personal letter from Richard, usually written at 3:00 A.M., thanking them for some small service or offering some tidbit of counsel or encouragement. In his honor, we gave everyone who came to the funeral a McDonald’s coupon to give away to someone who needed a hamburger or an ice cream cone. Kind of a silly thing to give away at a funeral, but Richard loved to give such things away. Richard was a character, but he knew how to find delight in the world and loved sharing it with others.
So what does giving out McDonald’s coupons or singing to the bank teller have to do with how leaders build your company’s bottom line? Just this: Customers who are delighted with their interaction with our products come back for more. So do employees. In an understated, backdoor way, delight seems to go to the heart of finding a sense of abundance at work. Delight teaches us that life’s goodness is not found in money or fame but in simple pleasures, meaningful connections, and a sense of discovery. Delight reminds us that no one has nothing to give, that relishing diversity and multiculturalism is good business, and that there is always something of which we have enough and to spare. Employees who find delight at work are often employees who stick around, who make a difference, and who invest their discretionary energy in the creative and challenging aspects of work.
When we talk to leaders about the ideas in this book, the idea of making room for delight sticks. It smacks of creativity, playfulness, pleasure, and fun. It is approachable, reachable: “I’m going to bake cookies and take them to work tomorrow—that’ll shock people!” “I’m going to learn more people’s names, and not just the people above me on the organizational chart.” “I’m getting a book on tape for the commute home and turning off the talk radio.” “I want to thank someone sincerely every day.” “I am going to have a dress down day at the office.” “I am going to begin staff meetings with a good news, non-work-related moment.” These simple choices remind them that harder choices can also be broken down into more manageable pieces, that they are not alone, that they have a capacity for creativity and change that doesn’t emerge only when strong-armed by relentless production schedules or hefty rewards.
Delight is not just about jokes or cookies, although it is about jokes and cookies. Delight is about noticing little things, breaking out of ruts, feeding creativity. Delight is about appreciation, about beauty, about playfulness and fun. Delight is picking up the cell phone to check in—or maybe turning off the cell phone to check out. Delight is doing someone a favor, choosing a new screensaver for our computer, taking day-old bread to a battered-women’s shelter, picking berries with the kids. Delight is about appreciating and learning from people who come from different backgrounds and cultures. Delight may start with a leader’s sense of humor or from a group of employees who find joy at work. And delight can turn a tough day on a tough job into something tolerable, something laced with hope. While delight is inherently personal, we can manage a common process to figure out what it is. Leaders can do this exercise alone or with their employees. Take out a pencil and a piece of paper. Ready?
Number from 1 to 10. As quickly as you can, list 10 random changes you could make to bring more delight into your life. And if you find yourself resisting this suggestion, let us warn you that there are more of these exercises to come in this chapter, so, hey, humor us. It will take only two minutes, and it might be delightful. Go.
Did you do it? If not, why not? Need some suggestions to get started? Here’s Wendy’s list: take a walk after dinner, offer to babysit our grandbaby once a week, write a novel, walk through the backyard, take a yoga class, go to the farmers’ market, get a new pen, call my sister more, trace my genealogy, drive up the canyon with good music on.
Here’s Dave’s list: spend time weekly with each of our children and our granddaughter, walk up the canyon, offer tips ($10 or $20) to good flight attendants, take a bike ride, read a novel, attend more Jazz (basketball) games, check in daily with Mom, Google an interesting topic just to learn about it, exercise regularly, give talks on new subjects, take time off to stroll along a beach.
Maybe some of the things you wrote down require a hefty amount of disposable income, but we’re guessing that much of what brings you delight is about small and simple things, not big and expensive things. In fact, research on what makes people happy backs up that idea. If they were to get a windfall of $20,000, most people think they would get the biggest kick out of shooting the wad on a big vacation or plastic surgery or front-row tickets to a play-off game. And it is true that the big purchase would get your attention and give you a huge thrill and a lasting memory. But the research suggests that after two years you would have gotten a lot more satisfaction and a bigger boost to your overall happiness by investing $100 a week in lots of smaller hits: small vacation breaks, dinners with friends, gifts for people you like, handouts to someone in need, a membership at a gym, fresh flowers, a new basketball, a painting class—especially if you keep the small hits consistent with your values and interests.
So, how many of the items on your list were related to or done at your work? Too often, delight is found outside of the daily demands of work. In a workshop, senior leaders were asked to write their personal leadership point of view. In almost every case, when leaders talked about values and things that brought meaning and delight to them, they referred to things outside of work—their children, families, hobbies, and service activities. When they talked about work, they referred to their ability to set goals and get things done. Simply stated, we want to bring meaning and delight into work, without minimizing the seriousness or intensity of the work we must do.
Delight at work does not have to be expensive either, and employees will generally appreciate lots of small investments in their well-being and delight at work more than grand gestures on rare occasions. As a leader you set a tone for cultivating and modeling delight at work. You can also ask others to brainstorm about what they could do to make work more fun for them or what the company could do at minimal cost that would be meaningful to employees to bring delight to work.
Let’s look at four sources of delight that can make work, and life, more enjoyable: creativity, pleasure, humor/playfulness, and civility. Then we’ll talk about how fostering delight at work among employees can also create a climate of delight for customers.
Creativity
Delight is both an outcome of and a contributor to creativity. This is a chapter about finding delight, not using delight to build creativity, but the process certainly can go both ways. If we know we want to foster creativity at work, then providing people with rich images and evocative raw materials will invite the creative part of them to come out and play. We do our best sustained creative work under moderate, not severe stress, when the heat is on but we are not in the pot. As long as the challenges of staying in business and keeping a job are sufficiently motivating, an atmosphere of playfulness, humor, and support can keep things from boiling over.
But creativity is also delightful! When we have a creative breakthrough, a moment of innovation or novelty, we often get a huge charge out of it. It sparks delight to see a solution that has evaded us, to realize a connection we hadn’t made before, to be surprised by truth. If we want to find work delightful, even small doses of creativity enrich the stew.
In many organizations creativity is the domain of research and development. It is not really fostered on the plant floor or in the accounting office, where in fact creativity is suspect. Who needs a creative accountant? You do. Even if you don’t think accounting creativity will help your bottom line, it can help your employees, who can help your bottom line. Like this:
Creativity experts Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan describe Jerry, an accountant for a Big Six accounting firm. Jerry reports, “My life was lackluster. I knew it but lacked the will and resources to change it. I crunched numbers by day, in a place that felt like a tomb, and I ate cookies at night to calm my fears of being dead.” Jerry took a course in creativity from Julia and Mark and was assigned to spend time each week feeding his creative interests. He couldn’t think of any. He did other assignments, but he was not experiencing the usual jump in delight that came as people invest in their creative lives.
Then Jerry remembered a long-forgotten curiosity about Oriental rugs. He began to explore rug stores on his day off. He was fascinated. The romance and timelessness of caravans moving across the deserts sparked his imagination. Being the good accountant he was, he began to study the rugs, learn the rules about what made them valuable, and run the numbers on rugs he liked. One day he found a rug in a secondhand store that he quickly realized was a steal. He bought it, took it to work, and put it in his office. He writes, “That first rug transformed my office and my life. It gave me something to talk about with clients, and I suddenly understood in a visceral way what my job really was. I was supposed to help clients turn their money into beauty, things they dreamed of. I suddenly had new respect for my job and new respect from my clients. I learned to listen to the beauty in the numbers. . . . I help clients manifest their dreams.”1
Creative accountants not only help find creative answers to problems that bore most of us; they bring a sense of meaning and delight to colleagues and customers. Creativity on the plant floor may mean the difference between turnover and retention, between business as usual and innovation, between line-stopping problems and back-saving solutions. People shouldn’t have to work for Disney to have the chance to be imaginative, innovative, or inspiring at work.
Creativity with a capital C may be the domain of artists, scientists, and high-paid marketing firms, but garden-variety creativity is what lets everyday people know and feel we are alive. It is what helps us figure out what to do when our kids won’t do their homework or our employees won’t finish their paperwork, without alienating either. It is what opens doors to new relationships and new endeavors. It is not just about doing something we have never done, like eating a grasshopper or swearing at the president. Creativity is about bringing divergent ideas together to solve a problem, articulate truth, capture beauty, or form a promising connection that leads to new products and better ways of doing business. And that sparks a sense of delight in everyone who touches it.
Creativity expert Eric Maisel writes:
[Creativity] can have its own splendid rewards, but the goal is to produce work that has meaning and makes meaning in the universe, that touches and transforms others, that speaks to others, that decorates or enriches the lives of others, that bears witness—that, to put it in the most old-fashioned way possible, is both beautiful and true . . . each of us knows that the special marriage of truth and beauty, where witness is borne and material crafted, is the very definition of deep work and high achievement.2
Both playfulness and civility can be seedbeds for creativity. Playfulness invites irreverent questions and fresh approaches that spark new ideas, while civility moderates the tone of harshness or criticism that can keep innovation from growing. To be sure, not every brainchild is worth developing, but even the best ideas do not see the light of day without encouragement and protection. Creativity requires curiosity and reflection. It requires working outside your comfort zone and attempting things where you may not be qualified today. It requires hard work and deep honesty. Most of all, it requires us to learn to tolerate anxiety. Eric Maisel states:
While anxiety is the greatest impediment to aliveness, in order to create you must invite anxieties into your life and live anxiously. . . . If you are to create you must invite anxiety in. But then you must manage it.3
Do you remember anyone in school or your early job training teaching you about the anxiety that accompanies honest, creative work? Do you remember anyone telling you how to manage that anxiety, tame it, work despite it? Most of us don’t. This is often the great leader’s job: to help people tame and tolerate the anxiety inherent in the process of doing good work, creative work, meaningful work. Leaders can warn people about difficulties, stir up hope in the face of obstacles, and hold open the space between a vision and its realization to help people trust that it can happen. Great leaders not only help shape that vision or identify those problems but also help people muster the stamina and courage to keep trying, to keep staring down their self-doubts or fear or boredom until they get somewhere new.
Questions for you:
Who are your most creative employees? What do they need to work creatively? (More clarity about what is needed or its parameters? More help? More experience? More license? More encouragement? More protection from criticism in the early stages? More realism?)
Who are your least creative employees? What do they need to work more creatively? (Consider the same possibilities.)
Which category do you fall into? What do you need to work more creatively?
Pleasure
Positive psychology guru Martin Seligman has identified three sources of happiness: things we find deeply meaningful, things that are deeply engaging, and things that simply feel good. While lasting happiness is not found in pleasure alone, in balance with meaning and engagement pleasure contributes a lot to our sense of well-being, including at work.
Number your sheet of paper from 1 to 10 again. What are 10 things you could do to make work more pleasurable that would cost nothing or less than $20? Ignore all judgments about whether these ideas are practical or even possible—just brainstorm and see what comes up. Go!
If you are having trouble getting started, try deliberately including at least one item from each of the following categories of pleasure: physical, intellectual, spiritual, social, and emotional/aesthetic.
Here are some of the things we’ve heard:
Physical. Play air Ping-Pong with Fred in the hallway on breaks, take a walk at lunch, burn scented candles in the lobby, keep a golf ball and a putter behind the door, stash chocolate, organize a yoga class, rearrange my office furniture, do sit-ups.
Intellectual. Ask people about their favorite books, get a new iPhone application, learn new vocabulary words, set up a friendly debate, study a language, look more stuff up on the Internet, Google myself or a friend, attend a conference or class in a field I don’t know much about, read more, listen to people I disagree with until I can clearly articulate their position.
Spiritual. Organize volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, privately pray for coworkers, pool money with officemates to support a disadvantaged child, play Gregorian chants in the elevator, fast for world peace, give fast-food coupons to homeless people, post and practice the values our team believes in, plant trees, get out the vote.
Social. Invite some new employees to a picnic lunch, start a sudoku contest, tip a good flight attendant, go bowling as a work team, become a better listener, compliment people more, do an act of unsolicited service for someone you care about, make a real connection with someone every day, respond more to others’ bids, share ideas more.
Emotional/Aesthetic. Smile more, take good pictures and share them, plant flowers, find a great screensaver, get colored file folders, bring in a headset and some good music, get an office pet, sponsor a company talent show, write in your journal and share it with your family or friends, have a poetry contest, make more jokes, tell patriotic stories.
Will any of these things save the economy or improve your market share? Not immediately. Could bringing pleasure to work get out of hand? Of course. But somewhere in between saving the world and disintegrating into an overgrown frat house, pleasure has a role to play in making work a place where people feel good about being alive and being at work. Leaders set an important tone in encouraging, modeling, participating in, and sometimes toning down or rechanneling pleasure and delight at work so they serve a greater good.
Do you know what the primary sources of pleasure at work are in the preceding categories for each person on your team?
Do you know which departments have the most turnover? What are the sources of pleasure at work that matter most to those who leave? To those who stay?
Humor and Playfulness
Everybody had a favorite teacher at school. Occasionally these were people who were intellectual giants or deeply caring mentors, but often our favorite teacher was the one who was funny. Humor and a sense of playfulness can make the serious work of business more palatable for everyone. John Kotter at the Harvard Business School is a world expert on change. He has written a number of important volumes on the process of change, books that get quoted in academic articles and look impressive on bookshelves but don’t sell a lot of copies. Then Kotter decided to write a lighthearted parable about penguins who realize their iceberg is melting and something will have to be done. Embedding his message about the steps of corporate change in an approachable and playful little story would not work very well if Kotter didn’t have something worthwhile to say, but adding humor and accessibility to his considerable academic credibility allowed Kotter to significantly broaden the impact of his ideas. Our Iceberg Is Melting has sold more than 500,000 copies.
Of course, if your work setting already struggles to get people to put down the whoopee cushions and get down to business, you will have to take this section with a grain of salt (or maybe consider how to channel that lightheartedness into friendly competition or great customer relations). If your office needs to present a high degree of decorum to convey an appropriate professionalism to clients, playfulness may have to be reserved for the commute home (or maybe ask yourself whether all clients really want all that propriety all the time). To start, put an X to indicate where you would currently put your company or team in terms of playfulness, humor, and fun:
Frat house wannabe 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Funeral home on Valium
Now, where do you think your best customers would like you to be? Circle that number. Finally, what would your best employees prefer? Put a big E on the line for them. If there is a mismatch, consider a few suggestions for how to shift the balance toward a little more playfulness. Or, if you need to tone it down, consider the next section on civility for some ideas.
Wendy: Dave is the playfulness expert in our family and hands down the hardest worker of any of us. Thanks to him, each of our kids has developed an ability to have fun along with a solid work ethic. For Dave, the two are closely related. Dave is certainly able to put in long hours at thankless work when necessary, but he also gets a huge kick out of much of what he does. He thinks the process of creating a new presentation or engaging a challenging business problem is fraught with fun. I learned early on that Dave was both hardworking and playful, but we were married for several years before I realized he was also funny. Maybe that says more about me than it does about him, but I honestly don’t think Dave was always that funny. He developed his sense of humor to become a better teacher and a better person. He works at being funny, and sometimes he bombs. He doesn’t let that stop him. When he finds a good one-liner, like all good comedians, he uses it again. He watches good comics in action. Not everyone is a natural at humor and playfulness, but most of us can get better at humor if we nurture it a little, see it as valuable, and lose a few of our inhibitions about what others will think of our beginning efforts.
How would you rate yourself on the humor and playfulness scale (1 to 10)? If you see room for improvement, it might be helpful to examine your attitudes about humor and fun. Fill in the following:
When I was a kid, I thought people who were playful were
__________________________________________
The thing that makes me nervous about humor is
__________________________________________
I would be more fun if
__________________________________________
The arena where I could use more playfulness is
__________________________________________
I think people who are funny are actually
__________________________________________
People get hurt by humor when
__________________________________________
I have been hurt by joking or humor when
__________________________________________
To be more playful I would need to
__________________________________________
I am funniest when
__________________________________________
The person who would most appreciate it if I lightened up is
__________________________________________
I could show this person my lighter side by
__________________________________________
Learn anything? Has your sense of humor been injured by ridicule or excesses? If so, what have you also learned about how humor can help without hurting? Have you seen people victimized by humor so that it has turned you off? If so, it may be time to collect the baby back from the bathwater and reinvest in your lighter side. Have you channeled your playfulness too narrowly? If so, it might be time to let more people see this side of you. Does your humor become mean-spirited, overly sarcastic, or crude? See if you can develop other aspects of your humor repertoire.
Consider who in your organization is great at humor and playfulness while still being a credible and contributing employee. How does he or she pull this off? What can you learn from this person?
Wendy: I’m not as good at humor as Dave, but I believe in the power of play. In my work as a psychologist I often invite adult clients to experience working in trays of sand, using miniatures to create whatever they like. Sand tray therapy is a powerful educational technique as well, helping people express without words what the nonverbal and most creative part of the brain knows but cannot articulate. The great psychologist Carl Jung once said, “Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” This is true for big grown-up problems, not just little-kid problems, but big grown-ups often consider play beneath them. When I can get people to simply play in the sand and then tell me about their creations, they are often stunned at what they learn that they had no idea they knew. And this learning usually sticks far better than word learning alone.
Play has many uses for creative problem solving and innovation. Not only can we play directly at solving problems or imaginative innovation by drawing, crafting, or just manipulating objects, but sometimes taking a break from a pressing problem to go bat a ball around or knit for a while will allow creative solutions to kick in.
Pick up that pencil once again and number your piece of paper from 1 to 5. How could you enhance the atmosphere of appropriate humor, fun, and playfulness as a leader in your work setting? If nothing comes to mind, make this a group brainstorming exercise and see what others come up with.
Smile and laugh more.
Have your next team meeting with everyone sitting on the floor.
Give everyone poker chips to reward one another for going the extra mile.
Tell funny stories on yourself.
Give out prizes for the happiest desk or the most unflappable response to an irate customer.
Use window crayons and markers to brainstorm or draw solutions on the windows.
Wear costumes for Halloween and hand out candy.
Civility
Recently we spent a night at a posh private club in New York City as guests of a friend. We giggled at the list of stuffy rules: no flip-flops, no tennis shoes, only jackets and ties in the lobby or dining areas, no talking on cell phones or using computers in public spaces. But as we went to the breakfast buffet all scrubbed and suited, we couldn’t help noting the air of . . . well . . . civility and delight. We got into a conversation with the waiter, an older man who talked and looked like Rocky Balboa’s hard-nosed manager, who had worked at the club for 15 years and loved it. “Why?” we wondered. “Because the people here are just so nice.” As people who prefer gym clothes over all other attire and would go barefoot to the mall if we could, we are unlikely to buy a membership at a private club with a formal dress code anytime soon. But we did find ourselves wondering if there is a time and a place to turn off the cell phone and put out some flowers. We did wonder if civility is a lost art worth cultivating.
In political debates where strongly held positions often lead to degrading others’ points of view, civility has too often been replaced by hostility. As a result, the gears of the political process become stuck and no one benefits. Wise politicians can disagree without being disagreeable and have tension without contention. Political, organization, and personal civility shifts the debate from how we differ to how we can come to agreement, from how the other person is wrong to what we can learn from the other person, and from demeaning others to respecting them (even if we disagree).
Civility doesn’t have to be stuffy or punishing, of course, and the type of civility we recommend should be neither. Instead of upturned noses or lots of rules, think writing notes of appreciation, acknowledging birthdays or personal events, offering little acts of kindness and respect, exhibiting basic politeness, smiling. Civility that is warm and friendly can help grease the skids of working at close quarters with people we don’t always agree with. It won’t work very well to expect sales reps to be sincere and polite to customers if we are not sincere and polite to them. Rate yourself (1 = low, 5 = high) on the following:
_________ I promptly and sincerely thank people for good work or extra effort, often in writing.
_________ I am appreciative and friendly to people who perform menial tasks.
_________ I say please, thank you, and “I goofed—I’m so sorry” to both colleagues and customers.
_________ I make it easy for others to tell me the truth because of how I respond.
_________ I attend weddings and funerals (literally and figuratively).
_________ I dress appropriately for the occasion.
_________ I avoid sexist, racist, or mean-spirited jokes or comments.
_________ I work to put people at ease around me.
_________ I listen to understand other people’s point of view.
_________ I can disagree without being disagreeable and have tension without contention.
_________ I don’t use anger or petulance to get my way.
The form civility takes in a Marine fighting unit may vary from that of a flower boutique, but civility has a place in both. Genuine civility generally brings out the best in people, who bring out the best in their colleagues and customers.
Ask your team members how they would rate you on the preceding criteria. How would they rate themselves? Do they think these are the right criteria for their work setting? What others would they substitute?
Customers and Delight
Our daughter Carrie, who does not consider herself a very techy person, recently decided to replace her outdated computer. She had put the decision off for a long time because both learning new technology and setting up a new computer intimidate her, and she has no idea where to begin in making computer-related decisions. She asked her brother, a statistician computer-geek, for advice. He talked her into an Apple, his personal favorite. She went to the Apple store, made her purchase, set up the computer, transferred all her files, and had a completely positive experience. She can’t stop talking about how much she loves her new computer, how much fun it is to go back to the store for their computer classes, how hassle-free the purchase process was, and did we mention how much she loves her new computer?
We got curious about how a computer can meet the needs of both our tech-savvy son and our tech-avoidant daughter so well. As near as we can figure, both of them find a simple sense of delight in a product that is both technically advanced and deliciously intuitive. The screen is beautiful. The experience is tactile and inviting. They don’t have to stand in line at the store, because every sales rep carries a little credit card reader around his or her neck. The computer synchs with the phone. And have you seen the cool way the icons swell enthusiastically when you run the cursor over them?
Most companies that make a living by attracting customers want people to experience that sense of delight because they know it translates into customer loyalty. Customer delight, may come from store layout, product features, a great bargain, or attentive service, and customer delight is a constantly moving target, but if companies can deliver on delight, they can usually count on people to come back. Companies that deliver on delight can usually count on their pick of creative employees as well.
A study done many years ago at a large retail firm with thousands of stores found that every 10 points of increase in employee engagement translated into a 4-point increase in customer satisfaction. We anticipate a similar connection between employee delight and customer delight. As leaders make room for employees to experience both big C and little c creativity, enjoy little pleasures, find work conducive to a sense of humor and playfulness, and practice civility, employee satisfaction can turn into customer satisfaction.
You may not be able to afford a fancy gym or day-care center for your employees, but a yoga class or a Ping-Pong table might fly. Salaries may be frozen, but someone could still thaw out the cookie dough. Delight doesn’t have to mean expensive artwork or fancy furniture, and it is not something people have to wait for management to provide—as long as thoughtful leaders are opening up the windows to let a little delight blow through.
An Unexpected Lesson in Delight
When the Khmer Rouge, a totalitarian Communist regime, took over Cambodia in the late 1970s, they emptied the capital city of Phnom Penh of its 2 million inhabitants in a matter of hours, sending everyone to the country to work in rice fields and on farms in makeshift huts and with no training or provisions. An estimated 1.5 million of the 7.1-million-person population died from torture, starvation, disease, and forced labor during the five years of Khmer Rouge rule, probably half from execution, making it the most lethal government of the 20th century. Schools, hospitals, banks, communication systems, and industry all came to a complete halt, with intellectuals, professionals, the educated, those with leadership skill, and city dwellers among the most suspect and the first to be executed. Children were separated from parents and trained in torture. The oft-repeated phrase from the government to the populace was “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.”
Teeda Butt Mam and her family were among those evacuated from the city and sent to the rice fields to eke out a meager existence. Despite being well-educated professionals, they survived by working hard, adapting skillfully, and carefully hiding their background. As they became more aware of the relentlessness of their oppressors and the impossibility of escape, however, Teeda became more and more despondent. Though suicide meant sure punishment to surviving family members, when Teeda’s friend was raped brutally and repeatedly until she died, Teeda began plotting her own death. Life had lost all meaning, and she felt dead inside. The months and years of horror and exhaustion seemed impossible to endure any longer, even for the sake of her mother and siblings. But then the story takes an unusual turn. Teeda states:
Then, unexpectedly, on my way to the rice fields one morning, I glanced up, just as the sun rose over the paddies. The sheer beauty of heavy ripening rice silhouetted against the glorious orange sky took my breath away. A massive, plodding buffalo moved across the scene, giving a sense of the continuity of life from former times to now—an instant lesson in patience and perseverance. All nature affirmed that some things were beyond Angka Loeu’s [the Khmer Rouge’s] power to control. Neither sunrise nor storm, neither cloud nor wind nor bamboo, nor I, would be controlled by Angka. Angka Leou was not omnipotent. I felt—for the first time in months—that life might still hold something worthwhile.4
A tiny moment of delight, of beauty, declaring that “life might still hold something worthwhile,” held Teeda steady through this moment of crisis and gave her a memory that held her through many others. She and her family eventually escaped Cambodia and started a new life in the United States.
If a small moment of delight can bring hope to someone in such circumstances, affirming that life is a precious gift even under the hand of unspeakable oppression, surely such moments can bring meaning to those of us with much less to overcome, much more to live for.
Summary: Leadership Actions to Foster Delight
See and test the connection between employee delight and customer loyalty.
Find ways to delight yourself at work and encourage your employees to find delight through:
Creativity
Pleasure
Humor/playfulness
Civility