Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love

by Richard Sheridan

Over the years, I had also read numerous books on organizational design and management principles. That night I reflected on some of those that had influenced me the most, such as Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, Peter Drucker’s Management, Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence, and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends.

As you consider your own aspirations for cultural change, don’t lose sight of how important it is to draw others into the energy and excitement.

In order to get others to accept change, you must recognize that any change involves tearing down existing reward systems, especially if those reward systems unintentionally foster and perpetuate pain-filled systems. If the change is to stick, you must quickly replace the old rewards with new rewards of equal or greater value (and remember, most treasured rewards are not monetary).

Individual heroes are useless to team building. Don’t want ’em. Don’t need ’em. Ever. They don’t add joy.

A company doesn’t exist to serve its own people; a company exists to serve the needs of the people who use its products or services.

We need to study people in their native environment to figure out how to bring them utility and joy.

Fear is one of the biggest killers of joy.

Freedom from fear requires feeling safe. If you feel safe, you run experiments. You stop asking permission. You avoid long, mind-numbing meetings. You create a new kind of culture in which you accept that mistakes are inevitable. You learn that small, fast mistakes are preferable to the big, slow, deadly mistakes you are making today.

If you are the leader, your team watches you. Do you actually mean what you say? The team will continuously look for clues and inconsistencies in your message and your actions. If they find those inconsistencies, you’ll soon witness a rise in fear. It doesn’t take much fear to wipe out that feel safe culture, and suddenly you’re commanding a being safe culture.

Leadership is an art that is born out of skills that must be practiced. Those few of us who do have a title and positional authority must learn to look at every moment, whether difficult or important, as an opportunity to see whether a new leader is ready to step up and exercise his or her leadership skills. Perhaps some are born to lead, but we believe all are capable. In both cases, there must be a willingness and a desire to lead.

We all carry around this age-old mantra in our heads: The customer is always right. No, they’re not. In fact, the customer is seldom right. If the customer was always right, why would they need us?

Rigor and discipline are hard, and it’s always easy to say, “Tomorrow I will do better.” Tomorrow never comes—it is the actions we take today that make all the difference.

I believe we have fooled ourselves as a society into thinking that remote work arrangements are actually more productive and effective, even though we are naturally wired as humans to be in community with one another. There is no better way to be in community than to actually spend time together in the same space.

Trust, accountability, and results: these get you to joy.

We must continually experiment and try new things—and solve the problems we do face.