Joy Space in the Workplace

Every employee has a joy space! How can managers maximize each team members’ value to the organization? Chief Management Consultant at What Works Consultants, Diane Dye Hansen, explains that the key is to design your project teams based on desire first, then capability.?

Beyond skill set and experience, building a successful work team requires one additional ingredient which I call joy space.?

It’s really important to have an employee living in their brilliance because when you do, you are able to maximize the value that each employee can bring to the organization. When your team is constantly working in their designated joy space, the work gives them energy, versus robbing them of energy, which is what happens when someone does not like what they are working on.?

Design by Desire

I learned this lesson when I created an organizational chart for What Works Consultants. We really take our own medicine at this firm! As I recommend to our clients, we utilize a? Predictive Index assessment as a discovery tool to hire and design the firm’s workforce. The PI test relies on honest and personal insight in order to measure abstract intelligence. Based on the personality characteristics, a team member is assigned a reference profile. Our firm uses the following areas 1) Teamwork & Employee Experience 2) Innovation & Agility 3) Process & Precision and 4) Results & Discipline.?

I am a strong believer in team discovery. Based on the PI designation, I can determine who will be successful in our divisions: communication strategy, operations strategy, research and client insights, and talent optimization. Essentially, I design by one’s capability AND joy space.

Why assess both capability and joy space?

Resumes and references only tell part of the story. Just as we approach our contracts from a research perspective, at What Works Consultants we leverage behavioral research to determine what clients, projects, and tasks will bring the best out of our people. We bring in new team members based on team fit, skillset, and joy space to assure we have the right people in the right seats to make a difference for our clients.

How does determining joy space help with team management?

When you look into our consulting team, some of our employees live very squarely in the world of teamwork & employee experience. What this tells me is that these individuals need to collaborate with at least one other person. Consequently, I am not going to place one of these collaborators in a solo process & precision project. This employee will flounder. It doesn't make sense to set people up to flounder. It costs a company money and time to set up a human resource for underutilization like this.?

Set Employees Up for Success or Life’s a Beach Ball

When you think of employee success, think about a beach ball. If you hold onto a beach ball, especially a big one, you have that place closest to your heart. The subsequent spaces that you cannot reach are like the spaces in your job that exhaust you. Those are the tasks that take longer to complete because you feel uncomfortable or insecure. It’s not that you cannot do it. It is just a struggle, and the more that you stretch around that ball and the bigger the ball is, the more difficult it is to carry. Undoubtedly, the space closest to your heart is pretty secure. That’s how you know your Joy Space. I am not going to throw an employee who measures high teamwork and employee experience into a spot where they are responsible for the results and discipline of the team. That is the opposite side of the beach ball.?

Make sure to assign at least one individual who is results driven, as they will champion the project while the others can work in their brilliance. Remember, capability does not necessarily mean desire. Projects can often get bogged down or lose focus when teams are thrown together without character alignment.?

Essentially, when you make an effort to design your team with intention, that’s where the magic happens. Joy space, desire and contribution - that’s the key to an engaged and productive workgroup.

Want to learn how to optimize your team to bring them into their joy space, saving your company, time, money, and lost energy? See if you qualify for a free team optimization session.

ABOUT DIANE DYE HANSEN

As the Chief Management Consultant of What Works Consultants, Diane utilizes research, internal communication strategy, process development, and talent optimization to reshape companies and position them for reorganization, expansion, growth, succession, and (if desired) sale. She has helped hundreds of Owner/Operators and C-Level leaders do the inner and outer work necessary to be successful. What Works Consultants is the only firm that utilizes change management methodology to restructure processes, realign communications, and optimize teams toward the achievement of business initiatives. The firm specializes in utilizing challenging situations to create innovation in service-focused companies, enabling them to diagnose and fix internal problems to increase revenue.

Diane has a Masters in Communication Management from the University of Southern California where she graduated as an inductee of Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society and a Bachelor of Business Administration from Cal State San Bernardino. She has a High-Performance Masters from the High-Performance Institute, is a Certified Problem and Change Manager, a Certified Customer Success Management Consultant, and a Predictive Index Certified Talent Optimization Consultant.??