Myth Meets Employee Happiness
Finding Secrets to Reduce Turnover

I read once, “Happiness is in the waiting room of happiness.” Such a brilliant phrase for our myth-loving brain to digest and really wonder about, especially when it comes to this idea that happier, engaged employees make for more
productive tenures and should be front and center on all strategic stages. How have we overdone the search for the Southwest Airlines culture of people by ignoring truth and instead hail a sort of corporate legend of an idea as it fills our hopes and HR goodie bags with half-truths?

Perhaps the answer lies in a seminar I gave some time ago in which I posed the question to my corporate mid-levels: “How important is the brain in leadership?”

Remarkably over 60% of the participants stated, at least by implication, that “other things were more important” such as free will, strategic alignment and
communication styles. Hmmm. Makes you think how well we know our biology as we relegate this powerful organ of ours to some primal center of us all where its main duties our consciousness mediation (not leadership,
for I guess you don’t need to be conscious for this) and breathing regulation. Not things of boardrooms I guess.

At the risk of getting too “out there” with brain science, let’s get the facts straight. Our prefrontal cortex is the CEO of our decision-making, no matter who the actual CEO is in your company. It makes complex nuanced negotiations of trade-offs at a nanosecond level, calculating emotional pay-offs and manages chemical signals that decide whether you live in fear or creativity in any moment. If that isn’t the stuff of engagement I don’t know what is.

Similarly, when it comes to this issue of a happy employee makes for a more lasting one, some of the following neuroscience facts may make you think twice about attempting to build a culture full of “happier people.” For to do this would imply people truly know what it is that makes them happy.

Instead, after reading some commonly accepted facts about metaphysics and neuroscience, you may want to build instead a culture of people more aligned to reality—more to seeking an appropriate hesitation and pause about what they think they know:

• That about 90% of reality is actually invincible.
• That we are conscious of about 5% of what we do.
• That our minds are actively recreating and repackaging initial memories that we stamped as “true,” making the conscious replication of a stimulus not at all accurate in fullness to the objective event as it occurred.
• That due to a visual perception issue of “inattentive blindness” we have as humans a propensity to fall in love with the forest for the trees, and not really ever see/know a tree as it is.
• That chemical feeling of joy/excitement is actually triggered in the moments before we attain what we think will make us happy and does not occur at the time of getting the thing we think will make us happy.

All these facts, especially the latter one, make us wonder about our ability to seek things at work that may not be ultimately attainable there. Instead of building a culture of happier people, teach your people to understand reality, the brain, and the never so more important distinction of knowing what is important versus what is essential in “knowing anything” about people, your boss and ultimately your own perceptions about what you think you know is going on in you.

Storytelling time by a fireplace may have assured us of happiness back then as kids, but now we are called to go beyond fiction. Where happiness really lies.