Episode 148: Eudaimonia as the Blueprint for Creating Flourishing Workplaces with Andrew Soren

Ashish Kothari:

Andrew, it is so lovely to have you on our Happiness Squad podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Andrew Soren:

Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Ashish.

Ashish Kothari:

So, Andrew, I've been looking forward to this conversation. I love the name of your company, Eudaimonic By Design. For our listeners who might not know what Eudaimonia is—many people know what happiness is, what wellbeing is, what flourishing is, and the opposite terms of those. But not many people know what Eudaimonia is, unless they are lovers of Greek philosophy.

Andrew Soren:

 That is correct.

Ashish Kothari:

So why don't we start with describing for our listeners what Eudaimonia is?

Andrew Soren:

Yeah, absolutely. Bonus points, by the way, for figuring out how to say it. Eudaimonia is one of those words that, when I first found it, my mind was blown. I thought, “Wow, there's a word to describe this.” It’s such a beautiful word that I named my company after it.

Eudaimonia is an ancient Greek word. The etymology is where we can start: Eu means “good” in ancient Greek, and daimon is like a spirit, a soul that lives within all of us. So this idea that there is a good spirit, a good soul within each of us just waiting to be potentiated—that’s what Aristotle might have said Eudaimonia is all about.

When they were talking about it, they were really asking: what’s a good life? What constitutes a good life? Eudaimonia was one way of framing it, while another was Hedonia. Hedonia is about pleasure, so a good life was one focused on maximizing pleasure. Eudaimonia, on the other hand, is about purpose, growth, and potentiation. It’s the idea that a life well lived is one where, every day, you wake up and try to bring the very best of yourself, to reach your full potential.

If you did that with deliberate practice day in and day out, that would be a much better life than someone who just tried to have as much sex, drugs, and rock and roll as possible. That was the debate. Aristotle argued that a eudaimonic life is the best possible life we can lead. It’s hard, frustrating at times, and you’ll fail more often than you succeed. But if you try every single day, chances are you’ll feel like it was worth the effort. That’s what Eudaimonia is.

Ashish Kothari:

I was a partner at McKinsey, I had a loving family, my health was great, my relationships were great, I was living in Boulder. My career was peaking, my clients loved me. Everything was amazing, and yet I was waking up with anxiety.

I went looking for answers in psychology, spirituality, neuroscience, philosophy, and religious studies. I was continuously learning to be a coach. That’s when I found the works of the Stoics, and this notion of living a virtuous life shows up. But it shows up much earlier too.

Think about Buddha’s teachings: life has suffering, and the eightfold path is about how you live a life. It’s a path, not a destination. It’s a path that can lead to being a Buddha, to liberation. Everybody has that in them. It’s not easy, it doesn’t mean suffering disappears.

In fact, it often shows up in the “road less trodden” as Robert Frost described. But it is a path that can bring longstanding peace, contentment, and joy in our lives.

Andrew Soren:

Absolutely. These are such ancient wisdoms. It’s amazing when we look across cultures. You mentioned Buddhism—yes, a hundred percent. There’s so much alignment between what Aristotle said and Buddhist perspectives, or even Confucianism. Confucianism and Aristotelian philosophy are very similar, with many parallels.

If we look at indigenous cultures around the world—I'm based in Turtle Island in Canada—there are so many indigenous wisdoms fundamentally grounded in a sense of virtue. The idea is that a life well lived is a virtuous life, where we constantly think about more than just ourselves and our relationship with the world around us. That is fundamental to what Eudaimonia is all about.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. You know, I’m curious to get your take on it.

You chair the International Psychology Association. You hold so many conferences. You’re deeply steeped in this field. You’re one of the teachers in the MAP program in positive psychology at Penn. I’ve thought about this question: we’ve known about these truths for thousands of years.

It’s amazing that we’ve known, and yet today we are as far away from practice in our day-to-day lives as we’ve ever been. We have all this technology. We have more knowledge than ever. And yet we are starved for practice. We are drowning in knowledge, but starved for practice.

Andrew Soren:

 Hmm.

Ashish Kothari:

And I was thinking about why that is. My hypothesis, as I was looking across different fields, is that when we go back in time, we lived in nature. There was not this notion of man and nature. We were nature. Nature has rhythm, a way of life.

Buddha didn’t discover Buddhahood sitting in a palace surrounded by maidens and food. It was under a tree. It was under a tree.

As we’ve moved further and further away, and consciously tried to put more pleasure into life—and more importantly, eliminate all kinds of suffering, diseases, scarcity of food—we’ve caged ourselves more and more. Today, I can go to a grocery store and get food. I can order from my phone. As we’ve eliminated suffering and inconveniences, we’ve separated ourselves from nature.

We are falling prey to our brain rather than our heart and spirit. And the brain just wants sex, drugs, food, and rock and roll—pleasure and procreation. But that is not a life of meaning. It brings short-term pleasure.

Today, we’ve extended our lives, but created so much suffering in people who are living longer with chronic ailments. So my perspective is that one of the sources behind the rise of suffering and unhappiness in the world is our increasing alienation from nature and our imprisonment in digital and mental worlds.

Andrew Soren:

I wish I had an answer to that question. But let’s stay with philosophy for a second. One of the things you just articulated—and this is the foundation of Buddhism as far as I understand—is the idea that suffering is all around us.

Life is suffering, literally from the moment we are born. There is suffering all around us. In many ways, the question of Buddhism is: how do you suffer well? And I think that’s the question of many ancient religions. It’s the question of a lot of philosophy. Perhaps the mistake we’ve made is to think that we shouldn’t be suffering at all.

That’s the failure of our society. What happens when a society focuses so much on hedonism, on pleasure, on maximizing pleasure and reducing pain? We ignore the fact that a fundamental part of being human is that there will be pain. We have to find meaning in that pain. We have to find relationships in that pain. We have to find growth in that pain.

Otherwise, the pain is unbearable. But at the same time, the pain is inevitable. We are born on this earth to die. If we don’t appreciate that at some level, if we don’t make the best of our time while we have it, we’re missing the point.

I think it’s a failure of predominantly Western societies, capitalist models, and enlightenment thinking that have caused us to veer away from some of those foundations, which were so core to almost what all ancient religions and philosophies were about.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the most common questions I get when I talk about Happiness Squad, the company I founded, is: “Oh, so does this mean we are going to be happy forever?” And I say, no. Happiness is not an emotion. That’s not what we’re talking about.

I’ve never quite articulated it this way, but I want to help you suffer well. What I do talk about is helping you be joyful rather than chase joy.

Stop chasing joy and expecting it to be a permanent state, and instead be joyful regardless of what is being served to you today, in this moment, right now.

Andrew Soren:

 Yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

It’s an attitude.

So, my friend, tell me a little bit about IC Design, and the work you do with organizations to design systems and organizations around these principles.

Andrew Soren:

 Mm-hmm.

Ashish Kothari:

And I want to get into the principles as well. But first, just tell me why this matters.

Andrew Soren:

I’ve been focusing on this idea of eudaimonia for a really long time. In different ways, I’ve been thinking about it throughout most of my working career, but specifically for the last 15 years or so. I’ve been really interested in this idea of meaning, purpose, potentiation—eudaimonia. Let’s call it any number of different words.

The first part of that period of time was in relation to the individual. I was a coach. I was working at an individual level with managers, professionals, and helping them think about how they were learning, understanding, and discovering what their sense of meaning and purpose might be. What eudaimonia might look like at an individual level.

The more work I did in that space, especially in organizations, and especially with individuals genuinely trying to lead a eudaimonic life or do eudaimonic work, the clearer it became that there are structural barriers preventing us from doing that kind of good work. Those barriers are very real.

At a fundamental level, it’s about things like: Are we paid a living wage? Do we earn enough money to have time to think about what is meaningful and purposeful in our lives? Do we believe we’ll have a job tomorrow, or is there so much insecurity that we can’t think about anything else? Do I feel like I have freedom—not only freedom from psychological or physical harm, but also freedom to exercise my voice, to speak up, to bring my best self to work? And fundamentally, dignity—do I feel like I’m being treated like a human being, or am I just a widget in my organization?

These are the things the International Labour Organization of the United Nations would call “decent work.” Freedom, equity, security, dignity. They are fundamental enablers of us being able to have a sense of decency in our lives, especially in a work context.

Often, the people doing the most eudaimonic kinds of work are in situations where that level of decency is shockingly low. Think about teachers, nurses, international aid workers, or nonprofit workers in general. In Canada, there was a recent survey called the Changemaker Wellbeing Survey. It found that about 50% of nonprofit workers in Canada do not earn a living wage. They are suffering from food insecurity. One out of two nonprofit workers can’t afford groceries.

That’s heartbreaking. But it’s reality for many who do deeply meaningful work. I’m in Halifax right now, and the university workers are on strike. Universities are pretty good, but if you’re a PhD student or junior faculty member, you’re not earning a living wage. These are big problems. One in three workers around the world do not earn a living wage.

When I think about eudaimonic design, I think about it at two levels. The first is: how do we give people a fighting chance to experience eudaimonia at work? That means creating the conditions for decent work in organizations, making sure organizations think about this in concrete, strategic ways, and understanding both the realities and advantages of creating good jobs.

The second part is: if decent work is the baseline, what else do we need? Decent work alone doesn’t create the conditions for eudaimonia. It’s harder to reach eudaimonia if you don’t have those conditions, but once you do, what’s next?

I like to use the metaphor of a boat. Decent work conditions are like the hull of the boat. If the hull is filled with holes, you’re just bailing water the entire time. But just having a hull doesn’t get you anywhere. You need sails, a mast, a crew working together effectively, and a destination. All of those are part of eudaimonic design within organizations.

It’s about creating the conditions for momentum—taking the idea of eudaimonia and giving it a platform to power the organization. That comes down to systems and policies, leadership behaviors, and the kind of culture an organization needs to give people the power to take their eudaimonia and go somewhere with it.

Ashish Kothari:

I love that analogy of the hull and the other elements of a boat. If you have a leaky hull, you’re not going far. My wife once tried to take me into the middle of the ocean in a boat with a leaky hull. That’s for another conversation. I got off it. I didn’t get in, and she didn’t either once she realized the hole wasn’t plugged.

But today, Andrew, most organizations have leaky hulls. Forget leaky hulls—they probably have more holes than hulls. And they’re filled with people trying to get somewhere. You just shared some of the stats: nonprofits, for-profits, blue-collar workers, people in manufacturing, restaurants, and other sectors.

They’re struggling. There is so much struggle. Organizations today are not eudaimonic—not by a far stretch. How do you convince an organization, beyond appealing to their heart and saying, “This is the right and decent thing to do,” to actually take action?

Andrew Soren:

 I think there are three ways of potentially framing that argument. And I’m going to take a page from Zeynep Ton, a professor at MIT who runs the Good Jobs Institute. Her book, The Case for Good Jobs, is a must-read for anybody interested in this topic.

She would say there are three major reasons why someone in a boardroom should be thinking about building the conditions for decent work first in their organization.

The first is productivity. You will be operationally more effective if the workers who are working for you are able to focus on the work they’re doing, feel like they’re being paid enough money that they can afford to eat, and are not worried about the security of their kids. They’ll be more present. They’ll take less sick leave. They’ll be more effective on the job if you focus on those things. So her first answer would be productivity: if you want the most productive workers, you want those decent-work things to be true. You want to allow them to be innovative, present, engaged, and effective.

The second is competitive. You can take this from different lenses. From a talent perspective, if you want the best talent, you want to make sure you’re hiring people who want to work for your organization.

People who will want to work for your organization are more likely to think they’ll have wellbeing there. In a fierce talent market, you want to compete for the best talent, and therefore you want conditions that allow people to experience wellbeing in your organization.

From a market perspective, you might have buyers and markets—the whole B Corp movement is based on this, and a lot of conscious capitalism is based on this. There’s a world of people who want to buy products and services with an environmental, social, and governance lens, and the social part is really important.

Organizations that foster wellbeing—of people and the planet—are probably, in the long run, good, sustainable bets.

The third—and I’ll stop here, and quite frankly I think this is more important—is the moral argument. We’re talking about one in three people in the world who don’t feel like they’re earning enough money to buy groceries, take care of their kids, to live in a good way.

These are moral arguments about what we’re trying to do here. What is the purpose of business? What is the purpose of society? Shouldn’t the organizations we create be morally situated to improve everybody’s lives? Isn’t that what we would ideally want in the kind of world we live in and the kind of place we work?

Very few people focus on the moral argument. People tend to focus on the competitive or productivity or performance lens. There are good reasons—there is a business case—but it feels very un-eudaimonic to focus on the business case and leave the virtuous part of this equation up for grabs.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. With three other folks, we started the Conscious Capitalism chapter for Colorado. I was there two days ago with Timothy, who is now the Chief Enablement Officer for the movement internationally. He just took the reins not that long ago.

We were talking about the arguments around productivity and performance—both from flourishing work and wellbeing work, as well as from purpose. Conscious Capitalism is a 20-year-old movement. B Corp is about the same, maybe a little different. The data on the impact—on performance, competitiveness, and productivity—is as clear as the earth is round today.

We’ve done that work, but getting leaders to take the journey from the head to the heart, to actually act on it, versus saying, “Yeah, yeah, all that is great, but I’m going to focus on profits,” is still the challenge. Leaders continue to push the boat through pure muscle and trodding, trying to get where they need to go, while ignoring the moral argument or putting on blinders.

I remember a conversation I had with someone in the human resources department at a company. In the survey we run on flourishing, one of the questions is: I experience financial stress in my life—ranging from rarely to most of the time. He said, “I don’t want to ask that question.” They had a lot of attrition. I asked, “Why don’t you want to ask that question?” He said, “I know the answer.”

I said, “Do you know the answer?” She said, “No, but I just know.” I asked, “Then why don’t you want to ask the question?” He said, “Because I don’t care, and I don’t want to move on it.” I thought, that’s crazy. If people are showing up worried about how to put food on the table—in a manufacturing setting—are they giving you their best work? Are you getting the fullness of the person? Why wouldn’t you want to address that?

That was the situation. It was an interesting discussion. But I am with you—the moral argument is an important argument.

In addition, I gave a TED Talk four weeks ago. I ended the talk by saying: flourishing is not a benefit, not a perk. It is the point. Businesses exist to elevate humanity, to serve humanity, to create more value. Pursuing profits at the cost of the people contributing to them seems like the biggest failure of the system. The system is not working. We need to change the system.

Andrew Soren:

Let’s go back to the first part of this conversation when we were talking about Eudaimonia, Aristotle, and ancient Greece. Aristotle wrote about Eudaimonia in two major places: in his work on ethics and in his work on politics.

In ethics, he defined it as virtuous activity moderated by the soul. It’s about what I need to do to live a good life. What does that mean?

But when he wrote about Eudaimonia in the context of the polis—the ancient Greek word for social society—the whole idea was that the purpose of society is to create the maximum amount of possibility for Eudaimonia at the individual level. The purpose of politics, the purpose of a society, is to create as much Eudaimonia as possible for its citizens.

Now, let’s put aside the fact that in Aristotle’s world, citizens did not include slaves, women, or children. But the fact remains: we’ve lost sight of that. So much of our emphasis has become about personal growth, about me. How much money can we make? What is the economic potential? How do we maximize shareholder investment?

How do we focus on the benefits of that one individual as opposed to, how do we create the conditions where all of us can experience flourishing, wellbeing, or Eudaimonia? How do we think about that?

Organizations—especially big corporations—are much closer to Aristotle’s idea of the polis than our nation-states are today. It would behoove leaders of those organizations to really think: the reason why I’m here, the business of business, is the wellbeing of those we serve.

This is the fundamental argument of Conscious Capitalism. It’s the difference between Milton Friedman’s shareholder capitalism model and stakeholder capitalism. Friedman argued “the business of business is business.” But the business of business should be the betterment of humanity in the world. If we do that well, we should also be able to do well financially. That’s the triple bottom line. That should be the way. We should have more “shoulds,” let’s put it that way.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. I do see that. Too much focus on self at the cost of intervening for the other. The more we focus on self, the more we lose the other—and then we don’t care about the other as much. Whether that “other” is someone who looks different, or anyone outside my family, you can decide how small of a circle you want to create around it.

Andrew Soren:

 Mm-hmm.

Ashish Kothari:

And I think we’ve also lost the forest for the trees. The reality of human life is you are born with nothing, and you go with nothing. Yet most of life is spent accumulating power, titles, money, and things we can’t take anywhere—at the cost of so much else. The only way to live forward is in the hearts of other people.

We’ve lost the forest for the trees. Timothy put it beautifully: we need oxygen to live, but we don’t live to breathe oxygen. Businesses need profits to thrive, but profit is not the reason businesses exist. Businesses exist to provide value to others in exchange for money.

If we orient around value—and how we create that value through our people—there is a different story of what’s possible.

So Andrew, as I said, many companies are not eudaimonic by design. What are some companies you hold up as worth studying—companies that are eudaimonic by design? What comes to mind for you?

Andrew Soren:

I honestly can’t give you the company that I think is doing this well because I’m not sure that’s even the way I like to think about it. This is a journey we can all be on. Tell me who a eudaimonic individual is, and I’m not sure I can.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. Who are on the journey, who at least think about these principles, living them?

Andrew Soren:

I think we can look at places like B Corp and Conscious Capitalism and see lots of examples of organizations that are trying. By no means does a B Corp certification mean you’re actually a truly eudaimonic organization. There’s a lot of greenwashing out there. Nonetheless, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

There are a lot of companies—big ones like Patagonia—that are trying to do good and do well at the same time, doing their best to walk the talk. There are giants we’ve seen in the past, like Unilever. And there are tons of smaller ones, at the social enterprise level, trying to make a difference.

I think we have many examples of what good can look like. I spent years working at BMO Financial Group, the Bank of Montreal. Banks are not all great, but I can tell you that BMO did a lot that was rowing in the right direction. There were groups of purpose-driven people who saw banking as fundamentally about enabling people’s dreams, seeing their work as creating eudaimonic conditions for others.

All of which is to say: our job in this context is to look for positive deviance wherever we are. We can all think of businesses, individuals, or even single leaders we’ve encountered who do whatever they can to help the growth of those around them, who stand up for the little guy, who try to act with virtue in every way they can.

Finding those examples is more effective than only shining the spotlight on Patagonia or Paul Polman. We need the big examples of giant organizations, yes, but we also need the local ones. I think those are the ones that build self-efficacy—the belief that I can do this. I want to find an organization in my community trying to do this, get inspired by them, and think, “If they can do it, I can too,” rather than saying, “I could never be Patagonia.”

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. I think that’s such a beautiful way to put it. Just like humans can be on the eudaimonic path—walking a path of virtue—we will not always succeed, but we can pick ourselves up and continue. Leaders and companies are invited to walk that virtuous path, a path that provides meaning, freedom, equity, security, and dignity.

I love that aspiration: think about those principles. You might not always get it right, and you might not be in a position to act right now, but don’t lose sight of it. Don’t lose sight of it.

Andrew Soren:

 Absolutely. Yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

That’s beautiful. Tell me a little bit about the process. I know there is no playbook per se. Everybody wants silver bullets and playbooks: “Tell me, Andrew, five ways I can go do it.” I know they don’t exist. But what is a process or an approach if a leader says, “I’m up for that challenge. How do I go about it?” What’s the process they can take?

Andrew Soren:

I’ll give you an answer at the leadership level and one at the organizational systems level, because there aren’t silver bullets. You’re right. But there’s a lot of research about what does work.

For example, if you’re a manager of people, you can show care. That goes a long way. You can make someone feel like they matter, help them know they are valued and valuable. You can foster growth—give someone an opportunity to learn. You can create a psychologically safe space where they know you’ve got their back, and they can say what they need to say. You can show up with values and exercise wisdom.

None of these are magic. They’re things you can do in daily life, and they make an outsized difference in the lives of everyone you work with. They’re fundamentally human traits. That’s what it means to be eudaimonic. You’re just trying to be a good human being with your direct reports.

At the organizational level, we also have good models. I’m a fan of Vivek Murthy, the former Surgeon General of the United States. His model of wellbeing and mental health in the workplace was terrific. The American Psychological Association has similar models. They basically say: if you want to create more conditions for eudaimonia in your workplace, there are some bare-bones things you can do.

Number one: give people a chance to participate in how decisions get made. That’s massive, and it often doesn’t happen. Create structures that give people voice and choice. Think about psychosocial health. Structure recognition programs so people know they matter, that they are valued and valuable. Build growth and development into the talent lifecycle. Ensure strong communication practices.

These foundational things make a huge difference. It’s “ordinary magic.” If you actually do them, they make a huge difference.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, we’re so in sync, Andrew. One of the pillars I offered in my talk was: measure what matters. If you care about it, measure it. And genuinely measure it.

Once-a-year engagement surveys are not measuring anything—they’re just checking a box. Measuring means that at every level—team, function, business unit—you track flourishing. You measure performance, sales, outcomes, and alongside those, you measure the state of flourishing. Measure the state of eudaimonia.

Even if you don’t take action, seeing the state might move people to act. We are compassionate by nature.

I also love your invitation to leaders. You said managers and leaders, but really, everybody is a leader. Everybody can choose to be a leader.

Like you, I’m blessed to be part of the Center for Positive Organization Scholarship. That’s how I first discovered your name, with Jane, who is a huge mentor of mine, and Kim’s work.

In organizations, there’s often a narrative that it’s the individual’s responsibility, while individuals say, “What can I do? That’s leadership. That’s the organization. I don’t have a choice.” But you always have a choice.

You can choose to be a positive energizer, borrowing Kim’s words. You can choose to be a eudaimonic person. Don’t live eudaimonia outside of work—live it in work. That’s where you spend most of your time.

You can choose to show up with care. Monica Worline’s work highlights compassion at work. You can have conversations that infuse meaning in others—Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski’s work. You can create psychological safety—Amy Edmondson’s work. You can create more inclusive workplaces—Stephanie Johnson’s work.

We can all choose these things. We don’t need anyone’s permission. That’s why I love your call to action. There isn’t a silver bullet, but there are research-backed ways. And if you do them, they will help you flourish, help others flourish, and through that, help the organization flourish. Because the link between purpose and profits is through people.

My friend, keeping an eye on time, thank you for the work you’re doing. Thank you for the last 15 years you’ve dedicated to this path. I’m grateful for this conversation, grateful to know you, and I hold in my heart that we get a chance to collaborate on great things together—to help organizations make flourishing the point of why they exist, not a side hustle. Thank you.

Andrew Soren:

Cheers to that. Thank you, Ashish.