Happy communities are more inclusive, productive and sustainable. Logically, great leaders should put happiness and well-being at the centre of any strategy for building positive communities at work, at school, and in their neighbourhood. Here are three tips for creating thriving communities in your worklife.
Richard Branson recently posted a great quote and picture that encourages us to positively affect our communities.
Needless to say, I’m excited to share some happiness-based leadership strategies with you, especially since things like kindness, positivity, inclusiveness, and smiling not only define my leadership style, but have also recently been analyzed by Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath as key factors for creating a thriving organizational culture.
In their 2012 Harvard Business Review article entitled “Creating Sustainable Performance”, Spreitzer and Porath identify vitality (the sense of being alive, passionate and excited) and learning (the growth that comes from gaining new knowledge and skills) as two qualities that, when working in concert, allow people to thrive.
“We think of a thriving workforce as one in which employees are not just satisfied and productive but also engaged in creating the future – the company’s and their own. Thriving employees have a bit of an edge – they are highly energized – but they know how to avoid burnout.”
As someone who attempts to thrive in any context, build vitality and learning into my job, and to inspire people around me, here are my three tips for building a contagiously thriving community:
Create Opportunities for Reflection
“Learning happens everywhere all the time,” says Richard Keeling, a very wise man who provides insightful consulting services to universities and colleges around the world. So, be it resolved that we are always experiencing things – reading books and articles, conversations with classmates, planting a garden, doing taxes, running through a park, cooking a meal, or watching/listening to Louis CK’s HBO special (it’s on in the background right now) are all experiences. What happens after we experience something?
Building opportunities to reflect on what we experience is the starting point for empowering people to build knowledge and skills. And reflective learning is simple – it can be done with a conversation over coffee and pie (this is how I like to reflect on movies), a journal or blog, a Facebook status update, graffiti on the side of a building, or a presentation. This Edutopia blog post by Suzie Boss explores several other high-tech tools for reflection, too. Different people reflect, learn and build skills in different ways, so be sure to provide myriad opportunities for members of your community to have experiences, reflect on the experiences, and learn new things.
Build Open-Source Platforms and Processes
According to the New Economic Foundation’s A Well-Being Manifesto for a Flourishing Society, “[t]here is a link between well-being and democratic involvement that has implications for public-service delivery. We need to go beyond giving a choice of provider in public-service delivery to involving people in the design and delivery of the services they receive.”
Look, people need to – and should – know what’s going on in the world. I’m a firm believer that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – even if they, as Wayne Smutz argues, “are no panacea of higher education” – represent an information-sharing culture shift that is fundamentally changing communities’ accessibility and inclusivity. Whether information is shared through Googledocs, bulletin boards, an open office concept, public squares, Yammer, or weekly digital updates from the boss and/or mayor, the more that people can co-create a community’s narrative the more engaged they will be. Because thriving communities include everyone.
Be Nice and Be Interested
“Be more interested than interesting” – if you know a lot about a company or a graduate program or what a neighbourhood is trying to build then you will impress people from these places when you talk to them about such things. Spreitzer and Porath discuss “limiting incivility” as a best practice for creating an environment for people to thrive. Not being uncivil is a good practice, certainly. A best practice is the active spreading of kindness and genuine interest in peoples’ work through your community. This can be as simple or complex as smiling at people on the bus, applying skills from this article about Bill Clinton, sharing your financial or social media expertise with a community-organization through a Volunteer Day, or helping a colleague develop a skill, like giving awesome presentations or using Excel.
From a corporate or workplace perspective, Vancity has one of the best definitions of thriving that I’ve come across – employee engagement is defined by “the energy and passion that an employee has for their employer.” This statement provides a very clear metric for how to gauge their employees’ vitality. From a community perspective, the sustainability plan for Whistler, BC – Whistler2020: Moving Toward a Sustainable Future – aims to enrich, enhance, ensure, and protect, respectively, community life, the resort experience, economic viability, and the environment. Central to this plan is collaboration through successful partnerships, as evidenced by their vision for 2020: “The spirit of cooperation and support among residents, business owners and other stakeholders flourishes in Whistler from years of working together and encouraging each other to achieve the shared vision.” This is what a thriving community looks like.
Wherever you strive to build and/or enhance community well-being, lead with authentic interest and genuine kindness. Because the evidence – as well as your intuitive feelings about the positive effect that happiness has on others – supports the fact that the combination of enthusiasm and being nice helps communities thrive.
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Masthead photo courtesy of Pink Sherbert Photography / Flickr
This article was originally published on April 4, 2017.