I built my career on grit and strategy.
But the biggest breakthroughs came when joy was in the room, and my team actually enjoyed the climb.
Early in my leadership journey, I championed 3 principles:
- Improve Effort to Effect Ratio
- Bring Ideas to Reality
- Have Fun
That third one? I’d completely lost sight of it.
This weekend, reconnecting with old friends reminded me: the best conversations happen when we’re laughing.
The deepest connections form when joy is in the air.
Yet as I’ve been building my practice coaching product leaders, I realized I wasn’t practicing what I preached.
I was so focused on results, I forgot to make my own journey enjoyable too.
The Data Doesn’t Lie: Joy Drives Performance
Optimists consistently outperform pessimists.
Data backs this up.
My proudest career moments happened when I approached challenges with genuine joy.
The best product teams I’ve worked with not only delivered outcomes. They enjoyed getting there.
Every strong product culture has this in common: the teams like working together.
They laugh.
They trust each other.
They enjoy the climb as much as the summit.
We celebrate grit.
We glorify strategy.
But joy?
That’s the leadership essential most people ignore.
The Joy Killer: When Meetings Drain Energy
If you can win Zoom Bingo before lunch, imagine what your team could do with half those hours back.
46% of workers attend 3+ meetings every day, and the average week now includes 11.3 hours in meetings.
That’s more than a quarter of the work week.
Endless status updates and routine check-ins don’t just waste time; they kill joy
Before fixing the culture, fix the chaos.
The solution isn’t just moving updates to email. It’s finding the right operating rhythm.
That’s where PACE comes in:
- Purposeful outcomes → every cycle defines success
- Async-first → write for updates, meet for decisions
- Customer connected → tie rhythm to value
- Escalation boundaries → big issues get their own time
Before PACE:
A week filled with scattered check-ins, update calls that could’ve been emails, and back-to-back Zooms leaves your team drained, distracted, and behind on actual work.
After PACE:
Updates flow async, meetings focus only on decisions, and big issues get the space they deserve.
The result?
Fewer wasted hours, faster decisions, and projects that actually ship.
Apply PACE consistently, and chaos turns into momentum.
The Three Leadership Essentials
When you create space for your team to breathe, you create space for joy to emerge.
Here are the three essentials that transform good teams into exceptional ones:
Build with Grit
Persistence and resilience remain foundational.
But grit without joy becomes grinding, and grinding burns out even your best people.
Lead with Strategy
Clear direction and smart decisions are non-negotiable.
But strategy without joy feels mechanical, and mechanical doesn’t inspire breakthrough thinking.
Breakthrough with Joy
This is where magic happens.
Joy isn’t frivolous. It’s fuel.
Teams that genuinely enjoy working together take bigger risks, rebound faster, and create solutions that others can’t imagine.
What if Fun Mattered as Much as Hitting Targets?
Imagine if we all treated joy as a core leadership skill:
The teams I’ve seen achieve the impossible had one thing in common: they found ways to enjoy the hard parts.
They celebrated small wins.
They laughed through the challenges.
They built rituals that made the work feel less like work and more like a worthy adventure.
Your Joy Audit: Three Questions
Use these 3 questions to spot where joy leaks from your team and how to put it back.
1. Energy Check:
When was the last time a team interaction left people laughing and energized instead of drained?
2. Rhythm Reality:
If Zoom Bingo feels too easy, where would you start fixing your rhythm?
3. Culture Connection:
What small step could you take this week to inject more enjoyment into how your team works together?
Key Takeaways
✅ Joy isn’t fluff, it’s fuel.
Grit and strategy drive efficiency, but joy unlocks resilience, creativity, and breakthrough performance.
✅ Meetings are often the biggest joy-killer.
Without a rhythm shift, endless updates drain energy.
Frameworks like PACE help teams reclaim focus and momentum.
✅ The best leaders design for joy.
They build teams people are excited to join, where laughter, trust, and connection make the hard work feel like progress, not grind.
Bottom line: Grit and strategy will keep your team moving, but joy is what makes them unstoppable.
Because when you lead with joy, your team doesn’t just deliver, they thrive.
Make joy part of your leadership rhythm.
