I’m collaborating with a co-founder on a new venture.
It’s been a while since I’ve spent time at this formative stage of a business…thrashing out the basics of ideal customers, their problems and better ways to solve them.
We were grappling a bit with the “why” part of my B3 toolkit – being able to articulate why each of us really wanted to do the hard miles to bring a new business into existence.
That forced me to think about my own “why”. What was it that our new venture was really about?
And the answer came down to the relationship between joy and work.
When I reflected on the moments in my working life when work has felt best, it’s been when there’s real joy in the activity I was doing or what it was leading to.
Joy at work is about feeling genuinely alive, engaged, and fulfilled by the activities you’re doing and the impacts of what you do.
It comes from being able to express your own authentic talents, motivations and creativity in the service of something that you personally find meaningful and motivating.
And joy is much more than just superficial happiness at work.
It’s an internal sense of energising flow and connection with your own intrinsic motivations.
Joy at work means finding a profound alignment between the activity of work itself and your core values. This alignment boosts motivation, productivity and life satisfaction.
I know at this point just a few of you have already concluded that I’m going a bit wu wu. But bear with me, please.
At times leaders, very much including me, become preoccupied with things like KPIs, OKRs, ARR, and EBITDA – dehumanising abbreviations and numbers that can crowd out human perspectives from businesses.
Rarely is there enough attention paid to the very human experiences unfolding within scaling businesses each day. The subjective feelings, mindsets, and personal journeys of employees get overlooked.
Any scaling business is simply an organised collective of individual people collaborating together to achieve a shared goal. It’s not a machine where the individual parts are homogeneous, replaceable and predictable.
Each person brings their own hopes, struggles, motivations, and need to find joy and meaning through their work.
When leaders zero in so intensely on structures, systems and metrics at the expense of the lived individual experiences playing out within, It’s a missed opportunity . Both matter for successful scaling.
As we head into 2025, I invite you to recognise how the success of organisations and the individual experience of work within are intimately connected.
Nurturing joyful experiences at work universally helps engagement, retention, quality of work and a whole load more besides.
I’m really clear. Joy at work is not at odds with scaling success, but the integral catalyst for achieving it.
And with that understanding in mind, what might need to change for you or your business in 2025?
