Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 7

Daniel Goleman: Self-Regulation: A Star Leader’s Secret Weapon

Our emotions are driven by biological impulses. These biological impulses are beyond our control, but the resulting emotions are not. When emotions are running high, they certainly cannot be ignored – but they can be carefully managed. This is called self-regulation, and it’s the quality of emotional intelligence that liberates us from living like hostages to our impulses.

The signifiers of emotional self-regulation are easily identified. A person who knows how to self-regulate possesses:

an inclination towards reflection and thoughtfulness;
acceptance of uncertainty and change;
integrity - specifically, the ability to say no to impulsive urges.

Self-regulation is a pretty underrated skill. Those people who have great control over their emotions can be perceived as cold, aloof, or dispassionate. And we have a tendency to glorify the so-called archetypal leader who blows his top. Some even mistake this as a side effect of brilliance. But these types are often at a disadvantage if they’re able to make it to the top. In my experience, I’ve never seen the tendency toward radical outbursts to surface as an indicator of strong leadership.

Picture a leader who has just witnessed his team give a bungled presentation to the company’s board of directors. After the meeting, this frustrated executive might want to act out by slamming a door or pounding his fists on the table. Maybe his knee-jerk reaction is to maintain a mile-long stare and then leave the office in silence. But what if this leader knows how to self-regulate? If he does, he’ll plan his reaction carefully. He will acknowledge a weak performance without passing any harsh judgments. He will reflect on the reasons behind the failure.

For instance, was it a lack of effort? Was there something holding his team at a disadvantage? And what responsibility does he hold for this fiasco? After thoughtful reflection, a self-regulated leader would bring the team back together, discuss the consequences of the presentation, and provide his objective assessment of it. He would then offer a well-considered solution.

Why is self-regulation so imperative for leaders?
Reasonable people—the ones who maintain control over their emotions—are the people who can sustain safe, fair environments. In these settings, drama is very low and productivity is very high. Top performers flock to these organizations and are not apt to leave them.
Self-regulation actually has a ripple effect. Who wants to be seen as a fiery rabble-rouser when the boss is admired for her even-handedness? More positive attitudes at the top mean more positive attitudes throughout the organization.
It’s a competitive asset. We all know the landscape of business changes rapidly. Technology is constantly changing; companies divide and merge everyday. At all levels, leaders who know how to self-regulate will thrive on these changes. When a new database system is announced, for instance, a self-regulating leader will steer clear of snap judgment, focus on the steps for implementation, and lead the way by example.
Lastly, I want to emphasize how self-regulation enhances integrity, which is not just an individual virtue but also an incredible asset for an organization. So many of the disasters we hear about at companies are simply the result of impulsive behavior. And most offenders don’t accept positions with the intention to embezzle, jeopardize workers, exaggerate profits, or abuse power. Instead, a chance to increase personal gain or cut corners arises, and those who don’t know how to self-regulate just give in.

Develop your team's emotional intelligence competencies with the proven-effective resources in The HR & EI Collection including:

The EI Overview offers actionable findings on how leaders can foster group flow to maximize innovation, drive, and motivation to deliver bottom-line results. The collection provides easy-to-understand insights into proven-effective ways managers can best employ leadership styles, as well as develop the areas where they lack.

The Competency Builder program was created to assist workers at all levels learn how to improve focus, handle daily stresses better, and use these skills to increase their effectiveness.

The Coaching Program is an online streaming learning series for executives, highlighting methods for enhancing any leader or manager's effectiveness, creativity, and ability to connect with their teams.

The C-Suite Toolkit is designed for senior management (or those new to senior management positions) seeking a comprehensive reference library from the most respected business and leadership experts of our time.

Leadership: A Master Class Training Guide offers more than nine hours of research findings, case studies and valuable industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, leadership development, organizational research, workplace psychology, innovation, negotiation and senior hiring. Each module in the training guide offers individual and group exercises, self-assessments, discussion guides, review of major points, and key actionable takeaway plans. 

Daniel Goleman: Four Strategies to Renew Your Career Passion

The search for personal meaning can be an ongoing quest. It’s a difficult process but it usually results in a very healthy and necessary awakening. Leaders, for example, need to work on this regularly in order to replenish their energy, solidify their commitment, heighten their creativity, and rediscover their passion.

But they cannot do so without first re-calibrating to focus on their goals and dreams.

Certain signals can trigger the need to take stock or adjust your perspective. Examples of these signals are feeling trapped, feeling bored, feeling like life is passing you by, or that your personal ethics have been compromised. Or maybe you just don’t feel like yourself.

So how do you train yourself to recognize these symptoms of distress and take action before it’s too late? In my experience, it really takes a concerted effort to self-examine on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a quick solution for reestablishing meaning in your career. But there are some very effective strategies for examining your decisions and adjusting your trajectory where appropriate. Many people use a few combinations of these strategies, some seek help from others, and some prefer to go it alone. However you choose to undertake these methods, remember to take it slow. You’ll need time to reflect, consider where you are, where you’re headed, and where you really would like to be. Let’s take a look at 4 ways to do this.

1. Take a time-out

Taking some time off is a great way to figure out what you really want to do. It gives you a chance to reconnect with your aspirations. Sabbaticals are a common occurrence in academic institutions, typically offering faculty members six to 12 months off - often with pay. Because this is less common in business settings, those who do so are taking a risk, to be sure. But in my experience, few regret the decision.

Do you think this is right for you? First imagine: no to-do lists, no meetings, no structure. This can be quite difficult; most high achievers crave routine. Additionally, what about the loss of financial security? This is often prohibitive. And then there’s your identity in your work role. For some people, abandoning their station feels like too great a sacrifice. It’s a decision that needs to be made with great care and careful planning.

2. Find a program

If a more structured scenario would suit you better, consider a leadership or executive development program. These offer guided settings for people as they explore their dreams.

Take a long-time executive of several health care organizations. For a change, he began teaching part-time. He maintained his position at work, even as his course load grew rapidly. But he was becoming exhausted. It wasn’t until he enrolled in a professional development program that he was able to design his ideal future. It became clear to him and his coach that he had a powerful calling to teach. Teaching was not just a diversion; it was his dream. So he developed a two-year plan for disentangling himself from his business role, and now he’s full-time faculty.

It’s common for educational institutions to offer these kinds of programs. And some progressive companies have also decided that these programs are worth it, as they result in a rejuvenated, reinvigorated team. The risk to the company, of course, is that participants won’t return. Fortunately for them, it’s more common that these employees return with new meaning and excitement. Either way, it’s important to remember that those who jump ship would have done so regardless.

3. Create "reflective structures"

When the late leadership guru Warren Bennis conducted a survey of leaders in the early 1990s, he discovered a common trait: their ability to remain in touch with what mattered to them. They created space in their lives for what he called “reflective structures,” meaning they allowed themselves the time for self-examination on a regular basis.

Many people rely on meditation, prayer, exercise, or simple reflection as their outlet. One CEO reflects in solitude for an hour a day, and sometimes two or three hours on weekends. However you choose to do this, the goal is to separate yourself from everyday demands and just be with your thoughts.

There are also ways to reflect collectively, so that you can share your ambitions and disappointments with peers. After overseeing multiple divisions of his consulting form, one executive decided to share his experience by joining a CEO group that met monthly. By joining a group like this, you’ve legitimized the importance of examining your role and learning from others. The benefits are quickly tangible; members exchange proven effective tips for the difficult situations and conflicts they all have in common. (It also creates a space for honest feedback – something most executives don’t hear much of!)

4. Work with a coach or mentor

When we’re in a confusing situation, disregarding our past experience to arrive at an objective stance is very difficult. Perhaps impossible. An outside perspective is extremely useful in this way. You might seek help from trusted colleagues, but it may be in your best interest to consult with a professional coach. Coaches are trained to help you identify your strengths and determine the best ways to use them.

You may also be fortunate enough to work with a manager who possesses a coaching leadership style. Coaching leaders help employees identify their unique strengths and weaknesses and tie them to their personal and career aspirations. They encourage employees to establish long-term development goals and help them conceptualize a plan for attaining them. They make agreements with their employees about their role and responsibilities in enacting development plans, and they give plentiful instruction and feedback.

 

How did you restore your career passion? Share you experiences in the comments, or tweet them to me: @DanielGolemanEI.

You may find also these other articles useful in your quest:

Why Self-Improvement Begins with Self-Reflection

The Brain Science Behind Gut Decisions

Does Intuition Affect Decisions?

The Valuable Data in Your Gut

How to Hear Your Inner Voice

Additional resources

The Coaching Program is an online streaming learning series for executives, highlighting methods for enhancing any leader or manager’s effectiveness, creativity, and ability to connect with their teams.

The C-Suite Toolkit is designed for senior management (or those new to senior management positions) seeking a comprehensive reference library from the most respected business and leadership experts of our time.

The Competency Builder program was created to assist workers at all levels learn how to work more mindfully, improve focus, handle daily stresses better, and use these skills to increase their effectiveness. A great resource for any HR library.

The EI Overview provides easy-to-understand insights into proven-effective ways managers can best employ leadership styles, as well as develop the areas where they lack.

Daniel Goleman: The Right Balance: Managing Well-Being at Work

The woodworkers at a mill noticed something peculiar. The speed of their production line seemed to be increasing through the week, starting at a moderate pace on Monday and accelerating to a speedy pace by Friday.

And the levels of their stress hormones rose along with the speed.

This research, done some years back, revealed that as stress hormones rose day by day, their levels stayed high through the night. They did not drop until the weekend.

Meanwhile the mill workers started drinking more and spent more hours at night locked in TV-watching. They stopped socializing with their families and friends. They got depressed.

On the other hand, when the production line slowed down and the workers found the right level of challenge, all that reversed. Their stress hormones got back to a normal level, they stopped binge drinking so much, and once again enjoyed their family and friends.

Today we call that optimal match between job demands and abilities part of “well-being at work,” according to Eileen McNeely, co-director of the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise, at the Harvard School of Public Health. She connects individuals’ well-being at work with their organization’s (and their personal) focus on the sustainability of the planet. “People need to be fulfilled enough to pay attention to sustainability,” she told me.

Her research pinpoints a number of other factors that determine our sense of well-being at work. Her Harvard group has drawn on years of relevant research to develop a Well-Being Index, assessing key dimensions. These include our sense of purpose and meaning in what we do, as well as the richness of our relationships at work.

The key signs of well-being are a sense of security, trust, and respect among co-workers and workers and their bosses. That resonates with George Kohlreiser’s model for optimal leadership, which puts the ability to provide this emotional surround at the heart of excellence.

In my emotional intelligence model, this positive environment results when people feel a particular kind of empathy, called empathic concern, toward those they work with. This genuine caring makes a team member, for instance, happy to put in a little extra time helping out a teammate. It makes a boss more likely to see a lapse as a learning opportunity for an employee rather than a black mark. And a boss with empathic concern will look for stretch challenges for workers, ones that will help them grow better at skills they need, rather than play-it-safe assignments.

A CEO told the Dalai Lama he was concerned about how stressed his entry-level employees were with their anxieties. The Dalai Lama’s response: “For their peace of mind, let the younger staff have an internal conversation—maybe once a week or every month—about their state of mind, their emotions, not the business.” They could share ideas on how to be resilient, confront challenges, be more effective, he added.

That’s not a bad idea. As McNeely finds, one of the strongest determinants of our sense of well-being lies in our social connections.

What does your organization's wellness programs look like? Share tips and best practices in the comments.

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Learn other ways businesses do good while doing well in my new book, A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama's Vision for Our World. Available now in print/ebook and audiobook.

Join the Force for Good initiative here. You're also invited to participate in the Force for Good LinkedIn group here.

Daniel Goleman: An Open Letter to Jeff Weiner

Dear Jeff:

There’s no doubt that LinkedIn has become the world’s best place to connect professionally and build your network.

I see a way it could be even better – especially when it comes to managing your professional identity – and letting users know if you’re the right person for a job.

It comes down to the fact that character counts, not just credentials and job experience.

LinkedIn profiles understandably emphasize professional accomplishments. And that kind of information is crucial when someone scans your profile to evaluate you as a potential job candidate, business colleague, or for any other reason they might want to size you up.

But your expertise, experience and accomplishments are just one dimension of who you are. Technically, these indicate “threshold” competencies — the abilities someone needs for a given position.

What they don’t indicate is what kind of person you are. And that can make all the difference. In the HR world these are “distinguishing” abilities, the ones that set star performers apart from mediocre. (In fact, I was pleased to see on the LinkedIn for Volunteers page that a large percentage of hiring managers consider volunteer work equally as valuable as paid work experience when evaluating candidates.)

One aspect of distinguishing abilities is your emotional intelligence – how you handle yourself and your relationships. Are you self-aware? Do you stay calm and clear during a crisis? Can you stay focused on your long-term goals? Do you tune in to other people? Listen? Communicate effectively? Collaborate well?

But who you are goes beyond such emotional intelligence competencies to include your character. Do you have integrity? Are you compassionate? Character counts. As Fred Kiel found, managers high in character traits like integrity and compassion got business results five times greater than those with fewer positive character traits.

Apart from the enhanced business acumen, there’s the human reality that we simply feel more secure and positive around people who have both emotional intelligence and good character. And we can work better.

So what are ways to tell if a person has such qualities?

Just as you heard from your fireside chat with Matthieu Ricard about his new book Altruism, I got the same message while interviewing the Dalai Lama for A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for the World [a pro-bono project with all royalties donated to charity because I agree with his message].

The Dalai Lama adds another point: each of us can move the world in a better direction – but exactly what we can do differs greatly from person to person.

One person might volunteer as a “big brother” or “big sister” for a disadvantaged kid. Someone else might spend their Sunday mornings helping in a homeless shelter.

As for me, I will commit to:

Dedicating more of my LinkedIn Influencer posts to highlight good work people and organizations are doing, just like Chip Bergh and Bill Gates.
Sharing more stories from your Social Impact channel on all of my social media feeds.
Reminding my personal contacts to update their profiles to include volunteer experience and causes they support.
Posting LinkedIn volunteer opportunities with my networks, including the A Force for Good LinkedIn group.

Jeff, you have the ability to encourage more LinkedIn members to include making a positive impact on the world in their definition of opportunity.  

I have a few suggestions to help you accomplish this:

Make the “Volunteering Experience” and “Causes You Care About” more prominent and framed so they are more inviting – maybe lump them under “Good Works” so more folks list the good they do. Or develop a “volunteer badge” members can prominently place in their profile. This would show that LinkedIn recognizes and values people’s acts of goodness – and give all of us a better sense of the kind of person we are dealing with.
Develop and share more LinkedIn for Volunteers case studies in your LinkedIn Pulse feed. I’d love to hear how the connections paid off, and I think others would too.
Create more content packages for Influencers to highlight stories about good work in their organizations or communities.
Consider creating a Good Works channel for companies to inspire
leaders to do good while doing well – everything from B Corporations and corporate social responsibility initiatives to charitable work by employees.

Together we can all create a greater force for good.

UPDATE:  June 24, 2015

LinkedIn responded to this letter with lightning speed. Within minutes of going live, Jeff Weiner tweeted: "Thanks for all of your contributions to date, and for the excellent suggestions. We're on it." And he's been good on his word. Meg Garlinghouse, responsible for LinkedIn's social impact initiatives, responded with this post: Social impact is the new professional norm. They also brought to my attention this video they produced to help nonprofits find the volunteers, board members, and even possible donors and employees they need to change the world. Keep going, LinkedIn!

Daniel Goleman: Can You Pass This Stress Test?

“Our people are under constant pressure, working 24/7, facing impossible demands,” the head of human resources at a global consultancy tells me.

Who isn’t these days? Stress has become a given in the workplace, with people taking fewer vacation days than ever, and staying tethered to work by their smartphones wherever they go, whatever time of day. Stress is the new normal.       

So here’s the test. When a particularly stressful event comes along – a colleague, or, worse, your boss, blows up at you, say – how long do you stay upset? Do you fret about that upsetting encounter for hours, wake up worrying about it that night, ruminate for days?          

Or can you drop it soon after, focusing on what you’ve got to get done?          

Build Resilience

The amount of time a stressful event preoccupies you afterword marks how well or poorly you can recover – and that’s the key to the resiliency found in the most successful people, according to research by Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin.         

Resilient people bounce back, no matter what happens. Instead of their body carrying the symptoms of constant stress and their minds tied up in knots, they are able to return to a relaxed calm even after the most upsetting events.       

[Read: A Relaxed Mind is a Productive Mind]   

Davidson finds that such stress resiliency has a brain basis. And some people seem blessed with this capacity from birth, while others have a lifelong history of worry and preoccupation.        

The good news: we can all change for the better. It just takes spending time each day in the mental gym, exercising the mental muscles for focus and concentration. As research at Emory University shows, the longer people have engaged in such mental workouts daily, the more quickly their mind can drop a distraction or upsetting thought and return to a better target, topic, or task.       

In my emotional intelligence model, this comes down to using self-awareness to enhance our emotional self-management. When I interviewed the Dalai Lama for my book A Force For Good, he used the term “emotional hygiene,” or getting our distress under control. We all understand the need for physical hygiene, he points out – so why not the emotional kind, too?          

Stress Recovery

There’s a simple way to increase our recovery time from stress, as research at Davidson’s lab and many others shows: rehearse letting go of our thoughts and returning our attention to a chosen topic. That mental move is the essence of mindfulness, or any other meditation.

In my own research at Harvard on this, I found that people who meditated recovered more quickly from a stressful challenge later. I start my own day with such an inner workout.         

After hearing all this empirical evidence, that head of HR at that stressed-out consultancy invited me to their headquarters. He wanted me to explain mindfulness-based emotional intelligence to their teams – and show them how to meditate.

Additional Reading:

Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain

Exercising the Mind to Treat Attention Deficits

The Art of Moving On

Do You Perform Better in High-Pressure Meetings?

Additional Resources:

PODCAST: Sensory Focus

Working with Mindfulness: Research and Practice of Mindful Techniques in Organizations

Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Intelligence

A Force for Good print/ebook and audiobook will be available June 23, 2015.

 

Daniel Goleman: How to Make a Lasting Positive Impact

A Force for Good print/ebook and audiobook will be available June 23, 2015. Sign up here to learn more about the Join a Force for Good initiative. Register for my talk about A Force for Good on June 25 in Washington DC here.

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He was a top executive at a multinational food company, and his coach was pursing a challenging line of inquiry. She wanted to know, “What will your legacy be?”       

It’s a conversation Dr. Cherre Torok, an executive coach with a global clientele, has with the CEOS and presidents she works with – “about 90% of the time,” she tells me.            

And while these high-level executives are able to alter company-wide DNA, it’s a question any of us at any level can ask ourselves, no matter the size of our sphere of influence.     

As the Dalai Lama told me while I was writing A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for our World, the litany of tragedies we hear about in our daily news feed more often than not come down to “a lack of ethics.” And when it comes to our personal legacy, it’s our sense of meaning and purpose that shape not just what we value and how we behave now, but also what we will leave behind.          

If your six-year-old asks you what you do, your answer would be simple, but authentic. “That genuineness is what we look for at any level,” says Torok.          

To get in touch with your guiding principles, she suggests asking yourself a series of questions. You might start with an honest answer to: Are you saying what you believe? Are you acting from your values?

 

Another way to think about it: What do you do that goes beyond the job description that demonstrates these values? A personal legacy means measuring our impact beyond money, role, or authority.         

For a more systematic inner dialogue, consider these questions:

Why? What’s the sense of purpose, values, or meaning that moves you?

What? Given your role and resources, how could you implement them?

How? Do you have the emotional intelligence chops to be effective? Are you aware of how your words and nonverbal, like tone of voice, impact people?

Who? What key stakeholders or allies can you convince or mobilize?

That last question often comes up with CEOs concerned about their own legacy – and how to keep it going after they leave. The higher you go in the organization, the bigger the legacy issue. One reason: your influence footprint is bigger. As Dr. Torok finds, with CEOs the discussion very often becomes just about the company, but about what they can contribute to the world at large.          

As for that exec at the global food corporation, his legacy inquiry led to the company investing in some R&D to make their foods healthier. And also another contribution to the company’s DNA: despite cost cutting, he found ways other than laying people off to make up the deficit.

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You're invited to join my new LinkedIn group, A Force for Good. You can also connect with the Join a Force for Good initiative via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

 

 

 

Daniel Goleman: Want a Loyal Team? Choose Kindness Over Toughness

A Force for Good print/ebook and audiobook will be available June 23, 2015. Sign up here to learn more about the Join a Force for Good initiative. Register for Dr. Goleman's talk about A Force for Good on June 25 in Washington DC here.

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Say one of your direct reports “blows it” in some way – maybe does something dumb that loses a sale, or alienates a client or colleague – and you get upset.       

How you handle that moment makes a huge difference for you, your employee – and your very ability to manage.       

You can either come down hard, reprimanding or punishing the person. Or you can use the mistake as a learning opportunity. This doesn’t mean you accept or condone the screw-up. You can say what was wrong and why it matters for the business, and add how that might have been handled differently.

If you do this without losing it yourself, it boosts an employee’s loyalty to you enormously — and he or she just might learn something about doing better next time around. It’s even better if you can deliver your reaction with a supportive tone, not a judgmental one.          

Bonus: any other employees who see you react with understanding rather than out of anger or frustration also become more loyal to you. A feeling of positivity toward your boss turns out to be a bigger factor in loyalty than the size of a paycheck.

Manage with Compassion

Call it managing with compassion. And despite its soft ring, research finds that compassion has better results than a tough-guy stance. For starters, people like and trust bosses who show kindness – and that in turn boosts their performance.

This may not come easily. After all, there’s a certain self-satisfaction that comes from venting your anger, plus the hope that a reprimand will teach that employee not to repeat the mistake. And maybe it will keep everyone on their toes.

But that is not what the data tells us. Research on how employees feel about bosses who are often angry reveals that they see that manager as less effective.

Besides, being able to suspend your negative judgments and show how to better handle the situation creates a more positive atmosphere, one where employees feel safe to take smart risks. If employees are fearful it kills creative thinking and the innovations that can keep a company competitive.       

But frustration naturally moves us to react with anger. How can we change that knee-jerk response?

Pause before you react. Taking a mindful moment – or a longer pause to cool down – when you notice you’re getting angry can give you the window you need to calm down before you respond. And a calmer state makes you more clear, so you can be more reasonable. Better self-awareness gives you more emotional self-control.
Take the bigger view, beyond this particular moment. Remember everyone has the potential to improve. If you simply dismiss a person as faulty because they screwed up, you destroy a chance for them to learn and grow more effective.
Empathize. Try to see the situation from your employee’s perspective. You might see reasons he or she acted as they did – things you would not notice if you just had your knee-jerk reaction. This allows you to nod to their viewpoint, even as you offer your own alternative.
Additional Leadership Development Resources

 

 

 

 

 

Leadership: A Master Class Training Guide offers more than nine hours of research findings, case studies and valuable industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, leadership development, organizational research, workplace psychology, innovation, negotiation and senior hiring.

An extensive, detailed training guide was created around the video content for human resources professionals, senior managers and executive coaches. Each module offers individual and group exercises, self-assessments, discussion guides, review of major points, and key actionable takeaway plans. The materials allow for instructor-led or self-study opportunities.

What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters

Resonant Leadership: Inspiring Others Through Emotional Intelligence

The HR and EI Collection

 

Daniel Goleman: The Trick to Attracting New Talent

A Force for Good print/ebook and audiobook will be available June 23, 2015. Sign up here to learn more about the Join a Force for Good initiative. Register for Dr. Goleman's talk about A Force for Good on June 25 in Washington DC here.

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Emily is the kind of high-potential new hire so many companies want: a smart and personable newly minted MBA from a top school. High IQ. High EQ.

What kind of job would she like, ideally?

“I’d like to work in sustainability at a major corporation,” she told me.

Doing Good While Doing Well

Like so many of her generation, Emily is looking for a job with meaning, one that resonates with her values. In addition to her impressive degrees, she’s already proven her leadership talents by running a successful project in Africa focused on women’s health.

As companies are grappling with the question of how to attract and energize Millennials –– on whom the future of their business will depend – here’s a tip: do some good.

There are endless ways to mix business and making the world a better place, and none of them need hamper the business side. Any of them will make a workplace more appealing to this new generation of talent.

The Greyston Bakery in the Bronx does a high-volume business shipping its brownies up to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory in Vermont, where they get mixed into the popular Chocolate Fudge Brownie flavor.

But the Greyston Bakery was not founded as solely a profit-making business (though its doing just fine in that regard); the Bakery’s mission was to train and house homeless people, those just out of prison, and others on the economic fringes, giving them a sound way to make a living.

As I was writing my book A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for Our World, the Greyston Bakery came up when I told him about ways companies are finding to do good, not just well. The Greyston Bakery, which he applauded, is a “B Corporation,” a company whose founding mission is to both make a profit and fulfill a social or environmental goal.

But there's no need for a company to go the full “B” route. I also told the Dalai Lama about Salesforce, the cloud computing-based client services specialist. Hugely successful, it’s founding CEO Marc Benioff promotes what he calls the “1-1-1 model,” where a company (including his own) gives one percent of product, one percent of people’s time, and one percent of profit to worthy causes.

Raise the Bar

Then there’s the appeal of fairness. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Facebook is pushing its vendors to up pay and benefits for their workers – for instance, paying a minimum of $15 an hour.

In addition Facebook wants to see its major contractors give their own employees perks like at least 15 days each year for vacation, holidays and sick leave. Those costs may well be passed on to Facebook. But as their CEO said, “We think it’s an expense worth bearing.”

Build a Better Tomorrow

The environmental card carries great weight for a generation that knows it will face increasing planetary crises. Manufacturers from Nike to Owens Corning are looking into the environmental impacts and people practices of companies in their vast supply chains, getting them to lessen negative impacts and improve their treatment of the people who work for them.

One interesting way companies are going this route is in cooperation with the Harvard School of Public Health’s SHINE program, which offers a hard metric for impacts both environmental and social – and gives a company a hard measure for the increasing good it does.

Additional Resources

Good Work: Aligning Skills and Values

A Force For Good (available June 23, 2015) - print and audiobook

What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters

Talent Strategy

Daniel Goleman: What's Your Organization's Handprint?

A Force for Good print/ebook and audiobook will be available June 23, 2015. Sign up here to learn more about the Join a Force for Good initiative. Register for Dr. Goleman's talk about A Force for Good on June 25 in Washington DC here.

View the SlideShare presentation for this article here.

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The VP of a worldwide coffee company was telling me about all the good changes they have made throughout their supply chain and manufacturing practices.          

There was only one thing that made the company’s sustainability practices look bad in the public eye: the little cups in which their machines brewed the coffee are made of plastic – a plastic that can’t be recycled. And they sold 10 billion of these cups a year.      

Still, there where many positives. The company:

sourced only fair trade coffee,
was shrinking their water consumption,
dropped suppliers who treated workers poorly,
and used lots of solar power.

And, he added, their R&D team was working on finding a new material that, ideally, could handle both the high temperature of brewing coffee and yet be easily recycled or biodegradable .          

But that upgrade was three years off at best.          

Even so, I told him, his company overall had a positive story to tell about becoming more sustainable, and a high likelihood that arc would continue into the future.

Footprint versus Handprint

It comes down to the difference between an ecological footprint and a handprint.

Your carbon footprint – and your organization’s – gives the metric for all the ways you add to greenhouse gases. It’s not a pretty picture for anyone, let alone a large company. An ecological footprint expands beyond carbon to assess your entire supply chain to include other greenhouse gases, emissions of particulates, and a host of other impacts. The methodology for this is life cycle analysis.         

Your handprint, on the other hand, starts with your footprint as a baseline, but then focuses on all the ways you are lowering that number. As your handprint grows your footprint shrinks.

The handprint gives you a positive value, not a negative. This is motivation to find ways to make it bigger. And it’s a positive story to tell the world.         

The handprint concept comes from Gregory Norris, who teaches how to compute such sustainability measures at the Harvard School of Public Health. He’s part of their Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise, or SHINE. SHINE helps companies accelerate along these lines – and develop their handprint as they go.

A while back I heard Norris explain the handprint concept to the Dalai Lama at a meeting on Ethics, Interdependence and the Environment. The Dalai Lama seemed fascinated.

And more recently while interviewing him for my new book, A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for Our World, he saw such transparency as one of the remedies that can help us counter the ways human activity degrades the global systems that support life on the planet.

The Dalai Lama told me he urgently wants to reach Millennials, whom he calls “the people of the 21st century.” Today’s young people, along with future generations yet to come, will face more and more environmental crises, and so will be far more motivated than today’s decision-makers to value sustainable practices – and the companies who adopt them.

And understanding their handprint can help any company start telling that story now.

Additional Resources

Leading the Necessary Revolution: Building Alignment in Your Business for Sustainability

Leading the Necessary Revolution and The Radical Horizon

Ecological Awareness

Ecological Intelligence

Daniel Goleman: The Real Reasons Happiness Has Nothing to Do With Money

To break a long journey by car, the Dalai Lama had been invited for lunch by a wealthy family. Using their bathroom, he noticed that the medicine cabinet over the sink was open.

He couldn’t help but notice the cabinet was full of pain killers, sleeping pills and tranquilizers.

The Dalai Lama told me this tale when I interviewed him for my new book A Force for Good: The Dalai Lama’s Vision for our World, adding,

“Many people feel money is the source of a happy life. Money is necessary, useful—but more and more money does not bring happiness.”

[A Force for Good print/ebook and audiobook for will be available June 23, 2015. Sign up here to learn more about the Join a Force for Good initiative. Register for my talk about A Force for Good on June 25 in Arlington, VA here.]

Indeed, if people have enough income to handle life’s necessities (about $70,000 per year for the average family), studies find that additional money accounts for about one percent of their life satisfaction.

So what makes the difference when it comes to our feelings of well-being? Some definitive answers come from the work of Richard Davidson and his group at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds, located at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. When I visited there recently he recapped research he had done for the United Nations’ annual report on happiness.

Based on new data revealing the interplay between the brain’s prefrontal areas, which manage our emotions, and the mid-brain areas like the amygdala that generate feelings like anger and anxiety, Davidson found these robust bases for the kind of happiness in life that has nothing to do with wealth:

Recovering quickly from upsets. Some of us hold on to worries and ruminate about what’s upsetting us for hours or days. Others can get over what’s upsetting quickly and so pay attention to what’s next. That quick recovery helps us get back into a good mood even when life proves distressing.
Staying positive. The more negative our general outlook, the more things will bother us. Those of us who have a sunny outlook tend to get upset or down about fewer events in our life.
Empathy and altruism. Being preoccupied by our own concerns puts our focus squarely on ourselves. But if we can attune to those around us, we will sense when they need help. And if we help them out, our brain rewards us with a jolt to the feel—good circuitry.
Focus. A mind that wanders or stays stuck to our worries tends to make us feel down. A mind that lets go of those concerns and pays attention to what’s going on in the here and now frees us from those negative moods.

The good news: these brain-based keys to well-being can be strengthened. One direct route lies in practicing mindfulness and a compassionate attitude. As Davidson says, well-being is a skill we all can get better at.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Additional reading:

Wise Leaders Focus on the Greater Good

What the Dalai Lama Taught Me About Emotional Intelligence

More Companies Can Do Well While Doing Good

Research: The Key Ingredient to Genuine Happiness