Using Joy to Drive Success

An often overlooked or undervalued element in the business world, joy is a powerful differentiator and can be a key driver of success for your company.

Is the design of your business model and your work environment supporting you to experience regular moments of joy? Have you ever been served by someone at a restaurant or store and thought to yourself, “This person must be an owner. They seem to be more vested in my experience and care more about serving me than the average employee.”

Joy is a natural differentiator. When you make the effort to truly connect with people’s humanity, as compared with serving their needs through transactional or operational efficiency, people feel seen. They feel heard. They feel like you care. And they remember how you made them feel and they are likely to want to feel that way again ... so they are inclined to come back for more!

For the purposes of this concept, I define joy as an emotion that rises up from within and brings with it a feeling of peace, fulfillment, confidence and gratitude. At work, a joyful moment might be an acknowledgement from a co-worker for a job well done, a connective conversation over a coffee in a quiet corner of the office, a sincere expression of gratitude from a client, or even a moment of appreciation for your teammates. Joy is experienced in the moments when we feel seen, when our contributions are valued and appreciated by others, and when we have a sense of belonging.

Joy is a source of sustained health, both for you and for your business. It gives you the strength to navigate challenges and the confidence to stretch into bigger goals. Without a few joyful moments in your day, work is more likely to feel very much like work, resulting in disproportionate levels of unproductive emotions like irritation, discouragement, exhaustion, and even depression.

Fortunately, through deliberate design, you can create and foster experiences for yourself and your team that provide moments of joy and, at the very least, diminish the discouraging feelings that come from an “all work and no play” environment.

The way you design your business, your work environment and your offer can not only emphasize the little things that protect, enhance, and replenish your happiness and well-being, but also ensure that you experience them more frequently.

One of the first areas to consider is the personality of your business. When your authentic personality comes through your beliefs, your promises, your brand, your services, and the full-scale experience of your offer inside and out, it's a remarkable differentiator. Why? Because it’s so rare! It’s one thing to have a distinctive brand personality but a whole other thing to fully embody it and incorporate that personality into all the different channels in your services and operations.

Start by defining what brings you joy. What makes you smile? What lights you up? When do you feel grateful, appreciated, valued?

Then identify how you might design your business so that you can more frequently experience the things that bring you joy.

• What’s working that you’d like to continue and do more of?
• What’s not working that you’d like to adjust or eliminate entirely?
• And what’s missing that you’d like to add or do differently?

With those insights, what might be your best first step to bringing more joy into your work experience?

Joy is a very real and valuable component of any successful enterprise. The joy you and your teams express through your work will be experienced by your customers, which will translate into many positive impacts. You’ll stand out from your competitors, you’ll attract customers who appreciate your culture and who you will want to serve, and you will reap the rewards of the connections you build.

To your?Success, Differently!

Michèle is the leading Differentiation Coach in Canada, with expertise in Value Propositions and Competitive Positioning for Professional Services Businesses. She is the 2011 Women of Worth Mompreneur of the Year, the recipient of the inaugural 2013 International Coach Federation Coach Impact Award and has been profiled 2 years in a row in the National 2013 and 2014 Distinctive Women Magazine.