WSJ Your Money Briefing - What You Can Learn From the ‘Happy Warrior’ in Your Office

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Co-workers who always seem to be in a good mood, even in the face of frustration, often find success by pairing their sunny attitude with fierce ambition. Wall Street Journal columnist Callum Borchers joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss the value hiring managers see in “happy warriors.”  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Half research indicates nine out of ten hiring managers are having difficulty hiring. Robert Half is here to help. Our recruiting professionals utilize our proprietary AI to connect businesses with highly skilled talent. At Robert Half, we know talent. Visit roberthalf.com today. Here's your money briefing for Wednesday, November 6th. I'm JR Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. There are a lot of things at our jobs that frustrate us, that can make us grumpy or maybe

appear to be slacking off. But then there are coworkers who rise above the challenges, always seem to be in a good mood and always on the go. They are the happy warriors. They're trying to signal to coworkers and maybe managers in particular that we have not fallen prey to the negativity and the burnout that is so common

in a lot of workplaces right now. So when you have so many people who are kind of mentally checked out at work, if you're the person who's bringing that happy warrior spirit, that engagement, that persistence, they say look it's a really easy way to stand out. So what does it mean for their career track? We'll talk to Wall Street Journal on the clock columnist, Callum Borschers, after the break. Robert Half research indicates nine out of ten hiring managers are having difficulty

hiring. Robert Half is here to help. Our recruiting professionals utilize our proprietary AI to connect businesses with highly skilled talent. At Robert Half, we know talent. Visit roberthalf.com today. Your coworker who has endless energy and is always smiling might have the inside track to getting ahead. Wall Street Journal columnist Callum Borschers joins me. Callum, in your column, you call these types of workers happy warriors.

Why are they taking on that moniker? Well, they're trying to strike a balance between friendliness and grit. So, okay, we're gonna work really hard, work harder than the rest of our coworkers, but we're gonna keep a smile on our faces while we do it. That's sort of the defining characteristic of these self-described happy warriors of the office.

And what kind of message is that they're trying to send? Well, they're trying to signal to coworkers and maybe managers in particular that we have not fallen prey to the negativity and the burnout that is so common in a lot of workplaces right now. If you look at Gallup's annual survey of employee engagement,

it's near an all time low right now. They find that less than a third of American workers say they are engaged in their jobs. So when you have so many people who are kind of mentally checked out at work, if you're the person who's bringing that happy warrior spirit, that engagement, that persistence, they say, look, it's a really easy way to stand out.

You have to be good at your work too. You have to deliver the goods. But just bringing that attitude is one way that you can really stand out above the rest. And so what benefit do they see in always being upbeat? Some of it just comes down to their own happiness in the job, right? So they say, this helps me stay in a better headspace. I feel like I perform better when I'm not bogged down by feelings of negativity. But there's also an external benefit as well. I'm thinking of a fellow

named Kenneth Eli, who's a civil litigator, an adversarial profession by nature. And he said, being an affable person, I like to think, can help get my client and maybe the opposing council warmed up a little bit to the idea of making a deal. And so there can be a practical reason to take on this happy warrior persona as well. Some of these folks feel like it actually helps them get better results. By the way, where did the term happy warrior come from? It's in the title of a more than 200 year old poem by William Wordsworth, the character of the happy warrior. And it's actually a quite long poem, but there's a certain passage that several people that I spoke with kind of latch onto and it describes a happy

warrior as someone who, if you rise to station of command, rises by open means and there will stand on honorable terms. But what they take away from that is to say, it doesn't mean I'm some kind of pushover, right? Don't mistake me for some happy-go-lucky person who doesn't care. I'm ambitious, right? I want to rise to station of command. I'm just going to do it by playing fairly. There's not going to be all this kind of like sneaky subterfuge behind the scenes. I'm going to do it in the honorable way. Well, you spoke to a woman from Connecticut who works for an AI company and she said, don't confuse her with being her company's chief happiness officer. What's different about how she goes about her workday?

I've actually written about chief happiness officers as well, but they sometimes view themselves as the office cheerleader. And she says, look, that can be an important role too. There's nothing wrong with that, but that's not me. I'm not here to like stage a pep rally every day. I'm bringing intensity to work along with the good vibes. And I think that's the distinction that a lot of these happy warriors really wanted to make.

And basically they said, just look at the term itself. Don't just fixate on the happy part. The warrior half is just as important as the happy part. She also said she has no work-life balance. Is that common and is it healthy? Well, I couldn't tell you for sure whether it's healthy. I'll let the doctors referee the level of stress and work hours that are appropriate.

But a lot of these happy warriors do put in a lot of hours. The folks I talk to, they're working in tech, they're attorneys, they're HR executives. These are not 40-hour week jobs necessarily. They say that their happiness isn't really derived from taking time away from work. In fact, they really enjoy what they do. They can be happy in that. For them, it's more about maintaining a positive attitude. And the way she put it to me was, I'm not going to let a perceived slight mess with my outlook on the job or drag down my own job performance. And she said, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe somebody else is just having a bad day. So I try not to take things too personally. Well, the energy and efficiency is one thing, but how do people like

this avoid burnout? They're feeling about it to avoid the burnout is to look a little bit more inwardly for your satisfaction. If you're bringing what you need to work every day and maintaining your own good attitude, it takes care of some of those problems. But could all the smiling and the constant energy lead co-workers or customers to think that maybe the show of happiness isn't genuine? That there could be some ulterior motive? Yes, it could. The key thing there, they said, you can't force it too much because as you said, JR, you can come across as not genuine if this isn't really your persona. But I think they also would add that you should be transparent that

sometimes there is ulterior motive sounds so negative, but that there is also a purpose to it. A woman named Mary Presti, who I spoke to, who's a vice president at Microsoft and the way she describes it is your vibe attracts your tribe. You got to be likable, you know, to get people to go along with your ideas sometime. And maybe that sounds silly. You can say, Oh, you should just be on the merit. How good are your ideas? But you know, office politics are a real thing. She says there's nothing wrong with acknowledging to other people on your team that like, Hey, we're going to have this happy warrior spirit with the purpose of getting things done. And what about their manager? Could the perpetual smiling mask a potential problem in the office that the boss should know about? The happy warrior spirit isn't about saying there is no problem. It's about maintaining a spirit that

says I can persevere through the problem. So it's not about covering up any issues in the workplace or not really raising problems for your manager to find out. That's not what these happy warriors would advise or what they say that they do. But it's more about saying, and I'm going to get over whatever that issue is, or I'm going to persevere through it and maintaining that outlook in the face of problems,

not ignoring them. That's WSJ columnist, Callum Borschers. And that's it for your Money Briefing. This episode was produced by Zoe Kolkin with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm JR Whalen for the Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening. Balance your trading strategy by adding futures. CME Group helps you manage risk and capture opportunities in all market environments. Capitalize on around-the-clock access to highly liquid global futures and options markets

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