Dan Morrell: Hi, this is Dan Morrell, host of Skydeck.

Justin Pasquariello (MBA 2010), CEO of East Boston Social Centers, spent time in foster care as a child, living in more homes than he can remember, before being adopted at age nine. But he credits a dedicated community of social workers, as well as his birth and adopted families, with helping him eventually flourish.

That gratitude helped spark his career in community service and his deep interest in exploring how humanity can build resilient, thriving societies. One of the throughlines he’s found is community joy and how strengthening the foundations of that experience can help societies sustain and succeed in challenging times.

And in this episode of Skydeck, Justin and I talk about the five pillars of community joy, why shared joy can be more powerful than solo joy, and how these ideas can improve towns, organizations, and companies alike.

READ MORE

DM: When did you start thinking about community joy?

JP: I was in foster care partly because of my birth mother's mental illness and was aware of the struggles that she had experienced. So I think I was really focused on true mental health from a young age. Not in the sense that we often talk about mental health—of it being kind of treating mental illness, but really how do we flourish?

And so thought a lot about the things that matter most for happiness, for joy. My sister had a teen magazine that she left on the counter when I was in high school, and it had 10 things that you can do to boost your happiness. And so that got me interested in the idea of there were things that you could really do that make a difference. So after founding a mentoring program for foster kids, when I came to HBS and the Kennedy School, I was thinking a lot about where is the place where the difference I want to see in the world, the work that I could be good at, and the kind of work I want to do, comes together.

And really thought about happiness and joy and thought about this experience of having founded a mentoring program for foster kids. I talked with other people doing work that was related and doing really good work, but sometimes saying things that didn't show they recognized the potential that youth in care had.

And so I thought about for people like youth in foster care, people experiencing poverty, people facing a variety of other hardship—what do they ultimately want for themselves? What do we want for ourselves? And I think the answer is more than just not poverty or not foster care. It's about being joyful, being thriving.

And also at the time I had really grown to love this community of East Boston. And had had the experience when I was a kid of working at my father's pharmacy. which was this place where people came together across generations, knew each other's families across race and culture, a variety of elements of diversity—that people just really cared about each other.

So I saw the power of community to be a place to create joy-- from that experience growing up, from being in East Boston, and from research that says that the happiness of the friend of your friend can impact your happiness if that person lives within a mile. So this idea that, you know, so often we pursue joy alone, but really, it lives in community.

So, that's kind of conceptually how I came to thinking about community joy, as a way to increase joy for individuals, which was work I wanted to do.

DM: Can you talk about how you define joy, and perhaps how that’s different from happiness, and then those five pillars that you developed that are sort of the foundation for community joy?

JP: Yes, and people define both joy and happiness differently, so I appreciate you asking that. We define joy as sustained emotional well-being, or you could also say “happiness times time.” Not the idea of, walking around constantly smiling at everybody, not kind of a cartoonish idea of it.

Life has emotional ups and downs, but it's having that solid emotional well-being and foundation that carries us through the good times and the tough times. From taking classes in positive psychology, from talking with leaders in the field, from attending conferences related to this work, I identified that there are five things that matter most for joy and well-being.

And I've talked with some researchers, some affiliated with Harvard, who've confirmed these are the right direction to go in, and so, long and strong relationships are perhaps the most important thing for joy and well-being. A sense of purpose, fitness, mindfulness, and the fifth one was fun. I started with that one just because it felt strange to talk about joy and be a hundred percent serious about the whole thing.

I thought fun needed to be in there. It also connects to research about things like laughter and play that really can add joy to our days as well.

DM: If you could walk me through and give me a little bit more detail on those pillars. And, not just, on the definition, but a little bit of what that might look like in practice, too.

JP: Yeah, so long and strong relationships, first I would say, there's, much data that backs this up in terms of impact on happiness, in terms of impact on health and well-being.

Some of that has been conducted at Harvard. Robert Waldinger is the person who's currently overseeing a long-running study that has included people like JFK and others in it over the years where they’ve tracked families across generations and they looked at both Harvard students and people from neighborhoods of Boston and found that the most important factor in a meaningful and healthy life was long and strong relationships.

There is a TED talk that I really enjoy the talks about long life expectancy in a part of Sardinia and talks about the types of relationships that we need to have for this.

So it's a mixture of two: It's those close relationships that we nurture with family and friends ...make a big difference in our lives, if those are good and supportive relationships But it's also the day-to-day people that we interact with.

Just seeing people every day on the street, like I, ride the bus to work, I walk my kids to school, and I interact with a variety of people in that process. And there's the values that you hear in the research around weak ties, but there's also mental health and physical health benefits of just having human interaction on a daily basis.

DM: And then the second one, purpose, of course, that seems pretty personal.

JP: Yes. And I think it's something that we can work on in community as well. There's kind of different domains in the research of happiness. There's the kind of pleasure happiness, and there is purpose happiness as well.

And this is one that in particular may not be linked to every moment being ecstatic. People talk about this with parenting. Some parts of childcare can be boring for parents sometimes. So it's not necessarily that parenting is something where moment by moment you're saying, “I am at my happiest state,” but it is something where you can feel this deep sense of purpose and value.

And plenty of happy moments along the way too, if my kids were listening in to this podcast. But that sense of purpose of contributing to something greater. So I think there's a variety of ways that we can achieve purpose. It can be with family in that way. It can be in community. And I do think in community we have an opportunity to work together around the shared purpose of betterment of community, of building more joyful communities.

DM: And on fitness, of course, this is both mental and physical, I presume.

JP: That's right, yeah. I remember back from my introductory psych class in college, so I'm assuming this data is still correct, although I'm getting a little older now, that in a study where they looked at taking antidepressants or having exercise, they found that six months later, the people who exercised had the greatest improvement in depressive symptoms.

So, I'm not giving medical advice here. Every person's condition is unique, but at a population level, exercise can actually make a bigger difference than antidepressants. That's kind of the reduction of negative mood, but it also boosts positive well-being.

DM: This is what I've been trying to tell my wife for years, that it's very important for me to take Wednesday nights off so I can do my old man pick-up basketball league. It's nice to have some evidence to support that.

JP: Well, just to double down on that, the place where these pillars can come together … so in some research they have found that people who play tennis have some of the greatest life expectancy gains among people with various fitness activities, and one theory is that, when we engage in fitness activities with friends, we get more of a benefit than when we do it alone.

DM: This means the pickleball generation is in good shape then.

JP: Exactly. You got two pillars there. Relationships and fitness.

So mindfulness, again from some of the research, they say that the happiest person in the world is someone who meditates a lot.

You do see real changes in the way that the brain functions with meditation over time. And something I think about with this pillar is, is kind of balancing not wanting to be too prescriptive. Everyone's going to have their own way that they want to find connection and their own kind of spiritual practices.

Taking that little bit of time for reflection is really helpful. And meditation is one area where there's a lot of research to support it.

DM: And fun, is also kind of hard to define, but what does that look like?

JP: We were fortunate with one of the people who we worked with on joy brought more definition around it and really talked about the value of laughter, which has a variety of health and well-being benefits and is something adults don't do enough.

Which maybe we see as parents around our kids that kids can laugh a lot, right? So fun and laughter and play, also. Which again, adults often don't do enough. There's a lot of research about the ways in which play helps us to be more resilient and adaptive. And so integrating that throughout life adds value.

DM: More ammunition for my argument about Wednesday night basketball. Thank you for that. I appreciate that.

JP: Yes, yes. And I would add the arts in, as I'm saying that as well. Which I only feel bad because I don't in any way mean to, to not elevate the arts as much as they should be elevated. But I think they can bring fun and joy to life as well.

DM: How then has this focus on community joy impacted how you think about your work at a strategic level?

JP: Yeah, I think there's kind of two pieces I think about that.

One is what's the difference that we're seeking to make in the world through this work? And then the other is how do we operationalize it? The difference that we're seeking to make is to significantly, measurably increase joy and well-being in the community of East Boston, but in so doing also to demonstrate a model that is relevant far beyond East Boston.

And I think the need has only increased since we started thinking about this work. We see a lot of measurable indications of democracy fraying, increased social isolation, increased loneliness, reduced sense of purpose, particularly among many of our young adults. And so the work that we do related to joy directly responds to those, and there's a real need for models that help people thrive and help communities and societies to thrive.

And that's what we're excited to be working to demonstrate. So how do we go about doing it? We have kind of a three-level theory of change. The first is that to most effectively increase joy in our communities, we need to start with our staff. It's going to be a lot tougher if staff are miserable in the organization for us to go be leaders and bring this out to the community.

And then the second level is through our direct service programs. The final level is work in the community and a collective impact approach. It's using these pillars of joy that we talked about. For the staff, we do an annual staff survey where we ask questions about staff well-being and also looking at these domains of joy.

And we've been able to see progress over the past few years and also great recommendations from staff. So the net promoter score for working at the social centers for the impact of our programs has increased really significantly. I'm proud of the work our team has done on that. And they've given us suggestions about, for example, strengthening connections between people who work in different programs in different locations in the organization.

So we have more events that bring staff together with each other. And we see staff doing things that contribute to joy around the office and they can share those ideas with each other. We have one little group that share an office that work in enrollment and transportation, and they call themselves ACL based on their first names.

They've got merch that they've developed for ACL. They play basketball with each other every Friday. They bring in food for people in the office. So they're doing fitness. They're having fun strengthening relationships, bringing pride. So it's great to see things like that.

DM: I have heard you say that you want to beat Denmark and Finland in your happiness and joyfulness rankings, which I think is a great goal. But I wonder if you've also learned from other cities in how they've approached these sorts of initiatives.

JP: There's a book about the “Blue Zones of Happiness” by Dan Buettner and he looks at San Luis Obispo in the United States as an example. Some of the traits that stand out about San Luis Obispo are the ways in which community members are all engaged in informing community development—that they have as a way to make it a place that invites connection, that invites fitness. So I think they blocked a road that would have really disrupted the downtown feeling and helped to use that as a gathering space for people. When I think about how to increase joy at a community level, I think about those kind of cross-neighborhood design features and then the kind of bottom up of how individuals can be catalysts.

Dan's research there is really informative, looking at how do we bring those design features in that can nudge people toward fitness, toward social interaction, toward having fun with each other in the community and build awareness.

DM: So there's some data outputs. There's some things you can see but I also wonder what you would see in your position on a day-to-day sort of anecdotal level.

JP: The first indicator that comes to mind for me with that … we have an active adults program and a hundred percent of those who participate in that program, in a survey, said that that program helps to overcome social isolation and foster connection.

We're really grateful to be able to increase that connection, and we know many older adults don't have any kind of connection like that. So I think, the first measure of success to your question about anecdotal success that would come to mind for me would be hearing from new older adults who were previously feeling isolated and found our program, found some other way to connect, and were building connections.

DM: Do you think that there's something inherently personal about this work, too? That like, you know that you get joy, personally, from successfully spreading joy in your community?

JP: Yeah, yeah, joy is contagious in the ways that I was mentioning, and I think where our approach as a society fails a lot of the time is that it's so much about the individual pursuit of happiness.

And ironically, the more that we pursue happiness, individually, there's diminishing returns and then negative returns at some point, even as much as you can immerse yourself in the research on what matters most, if you're constantly trying to do that and saying, am I happy? It can make you less happy.

DM: Well, yeah, you've written about this idea that the “happiness industrial complex” is broken, right? And you were sad to find out that you didn't actually coin that phrase. But it's a great phrase. And I wonder if you could talk about that, and why the work that you're doing right now is so important in this moment.

JP: As a culture, we have so much focus on self-improvement, and there is value in that up to a point. But what we've seen over, say, the past 50 years, depending on what data you look at in some ways we've probably reached our peak happiness in the 50s or 60s and by certain measures it's been declining in recent years.

So despite continued investment of billions of dollars in self-improvement at an individual level, collectively we've been moving backwards.

DM: So let's talk about these principles and how we can apply them to other organizations. From the work that you've done, are you confident that this can scale to other organizations, other communities?

JP: Yeah, I think, I think all of us can apply these principles. All of us can ask, how can we do plus one? Like, what are the ways in which our work is already supporting relationships, supporting purpose, mindfulness, fitness? And then, what are the nudges that we could add to continue to move that forward?

And I think can apply in a variety of places—organizations, but also, workplaces, you know, workplaces that cultivate strong relationships among their staff are going to have increased staff retention, increased staff happiness. The more that people feel connected to a sense of purpose in their work, the better they're going to be at their job.

That brings me back to my time here at HBS where I remember doing a case about Men's Wearhouse. And we talked about that many of the employees at Men's Wearhouse had a greater sense of purpose than people doing social justice or non-profit work like the work that I'm leading now. I was just talking about that case with my staff today about the fact that it's not just about doing work with purpose as an organization, but also about making sure that we're reminding our staff and thanking our staff for the ways in which they are advancing a collective purpose.

DM: Why was it that the staff at Men's Warehouse were so inspired?

JP: You are taking me back a few years here … so I may get this slightly wrong, but I think it was just a really strong sense all the way down from the CEO of we are helping to look and feel better about themselves. And it was also a CEO who gave people a second chance as employees.

They put their faith in their employees. They treated their employees well. The organization gave them a sense of meaning and purpose as individuals, also. And then really instilled in them the value of the difference they could make in their customers' lives.

DM: What advice would you give to somebody who's looking to implement some of these ideas into their organization?

JP: I would think for employees there's really a lot of overlap in the approach to that. I do think starting with fostering relationships … and it's been challenging to ask people to come back into the office; people have a variety of needs there, so I wouldn't want to be too prescriptive about that, but I do think many people find that they build stronger relationships and a stronger connection to a place. So kind of once they overcome that hump of not wanting to be back in person, having at least two or three days in the office, I think it makes a big difference for connection. Also, particularly as people started to return to work, a lot of people complained about going into the office just to be on Zoom with people, which doesn't really do much.

So, as an organization, being intentional about giving people an opportunity to connect, like I think about things like having more cross-functional work groups is something that we want to be working on at East Boston Social Centers, like a staff joy group that could have representatives from various departments, having lunches where we present ideas that could be relevant for the work that we do, and bring people together around that.

And I think many organizations probably do that, but it's an area to build on.

Skydeck is the Harvard Business School alumni podcast featuring interviews and insights from across the world of business. It’s produced by the External Relations Department at HBS. Our audio engineer is Craig McDonald.

It is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And if you could take a moment to rate and review us, we’d be grateful.

For more information, or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

Featured Alumni

Justin Pasquariello

MBA 2010

Login to send a message

Post a Comment