As CEO of Menlo Innovations, Sheridan focuses on creating a joyful work environment, emphasizing the importance of joy in fostering innovation. This article delves into the distinction between joy and happiness, strategies for harnessing joy, and the incompatibility of joy with a culture of fear. It serves as guidance for leaders on how to cultivate joy within their teams.
If you had to describe your company’s culture in a single word, what would it be? Are you super flexible and casual? Are you collaborative and inclusive?As CEO of Menlo Innovations, an enterprise software company based in Michigan, Sheridan deliberately focuses on cultivating joy in his company. His 2018 book,, offers guidance for how to create joy at work — and why it’s so important for innovation.
As CEO of Menlo Innovations, an enterprise software company based in Michigan, he deliberately focuses on cultivating joy in his . He wrote a boo k called, and in it, he offers guidance for how to create joy at work, and it’s so important for innovation. Those stories of Menlo Park inspired our guest today. A software engineer for years, Richard Sheridan says his work was as far from joy as he could get. So when he co-founded his own enterprise software company, he named it Menlo Innovations. He wanted his work, and the work of his employees, to be joyful.
And I could already feel my heart sinking in that moment, but I tried to keep my optimistic self. I said, “Absolutely, I’ll talk to Jim, but I also want to get out and talk to customers.” And he looks at me and says, “You’re not getting this, are you?” I said “What do you mean?” He says, “Well, if you keep bugging me to talk to customers, I’ll stick you in customer service.”
We want to be seen as clever. There’s no question about that, but cleverness isn’t near enough. We want people to delight in what we’ve created. We want them to hold it in their hands or touch it with their fingertips or whatever it is that we’re engineering and later have someone who doesn’t know what we know, who uses this thing every day, look at us and say, “I got to tell you, I love this thing that you created. I use it every day. You made my life better because of this.
I learned in the earliest days to walk up to people and say, “Hey Curt, how’s it going? What you’re working on, are you almost done? Are you coming in this weekend?” And I could generate artificial fear and I was taught. That’s what motivates people, but in fact, when we get into that fearful place, we go into fight or flight mode and it shuts down the part of our brain that we really need inside of our organization.
CURT NICKISCH: Before we get to that, I want to ask about how you decided to do that yourself. Because I think a lot of people want to be that type of leader, but there is, you know, especially after you’ve gotten all those promotions, there is a muscle memory to behavior in the workplace.
But I never gave up the dream. I think there were two things at work here. One was an ardent search, you know, just almost like cataloging in my head – positives and negatives, positives and negatives. And that pain – I think literally the place I’m in now was birthed out of the pain of the earlier part of my career that lasted a long time. The joy that I now talk about was elusive. I never got to it, but I so wanted to get to it. I just never gave up, so I kept that search going.
So none of this is easy and none of it is trivial and if you’ve got listeners who are struggling in the same place in their lives, I get it. And six months into the change when everything was working really, really well beyond my wildest expectations, actually. One of my programmers pulled me aside who had been at the company much longer than me and he didn’t understand why I was willing to put everything on the line for this change that he knew I couldn’t have known it would work as well as it had and he asked me – I think he was trying to like get garner some leadership lesson for himself.
CURT NICKISCH: There’s one line in the book that kind of jumped out at me and it said that you know, your inner engineer wants an algorithm to find the right balance of optimism, realism, fear, and hope. It was interesting because you still used realism and fear. Like, you’re in an industry that has ups and downs. You have layoffs, you have projects that don’t come through. It’s a competitive risky venture even though it can go really well when it’s going well.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. When you are being a leader, – I know you’ve stayed away from the term boss, you like the term leader, you strive to be a leader more than than a boss. What things do you do or what things do you catch yourself doing that you wish you hadn’t done to try to be a leader of this type of organization?
The good news is I have people around me who are willing to “speak truth to power” because they’ve been around long enough and they know they’re safe enough to do that, or they’re my wife and she’s not too concerned about it. And so, I do in those moments, try and listen. I think that’s probably another skill that I could definitely use improvement on is just basic listening skills. Spending more time with my mouth closed and my ears open.
RICHARD SHERIDAN: Yeah. I wish we did that well every time, but what I tell the team is when we’re going to fire somebody, I never ever want it to get to the point where that feels easy. That should be one of the weightiest decisions we make. And we’re kind of the opposite of the standard business texts in so many ways. We hire quickly and fire really slowly.
And when I tell them is – because a lot of people look and say, “Well, you’re small. That’s why this works.” And I get that. I mean, that makes complete sense to me that you would draw that kind of conclusion. But then I look at them, and say, “You know, guys, you don’t need to change your entire corporation. You could just change the piece around you.”
RICHARD SHERIDAN: T he first place change needs to occur is in the heart of the leader – I needed to become a different kind of leader first. So my encouragement to your listeners is just simply to the first turn inward. That old saying of “how can I be the change I want to see in the world?” And I think that’s really an important place to start.
And I say: “about what?” And they realize that in that moment I’m asking them to change and they’re not comfortable with it and they shouldn’t be. I mean, if you’re gonna make important change – I think any important change that occurs anywhere in our life is going to start with discomfort. Think of it as like, you know, that workout routine we’re all going to start next January.
JOY INNOVATION LEADERSHIP CULTURE WORKPLACE
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