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Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 18

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Engineering The State of Flow, and Happiness

In the late 60s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed 1000 people on what makes them happy.  He found a few main things that, when present, can engineer what he called the state of “flow”, when you are lost in the moment, time flies, and you feel like you could do a task forever.

In the Leadership Card Deck we’ve seen a few different studies that have shown that a clear objective can make a huge difference to your team’s results.  And creating a clear path for your team with a repeatable process that is easy to use can increase those results again.

But there is more to this story when it comes to increasing the engagement and happiness of your teams.  And it’s because of this:

Have you ever been in a situation where what you did had absolutely no effect on the outcome?  Take this as an example – imagine you were driving a car, and trying to get to a destination, but when you turned the steering wheel it had no effect on the path you took.  In other words, the action you took had no bearing on whether you made it there or not.

A lot of teams are operating like that car ride today, because even if they have taken a step above everyone else and clearly articulated the objective and the process to get there and made it ridiculously easy to do, if your team’s actions have no effect on getting to that objective they will lose interest very quickly.  And losing interest is the absolute opposite of a state of Flow.

Working Towards A Clear Objective, With Control Over The Outcome

Mihali isn’t the only one to have found this in his studies.  In research brought to light via Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, he found that one of the best motivators wasn’t money or rewards, it was actually a thing called “Mastery”, which he described like this:

“Working continuously towards mastering a worthy skill.”

So we have a fairly ideal set up here, and this is only the start of it.  All the research is pointing in the same direction.  In Leadership Card 10, we saw that tying outcomes to a higher meaning had a huge effect on the happiness of your team.  So if we have a clear objective, where our team’s actions have control over the outcome, and those outcomes are tied to a higher meaning or purpose, then we start to see the ideal situation for engineering happiness and flow in the work that they do.

What Happens Next?

And what happens next when your team can effortlessly perform their work and it is working towards something meaningful?  Well, they enjoy coming to work much more than they thought possible.  It stops being just about the paycheck.  And the effects of high engagement show profit can go up by 17%, revenue can be doubled, absenteeism and sick days can go down by 40%, and much, much more.

Enjoying yourself at work takes a little bit of awareness – awareness that is not taught at school and is not present in most leaders who work their way up through the ranks.  But creating this scenario at work has a big payback, and doing even a little bit will show you just how powerful it can be.

Chat soon – David McLachlan

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