Is Your Family Business a Positive Place?

Here is an interesting fact as part of my series on the Happiness Advantage:

#3 of a series – The Happiness Advantage

Marcial Losada is a psychologist and business consultant. After a decade of research on high- and low-performance of teams, he discovered that the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a team successful is 2.9013 to 1. Further, for teams to do their best work, the optimum ratio was 6:1. This means managers and leaders should make six positive statements or interventions for every one negative statement they make. Losada’s research further validates the Happiness Advantage.¹

Happy workers have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales and perform better in leadership positions. Are the leaders and employees in your family business happy? Is it a positive place to work? Check out the first two posts about how happiness effects success in all areas of life, and especially in business.

1. Losada, M. (1999). The complex dynamics of high performance teams. Mathematical and Computer modeling, 30, 179-192; Losada, M., & Heaphy,E. (2004)

One of the proponents of positive psychology is Shawn Achor, author of “The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work“ (ISBN 978-0-307-59154-8). Achor studied with some of the pioneers in the field of positive psychology and served as the head fellow to help design and teach the famed “happiness“ course at Harvard, which became the most popular course in 2006. In Achor’s TED speech, he describes his work using rapid fire delivery, laced with devilish humor. You can view that speech here.

Does Your Family Business Need Help?

Family Business Matters has extensive experience assisting family businesses. With many decades of experience, we understand the wide variety of challenges that families face as they work together to build, grow and sustain a thriving family business generation after generation. Through conferences, continuing education programs, family business retreats, speaking engagements and private family business consulting services, Family Business Matters has assisted more than 450 family-owned businesses around the world chart their way through family business issues of all shapes and sizes.