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Ah, those clever folks at Gallup! They've helped us break all the rules, discover our strengths, and determine how full our bucket is. Along the way we've learned about strengths-based leadership and the elements of great managing.

Now they're going to help us put it all together. That's what Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter is about.

The publisher's describe this book as "a research-base blueprint for understanding what makes life worthwhile." Of course, it is "a landmark study of wellbeing" of "more than 150 countries representing 98 percent of the world's population."

If you expect something new and startling out of that, you will be disappointed. The book delivers a lot that is important, but almost nothing new. And that's OK. What's here is good, even if it's not "new."

There are three key findings in this book. First, wellbeing isn't one thing. It emerges from the interaction of several things. Second, those things are consistent across much of humanity. Third, they include the following elements.

Career Wellbeing: Do you like what you do every day?

Social Wellbeing: Do you have strong relationships and love in your life?

Financial Wellbeing: Is your financial situation a source of stress or a source of strength?

Physical Wellbeing: Do you have good health and enough energy to do what you want every day?

Community Wellbeing: Are you safe and secure where you live and do you participate in your community?

The authors do a good job of describing each element. They identify things you can do to improve your wellbeing in each area. I especially like the fact that the sought "short-term incentives that are consistent with long-term objectives."

That's the first half of the book. Overall, what you'll find is not much different from what savvy parents and grandparents, the great religions of the world, a host of psychologists, and rank on rank of motivational speakers have been telling us for years.

I've reviewed and used several systems over the years. I've found that no system comes exactly the way I need it. In this case, I would prefer to see a category like "professional" in addition to "career." And, for me there needs to be a "spiritual" category of wellbeing.

If that's not a problem for you, the fact that this is a Gallup system means that there are tools available. Inevitably, the main tool is called the "Wellbeing Finder." The book includes a code so that one person can sign in on the Wellbeing web site and use the evaluator.

I confess that I'm a bit leery of instruments of this kind that provide numerical or graphical measurements of things like wellbeing. For my own measures of wellbeing, I take some time each quarter to evaluate each category.

The first half (114 pages) of the book, complete with the Wellbeing Finder, may work for you, or it may not. Look inside the book to see.

The second half of the book looks to me mostly like padding and things that didn't seem to fit elsewhere. There's a definition of the five essential elements, as if the first 114 pages didn't do the job. The Wellbeing Finder is described. There are technical details about Gallup's wellbeing metrics. There are references. You can discover more about wellbeing in the US and elsewhere.

There are also a few pages on "How We Spend Our Time." And there are a few on "Increasing Wellbeing in Organizations: the Role of Managers and Leaders." Those sound to me like the seeds for the next books we'll see from Gallup.

Boss's Bottom Line

The key here is that your life has different elements and they affect each other. Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements does a good job of describing the parts and giving you some ideas and tools for making things better.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.