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July/August 2014 21 successful," he says. "And as soon as they are more successful, then they will feel happier. Turns out, that formula is broken and backwards. …If you raise your success rates for the rest of your life, your happiness levels flat line. But if you flip around the formula, if you deepen your connections with people, raise your optimism and change the way you view stress…success rates improve phenomenally." The question is how do you create optimism in a pressure cooker? In the article below, Achor delves into the details. Positive Intelligence By Shawn Achor In July 2010 Burt's Bees, a personal-care products company, was undergoing enormous change as it began a global expan- sion into 19 new countries. In this kind of high-pressure situation, many leaders pester their deputies with frequent meetings or flood their in-boxes with urgent demands. In doing so, managers jack up everyone's anxiety level, which activates the portion of the brain that processes threats—the amygdala—and steals resources from the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for effec- tive problem solving. Burt's Bees's then-CEO, John Replogle, took a different tack. Each day he'd send out an e-mail praising a team member for work related to the global rollout. He'd interrupt his own presentations on the launch to remind his managers to talk with their teams about the com- pany's values. He asked me to facilitate a three-hour session with employees on happiness in the midst of the expansion effort. As one member of the senior team told me a year later, Replogle's emphasis on fostering positive leadership kept his managers engaged and cohesive as they successfully made the transition to a global company. That outcome shouldn't surprise us. Research shows that when people work with a positive mindset, performance on nearly every level—productivity, creativity, engagement— improves. Yet happiness is perhaps the most misunderstood driver of performance. For one, most people believe that success precedes happiness. "Once I get a promotion, I'll be happy," they think. Or, "Once I hit my sales target, I'll feel great." But because success is a moving target—as soon as you hit your target, you raise it again—the happiness that results from success is fleeting. In fact, it works the other way around: People who cultivate a positive mindset perform better in the face of challenge. I call this the "happiness advantage." Every business outcome shows improvement when the brain is positive. I've observed this effect in my role as a researcher and lecturer in 48 coun- tries on the connection between employee happiness and success. And I'm not alone: In a meta-analysis of 225 academ- ic studies, researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener found strong evidence of directional causality between life satisfaction and successful business outcomes. Another common misconception is that our genetics, our environment, or a combination of the two determines how happy we are. To be sure, both factors have an impact. But one's general sense of well-being is surprisingly malleable. The habits you cultivate, the way you interact with coworkers, how you think about stress—all these can be managed to increase your happiness and your chances of success. Develop New Habits Training your brain to be posi- tive is not so different from train- ing your muscles at the gym. Recent research on neuroplas- ticity—the ability of the brain to change even in adulthood— Convention Chair Jack Lewis (left) and his daughter Sallie, a roundtable leader, enjoy a moment in the sun. Jack and Assistant Chair Paul Parr did a fabulous job putting together a great meeting.