Arthur C. Brooks on How Leaders Can Be Happier

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0:32I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

0:44So for all the things we write about, leadership, talent, technology, strategy, the one topic that seems to resonate with our audience above all others is something that's maybe a bit surprising, and that is happiness. How to find it, how to maintain it, how to make it part of your work life. And the fact is that data shows that leaders are struggling to find happiness at work and that this affects what they do. Yeah, I think this is a real problem right now, particularly for people in stressful jobs, and especially because anxiety and uncertainty are so high. You know, I interviewed Leslie Perlow of Harvard a few episodes back about her research on how the busiest people find joy.

1:22And it's a tough subject to study because happiness is subjective. But I think it's key for us to cover it right now because unhappy people tend to not be good employees or leaders. And we really all want and need to find well-being, you know, in both our personal and professional lives. So the guy who makes sense of all of this is my guest today, Arthur C. Brooks. He's also a Harvard professor. He used to focus on straightforward economic issues. In recent years, has devoted himself to this basic but elusive goal of how to be happy. He integrates social science, neuroscience, and philosophy, and his latest book is The Happiness Files, Insights on Work and Life.

2:05He joined me at Harvard Business School's Klarman Hall for a live recording of this episode. Here's my conversation with Arthur C. Brooks.

2:17Your book debuted at number five in the New York Times bestseller. What does that say about us as a society? It says that there are four books that people like more. You know, the truth of the matter is that we have an opportunity in our society right now that we often see as a crisis. There is a happiness crisis. I've been looking at the data on human happiness in the United States and around the world for a long time. And American happiness has, in general, been in decline since 1990, ticking down little by little by little. And then starting in about 2008, there were three major storms that created downward pressure on happiness that was really fast.

2:55And so the result of it is that that crisis and happiness is an opportunity for all of us. And this is the entrepreneurial mindset. We're at the temple of entrepreneurship and business right here and the best business publication in the world should be all about seeing crises as opportunities. Sort of a basic question, because I couldn't tell from what you just said. Is anybody happy? How do we measure whether we're happy or not? We're not, and we are in point of fact not. And that's an important thing for us to keep in mind. I ask people all the time, what do you want? And they say, I want to be happy.

3:25I say, wrong, you can't be happy. You can be happier than you were, because it's a direction. Happiness is not a destination. We have negative emotions. This is part of life on earth. If we have a limbic system that was developed between 2 and 40 million years ago in our brain, that processes negative emotions as an alarm system to keep us safe, to pass on our genes, to not starve. We also have negative experiences because that's part of human life as well. The result of that is that perfect happiness doesn't exist in the mortal coil, perhaps sometime later. That's above my metaphysical pay grade.

4:00But I will say that the idea of trying to attain perfect happiness right now is one of the greatest reasons that people are actually pretty miserable because they wake up and say, I'm not happy today. Well, yeah, of course you're not, but you can be happier today if you actually have the skills, change your habits, and share it with others. You know, you mentioned 2008 and everything that hit us. You have said often that money, you know, power, the sort of trappings of success do not necessarily translate into happiness. And I feel like we all know that, And yet, we live our lives in pursuit of all these things, not just for ego gratification or for material well-being, but because I think we sense that they will provide us happiness.

4:44Yeah. Why? Right? Well. It's weird, isn't it? Why not? Yeah. Is maybe the question. Well, so the first big myth about happiness is that you can be happy. The second big myth is that Mother Nature wants you to be happy. She doesn't care. Mother Nature has only two goals for all of us, which is survival and gene propagation. We have urges and we think that come from Mother Nature. We think that if we satisfy these urges for money and power and pleasure and fame and admiration and Instagram followers or whatever, that we will achieve the happiness that we deeply want, but that's wrong. And so the result of it is that we get into a trap.

5:21Now, most people are able to escape that trap because their worldly dreams never come true. And so they have to settle for the second best, which is just lovely relationships and a fun family and good friends, but a few unlucky individuals, their dreams come true in worldly terms, and they find out pretty, pretty quickly that they have the wrong dreams. And a lot of my students are going to be among those people. So the first thing that I tell them in my class is I say that you believe, Mother Nature is telling you that if you attain your worldly dreams, that happiness will come for free. And then I say something that makes them panic, and there's one word in the sentence that makes them panic.

6:00The truth is, if you shoot for happiness, you will have enough success. What's the word that freaks them out? Enough. It's never enough. It's never enough. Because Mother Nature says it's not enough. And so that's one of the things that I have to help them understand. When you understand the science of what's actually happening in your brain, then you can actually tailor your habits. Human life is funny because of the prefrontal cortex, this incredibly, the 30 % of our brain by weight, the supercomputer in the front of our heads, it gives us kind of two parts in life. There are animal instincts and there are moral aspirations.

6:36And what we need to do if we want to live a happy life is not be content with the animal instincts, but rather to choose the moral aspirations that a large part of the time are standing up to Mother Nature. So you've kind of called BS on what some of us might think, you know, one, we can be happy, two, that maybe the normal state is happiness. And you're saying that's probably not what Mother nature intended. Who sold us this idea that we could be happy? I think we all kind of grew up thinking that's attainable and normal. Yeah. Well, part of it is that there are moments in our lives when we do feel happy.

7:08The problem with that is really the third myth about happiness, which is that happiness is a feeling and it isn't. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner. And so when people are searching for a feeling, what they're searching for is positive emotions, which once again exist only to give you information about the outside world. When you have positive emotions, there's a part of your brain that says, you have just sensed something that's an opportunity. You should approach it. When you're feeling negative emotions, you're sensing that something is a threat and you should avoid it.

7:42Happiness is not an emotion. Happiness has positive emotions associated with it. And we want it to be as continuous as possible. And that's as old as humanity itself. The right approach is to understand that happiness is something actually to be pursued and divided into three big scientific categories, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. That's an approach that can reliably help you to become happier every year. Not every day, but certainly every year. All right, so let's say you're concerned about the political situation. Uh-huh. Okay, like can't sleep at night concerned. Mm-hmm. All right, and your response to that is to bury your head in the sand and not really follow events because they're too distressing.

8:23So you work in your hobbies, you play tennis, asking for a friend, by the way. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. But that feels like a dereliction of one's civic duty, a path possibly to peace of mind, happiness perhaps. But where do you come down on that? So it's absolutely the case that one of the things that's happened in our technologized world is that the outside world has become very small and come to us in ways that we can't affect it. I mean, there are whole parts of the world that we can't affect, but we feel as if we could because the information is arriving so quickly. And that creates a profound cognitive disruption for us.

9:02It creates a dissonance for us. All these bad things are happening. I should do something, but I can't do anything. So I feel helpless. And that leads me to anxiety and sadness and fear. And that's what a lot of people are feeling all the time. The result of that is not to check out, not ever check the news. But I do have protocols that I recommend to people all the time. You should not be reading more than half an hour of news a day Ever and it should be in one block and not more than half of it should be political You're not going to get any more information than you had this morning by looking at the newspaper tonight and seeing if something has actually happened in congress Nothing happened in congress And that's an important thing for us to keep in mind and then how do we spend the rest of our time or ample free time?

9:44What do we do with the habits funny when you break a habit which is reprogramming a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens? you feel like you're so at loose ends because you have so much time on your hands. When I quit smoking, I felt like I had all the time in the world. And so I had to do something with my time. When you're not checking the news and you're not looking at politics and you're not trading information with the people who already agree with you that so-and-so is terrible, terrible, terrible and everything is awful, awful, awful, you feel like you have a lot of time on your hands.

10:11How do you spend that time? And the answer is by affecting change that you can change and that's profoundly local. That's your family, That's your neighborhood. That's your community. That's your town. That's your university. That's where real change happens, getting more local, more active with the time that's actually freed up from the things you can't do and watch your happiness start to rise. Okay. I'm going to take that from that very high altitude to the workplace. Yeah. Myself, people I know, there's a feeling that the tasks you do at work, you're going from one anxiety-filled, maybe performance anxiety-filled moment to the next.

10:52So there's not a through line of joy exactly because we have these tasks we have to deliver. How do we get out of that particular perception trap? Yeah. Well, the truth of the matter is that most people don't feel a lot of anxiety in their jobs. They don't. It depends on the performance, the kind of job that you find yourself. And so people in leadership jobs have a lot of anxiety. The more leadership responsibility that you have, the more anxiety in general you're going to have. And that's something that's actually chosen. And that's a big surprise to a lot of CEOs. The number one and two emotions in the first 24 months of an average CEO's tenure are loneliness and anger.

11:33Loneliness and anger, not joy and contentment, not joy and lovely surprise. No, that's not how it works. The only surprises you get a CEO is like the general counsel called, that's bad, or whatever it happens to be. And a lot of them are really caught by surprise because once again, your ancient limbic system says, climb, man, the brass ring, that's where it's at. It's going to be so great. And they get there and they don't like it. The number one predictor of CEO demise, by the way, is not liking the job of CEO. And there are CEOs all over this country. There are managers all over this country and all over the world who want to be CEO but don't want to do CEO because the negative emotionality is so intense and so high.

12:16And one of the things that I recommend leaders do a lot is actually step into more creative roles, step into more contemplative roles, step into more supporting roles, and they can actually be happy. You have to be really, really suited to bear up under a lot of anxiety. Anxiety is nothing more than unfocused fear. That's the definition of anxiety, unfocused fear, which is usually a maladaptation of the amygdala in the limbic system of the brain. You need to know how it works and be incredibly self-managing. So I want to talk a little bit about what has kind of happened in the workplace. There was a period, and we certainly wrote a lot about it, where it was in vogue to really try to make sure your employee base was happy, was seen, that they could bring their full self.

13:03I'd say there's a backlash to that now, you know, articulated by, you know, Mark Zuckerberg. We need more masculine energy, which I'm not sure what that means, but I think it means less of what I'm talking about. Let's say those are two legitimate paradigms, right? That you, the second is like command, you know, you do what I say. This isn't a company, right? Who cares about your whole self? We're just sort of doing work here. Do you have a view as to which is better in terms of creating joy, both for the individual and then creating positive results for the institution? I mean, that's a big question.

13:35Yeah. But do you have thoughts on that? I have the data on this. It's very, very clear. Happier employees are more profitable, more productive employees. That's just the way it is. If you're going to have a happier workforce, you're going to have a better company, and the results are going to be there. And I know this because of the work of Irrational Capital, which is a research firm on Wall Street, which I've done some informal advisory unpaid to them because I'm so interested in their data. And what they do is they've looked at 7 ,500 companies, all publicly listed companies, the entire S &P 500, the entire Russell 1000, big companies, little companies, and they have some proprietary data on workplace well-being.

14:08What they find is, for example, if you're in the top 20 % of workplace well-being, you will be on average about 520 basis points above the S &P 500 in your stock price over the past year. This stuff is really performing. It really, really is a good investment. The problem is people don't know what workplace happiness means. It's ill-defined. I spend a lot of time in California, and I'm talking to Silicon Valley firms, and they'll ask their employees, what would make you happier? and the police don't know. They just know they're not happy. And so they'll say stuff like, I don't know, a ping pong table.

14:44How about avocado toast? I don't know. And so they'll be like, okay, avocado toast and ping pong tables and the people are still not happy. And that's because that's not what they want. They want friendship. They want to actually have friends at work. They want to feel empowered and like they're getting better at their jobs. They want to feel like management is listening to them and taking their suggestions. They want efficiency. They don't want to have their time wasted with stupid meetings all day long. By the way, those are the top four of the six variables that we're talking about here. And if you get that stuff right, you use the data, you be a bit of a social scientist, you win.

15:21All right, let's talk about meetings for a second. Yeah. I've written about meetings. I wrote in a volume together. I know. And I have some colleagues here, so this is for you too. Yeah. So we all know meetings are terrible. We all know about the tyranny of meetings. They're the worst. written about they're the worst they sap your your your energy they sap your happiness and yet and and maybe we go through there we we respond and you know there are no meetings on fridays for a while right and then they come back they come back they come back and it it it makes us feel miserable and it feels like it's taking away from our real jobs right it's hard to remember what they were because it seems to be meetings and email help us here because because so much good intention so much understanding of everything you said and yet none of us seems to be able to break the tyranny of meeting.

16:05Yeah, yeah. And part of the reason is because they are a necessary evil, but we focus on the necessary, not on the evil. The truth is we should be minimizing meetings, and we should have good meeting hygiene at every company, every organization around the world. And, you know, universities are the worst. You know, faculty meetings, they'll say, you know, we really only have half an hour of business, but we're going to set aside 90 minutes in case something comes up. And if you're in management, you say, you know, we're probably not going to use all this time? And I'm like, yes, you're here. And then, you know, you get to the end of the 30 minutes of actual business and he says, does anybody have anything else on their mind?

16:38And it's always the same cast of characters. And this is very, very common in nonprofits in particular. The problem with that is that that drives out the people that are most, that want to go back to their offices and do their work. This is the people who are most interested in their own productivity and efficiency are most discouraged by that kind of behavior. And so the way to fix this is by having actual distinct protocols that are well studied. And I talk about in this book. So for example, meetings should never involve people who don't need to be there. Anytime it looks like a meeting isn't necessary, make it Christmas morning at work and cancel it.

17:13Everybody will love you if you're known for canceling meetings. No meeting should be over 30 minutes. You don't need more than 30 minutes. I'm sorry. And what the result of it is that there's no throat clearing. There's no preambles. There's no, did you go sailing this weekend? How's your cape house? Did you get those steps fixed? None of it. It's like, get to business. Get to business because you've only got 30 minutes and people are going to leave after 30 minutes. And having some of these protocols in place mean that people are going to say, yep, we need to have these meetings. If I'm at the meeting, it's because I'm going to have to present or somebody is going to have to present to me.

17:46It's only going to last 30 minutes. And if it's not necessary, it's going to get canceled. Okay. So let's keep going on how to build a relatively happy work culture. So the ping pong table and the avocado toast may or may not help. What you just talked about, it may or may not help. To what extent can leaders create a happier workplace? They can do a lot. The number one predictor of somebody hating their job is a bad boss. That's the number one predictor. Bad leadership and it has a lot to do with the character, personality, and leadership style of the boss. You can, if you're the boss, you can ruin the workplace very, very quickly.

18:22And that's one of the reasons that we need a lot of emotional and psychological equilibrium, a lot of emotional self-management. That's why I'm training managers here at HBS. I want them to be happy people. That's the number one predictor of being a good boss is working on your own happiness. And a lot of bosses don't understand this. By the way, the worst parenting advice ever is you're never happier than your unhappiest child. That's just bad parenting, straight up. Because nobody wants to have an unhappy mother or father and nobody wants to have an unhappy boss. If you're in any position of leadership, you have an ethical responsibility to be working on your happiness because it's your gift to the people over whom you're a steward.

19:02And we're probably picking the wrong people as managers. Well, we do sometimes. But there are some spectacular managers as well. Self-equilibrating, very well self-managing people. People who are not stuck in the empathy trap but are really paying attention to compassion, who really want the best for the people around them. And there are some wonderful, wonderful managers.

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20:06I want to talk about the consequences then of all this unhappiness. Right. Okay, so individually it's probably apparent. In terms of the workplace, you've got the data. But in terms of society more broadly, what is the consequence of this lack of contentment? When people aren't happy, the first thing that happens is that they don't lift each other up. You know, it's the first thing that you see in couples is when one becomes unhappy, it spreads like a virus in families. That's called emotional contagion. Emotional contagion is very, very, very strong. And so that's why it's so critically important that there be some form of quarantine, emotional quarantine, and that we emotionally understand ourselves and we understand that it's no service to anybody in a family or a workplace that we'd be bringing unhappiness to it.

20:55So that's the first thing that we actually see is trying to contain emotional contagion. All right, we're all dying to be happier. A lot of this stuff does sound hard or involves multiple people and institutions. Like, what are one or two things people can take home and just maybe feel a little bit better about? On the social media side? No. Oh, in general? In general. Okay, there's a lot that you can do. Every single one of you can change your social media habits starting today without throwing your phone in the ocean. And it's like tech-free times, tech-free zones, and tech-free periods during the year is what it comes down to.

21:27And I can talk about that, about how a detox works and it's incredibly efficacious and it's not that hard to do. When we talked about happiness in general, here's the key thing to keep in mind. There's four big habits that the happiest people have that they engage in every day. This is sort of the happiness pension plan. These are the deposits that you put in every day. These are the things to pay attention to. Number one, all of the happiest people who have the highest levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, which are the macronutrients of happiness, they're paying attention every day to their faith or philosophical life, which is religious or not, but is transcending themselves and standing in awe of something bigger.

22:05The second is their family life. They're taking their family life seriously. The third is that they're taking their friendships seriously. And that's super hard for people in business. especially the higher you go in management, the fewer real friends you have and the more deal friends that you have. And deal friends don't count. That's not the nutrient that I'm talking about. And last but not least is dedicating your work to earning your success and serving other people. It's faith, family, friends, and work that serves. Those are the big four. Those are the things that we can all pay attention to.

22:33And we can create an inventory in each one of our lives. Am I doing that or not? And then what am I gonna do to get after this? And I have very specific protocols in each one of these areas that I recommend to my students and anybody who wants to hear about them. You know, I'll just give you one example of this. On the faith side, people, how do I get started? I wasn't raised religious, and I don't want to be religious. No problem. But there's a funny thing here at Harvard. One of the most popular classes among the undergraduates is astronomy. It's like, who cares, right? Astronomy, right? And they're not astronomers, like English majors or economics majors or something.

23:07And you ask them and they'll say, you know, I don't know. But on Thursday morning, I go into my astronomy class and I'm all stressed out because I had a big argument with my mom and I don't think my boyfriend likes me anymore. And I'm worried about my grades. And I come out an hour and a half later and I realized I'm just a speck on a speck on a speck. In other words, they get small and they make the universe large. That's transcendence, which you can get from walking in nature before dawn. By the way, walk in nature before dawn while the sun comes up. That's called the Brahma Mukherta, an ancient Vedic thinking, and it's very well studied in neuroscientific terms.