What This Looks Like in Practice

Auger-Dominguez offers several concrete practices. None of them require a budget, a policy change, or a new initiative.

Find your Ikigai. The Japanese concept translates roughly as "a reason for being": the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what sustains you. Applied to work, the question becomes: when are you most alive in this role? What would you be doing if nobody was measuring it?

Embrace beginner's mind. Expertise is valuable, but it narrows the aperture. Managers who know exactly how something should go tend to close off possibilities before examining them. Auger-Dominguez describes coaching a senior manager who immediately dismissed a new project as a waste of time. Fifteen minutes of genuine questioning later, his whole posture had shifted. Not because the project had changed, but because he had looked at it differently.

Build a happy folder. Collect the notes, the moments, the feedback that reminded you your work mattered. Not for ego, as data. When you're in a stretch where nothing seems to be landing, that folder is a corrective. One of Auger-Dominguez's clients described it as "data that matters": evidence, from your own experience, that the work has been real.

Show up intentionally to every meeting. Two or three minutes before a difficult meeting, asking yourself how you want to show up changes the meeting. The energy you walk in with is the energy you spread. This is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can actually control.

Open every one-on-one with a real question. Auger-Dominguez cites a line from executive coach Zander Grashow: "Do you need me to witness, help, or distract you right now?" That question gives the other person agency over the conversation before it begins, shifting the frame from "here's the agenda" to "what do you actually need?"

Spreading It

If there's a core claim in Auger-Dominguez's argument, it's this: joy is contagious in both directions.

Simon Sinek's framing, which she quotes, gets at something important: helping ourselves produces moments of happiness, but helping others produces lasting fulfillment. The managers who have the most durable satisfaction in their work are rarely the ones who've optimized their own experience. They're the ones who've found something that matters in the development and wellbeing of the people around them.

That's a different motivation than performance management. It's closer to what meaning researchers like Martin Seligman would call contribution: one of the more stable foundations for flourishing, precisely because it doesn't depend on external recognition to stay alive.

The data makes the case plainly. In a conversation with Debbie Lovich, Managing Director at BCG, she shared proprietary BCG research showing that employees who enjoy their work are twice as likely to stay: the share not actively looking for a new job jumps from the low 30s to the low 70s.

When BCG then correlated dozens of factors against intention to stay, the top drivers were all emotional: feeling respected, valued, supported, and satisfied with their manager. Pay dropped to fifteenth. The manager's joy, and the culture it produces, is not a soft variable.

Knowing when it's working is also simpler than most leaders expect. It's not in the output numbers, though those matter. It's in the interpersonal texture of the team. Are tensions decreasing? Is collaboration getting easier? When something urgent comes up, do people lean in or step back?

When teams are functioning at that level, people stay not because they're obligated to, but because they feel genuine ownership over what they're building together. That's engagement as a lived experience, which is what we're actually after.

The Implication for Leaders

FlexOS starts with the leader because nothing else holds if the leader isn't grounded. That's not a motivational claim. It's a structural one. The team's capacity for meaning, safety, and genuine engagement runs through the leader's own relationship with the work.

Auger-Dominguez's framework is useful because it doesn't ask leaders to manufacture feelings they don't have. It asks them to do the inquiry: what does the work mean to you? Where is your best and highest use? What have you forgotten about why you started?

Arthur C. Brooks has explored why this inquiry is especially urgent for high-achieving leaders, and why the most accomplished people are often the least equipped to answer it. That piece is worth reading alongside this one.

Those are not soft questions. They're the foundation of everything that follows.

FAQ

Is joy the same as happiness at work?
No. Auger-Dominguez distinguishes them clearly: happiness is a fleeting emotional state; joy is a deeper, more durable form of satisfaction rooted in purpose, connection, and meaningful contribution. Leaders who pursue joy rather than happiness build something more resilient.

Why do middle managers struggle most with finding joy at work?
Middle managers absorb pressure from above and below simultaneously, often with limited resources, recognition, or clarity. This structural squeeze creates conditions for chronic burnout that senior leaders and individual contributors don't experience in the same way.

Can a manager's emotional state really affect their whole team?
Yes, and faster than most leaders realize. Research consistently shows that emotional states spread within teams: a manager who walks into a room anxious or frustrated shifts the room's dynamics within minutes, even without saying anything directly about it.

What is Ikigai and how does it apply to management?
Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning "reason for being": the overlap of what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what sustains you. Applied to leadership, it's a framework for identifying the work that produces genuine energy rather than just activity.

How do you know if a team is experiencing joy, not just performing it?
Look at the interpersonal texture: declining tensions, easier collaboration, people stepping up when things get hard. Joy shows up in behavior, not in survey scores. When people feel genuine ownership over the work, they stay, contribute, and cover for each other, not because they're told to, but because they want to.

What's the first step a manager should take if they've lost their sense of joy?
Start with the question Auger-Dominguez uses with every coaching client: what is your best and highest use? Not your job description. What work produces energy in you rather than draining it? That answer is where the rebuild begins.