Here's an interesting question to ponder:
What would your Netflix watchlist and queue reveal about your personality, your priorities, your mood, and your interests? With the Breaking Bad chapter of my Netflix life finally concluded, I recently embarked on a summer documentary binge-watching streak, with the most recent one being Happy, a 2011 film directed by Roko Belic and focused on positive psychology and happiness.
Belic's film features a variety of individuals from around the world (a rickshaw driver in Kolkatta, a Louisiana fisherman, a single-mother family living in a Danish housing cooperative, among others). At one point in the film, Knox College Professor of Psychology Tim Kasser explains how true happiness and life satisfaction is tied most deeply to four intrinsic human goals/desires:
- close community of family and friend relationships
- opportunities for personal growth
- status and personal recognition
- ability to help others and the world at large
These goals seem relatively self-evident and almost obvious, but the film raised lots of questions that I had already begun to ask myself when I started the business school application process: how can you create a genuine staff culture in schools (and an organizational culture in general) that allows for employees to hit all of these four benchmarks of happiness without negatively affecting productivity, efficiency, or the bottom line, whatever that may be (profit margins, standardized test scores, win-loss records, etc.)? Can happiness and an optimal bottom line truly coexist?
As I peruse the first year curriculum at Anderson, I'm looking forward especially to two things:
- taking Organizational Behavior during the Spring Quarter.
- attending Anderson's Management and Organization Speaker Series. There was a really interesting talk last November by Hengchen Dai about the "fresh start effect" on motivation and willpower (if anyone here has ever thought New Year's resolutions to eat better and exercise more are silly and pointless, this is for you!).
Is it possible to systematize and sustain employee happiness and motivation, in our schools and in our businesses? As teachers, my colleagues and I have always focused on improving student and classroom culture- ensuring that our classes provided a safe, focused atmosphere where students could be comfortable making mistakes, collaborating with their classmates, reading difficult literary texts, etc. Yet, we often inevitably overlook our own mental and physical health- our staff culture- as I learned the hard way my first year teaching. So what DOES it take to create a culture of happy?
