I’m featured in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera under the headline “Il manager della felicità arriva in azienda” – The happiness manager arrives in the workplace.
I’ve been getting a lot of emails from Italy since the article came out and the message is always the same: Italian workplaces don’t focus on happiness and having a Chief Happiness Officer would be a welcome development.
What would happen if you devoted 6 months of your life to helping others – free and anonymously.
The Free Help Guy tried exactly that experiment and in this AWESOME and inspiring speech he shares how he has helped people around the world for no reward and without any recognition.
Almost as a side effect, he also found that helping others made him happier.
He still helps people anonymously, which is why we’ve blurred out his face in the video.
This is just AWESOME :)
I would argue that most jobs, no matter how serious they may be on the surface, offer the chance to show your playful side.
And if they don’t, there are other jobs that do!
This is simply one of the best new business books I’ve read in a LONG time.
What if you ran your organization based on actually, genuinely caring for every single person in it? How would that inform strategy and leadership and how would it affect employees and the bottom line?
Bob Chapman’s leadership at Barry Wehmiller shows what that looks like and it is amazing.
Barry Wehmiller is essentially in the business of buying struggling production companies around the world and making them happier and more productive by introducing their processes and culture. They have 8,000 employees in 100 locations around the world in a large variety of businesses and they’re profitable and growing fast.
In this short speech, Bob Chapman explains their leadership philosophy:
The book contains a ton of powerful lessons that any workplace could learn from, but for me, these were the 2 most powerful things in the book.
1: Performance focus – with people first.
Of course the company cares about performance, but they realize that people come first. Chapman shares the story of what happened when a lean consultant came to do a presentation:
We scheduled a kickoff meeting in Green Bay with a group of senior leaders to learn about Lean and begin our continuous-improvement journey.
On the first afternoon, a consultant gave an opening presentation on Lean. After forty-five minutes, I stood up and walked out of the room in frustration. The presentation was all about justifying bringing Lean tools into an organization because they help add to the bottom line and get more out of people. “This will help you get more out of people.”
That’s when I left the room.
Brian followed nervously after me, glancing back to see if the presenter was still speaking.
“So, what’s going on?”
With fire in my voice, I said, “Brian, we are never going to have a Lean journey like that in our organization. We are not going to suck the life out of people and take advantage of them in that way. We are going to build a Lean culture focused on people or we’re not going to do it at all.”
I had made it clear that our version of Lean was to be about people.
Too many CEOs would never even catch that. They are steeped in the idea that results come first and processes like Lean are used as a tool for that purpose.
At Barry Wehmiller, Lean has become a tool to make work more fun and meaningful for the employees. And that in turn drives better results, than a direct results focus.
2: No layoffs
Your values are tested in hard times. It’s a lot easier to be nice and appreciative and people focused when the business is profitable but when revenue takes a hit and your company is losing money that’s when you get a chance to show if you take your values seriously of if they’re just pretty words that you don’t really mean.
In the book’s most interesting chapter (for me at least) Chapman discusses what happened when the recession hit them in 2008. They lost a large amount of business and were faced with massive pressure from their bank to cut costs.
Most companies around the world would not hesitate for a second before enacting layoffs. It’s just what you do, despite the fact that evidence shows it’s actually bad for business.
Chapman instead worked hard to come up with a plan that would ensure the company’s survival without laying off a single person – which they did.
I HIGHLY recommend this book. It’s a great read and shares not only a great business case but also Chapman’s personal story which is interesting in itself.
The book shows that happy workplaces can exist in any industry (even production) and that you can systematically transform bad, failing workplaces into happy successful ones. Provided you do so with some good structure, great leadership and the basic idea that people deserve to be treated well at work.
We visited Zappos in Las Vegas last week and saw this epic prank video :)
Ever done something like that in your workplace?
This is not a coffee shop – this is the reception at one of our clients in Denmark.
They can greet you, get you a visitor’s badge and notify the employee your meeting with. And while you wait for them to come meet you, they can also whip up an excellent cappuccino or a flat white.
Employees can also have informal meetings in the café and buy coffee cheaply using their ID cards or an app on their phones.
I saw something similar at the Coca-Cola HQ in Atlanta.
I like this kind of thing because it breaks down the formality of the reception area and makes it more welcoming and interesting. It gives visitors a better first impression and provides employees with a more relaxed setting.
Does your workplace have something similar?
It just struck me that the Danish word for happiness (glæde) is both a noun and a verb.
So in Danish you can experience happiness (føle glæde) but you can also “happy someone else” (glæde en anden).
As in: “I think this will happy my spouse” (det vil glæde min partner) or “small acts can happy others” (små ting kan glæde andre).
I don’t want to read too much into that linguistic quirk, but it is interesting because it goes to the heart of what happiness is – i.e. very much something we do for each other.
Can you think of another language that has this feature?
Here are some of the upcoming international conferences and events you can catch me at:
October 15, London UK: Well-Being at Work
November 10, Santiago de Chile: Expo Capital Humano
November 16, Istanbul Turkey: Peryön Kongres
November 25, Prague Czech Republic: Happiness at Work
December 3, Novi Sad Serbia: Geekstone Conference
December 18, Colombo Sri Lanka: Dev Day 2015
March 23, The Hague Netherlands: Happy People Better Business
April 13, Birmingham UK: Service Desk Conference
May 9, Miami USA, WorldBlu Summit
Should a manager focus primarily on results or people? Should the manager be the one who sets KPIs and drives employees towards their goals, or should the manager rather be the one who understands and likes employees and is able to build good relationships with them?
In 2009 James Zenger published a study that examined exactly that question. He found that if a manager is seen as being particularly focused on results alone, he/she will be seen as a good manager by only 14 % of the employees. If a manager has only strong social skills, the manager is regarded as being a good manager by a mere 12 % of the employees.
However, for those managers who are both focused on results and have strong social skills, the likelihood of being evaluated as a good manager rockets to 72 %. But here is the bad news: Less than 1 % of the managers in Zenger’s study were evaluated as being strong on results and having strong social skills. Ouch!
But how can it be that so few managers master both? An article from Harvard Business Review by Matthew Lieberman provides the answer: It is the brain’s fault. Our brains simply have a hard time being both socially and analytically focused at the same time. In the article and in his outstanding book “Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect”, Lieberman writes:
Even though thinking social and analytically don’t feel radically different, evolution built our brain with different networks for handling these two ways of thinking.
In the frontal lobe, regions on the outer surface, closer to the skull, are responsible for analytical thinking and are highly related to IQ. In contrast, regions in the middle of the brain, where the two hemispheres touch, support social thinking.
Here’s the really surprising thing about the brain: These two networks function like a neural seesaw. In countless neuroimaging studies, the more one of these networks got active, the more the other one got quieter. […] in general, engaging in one of these kinds of thinking makes it harder to engage in the other kind.
We know from extensive research that happiness at work is primarily affected by two factors, namely results and relationships.
Employees love their jobs when they make a difference at work, and when they feel cared for as human beings. These two factors determine – far more than gyms, massages and other perks – whether employees are happy, motivated and productive, or not. That is why it is essential to have managers who are able to help employees experience both.
Yet, in the business community, it is depressingly common to primarily acknowledge results-oriented managers, instead of those with strong social skills. Usually, the most professionally competent employees are promoted to managerial positions, even if they lack the social skills it takes to be a manager. If these new managers do not get the training/further education they need, it has a directly negative impact on happiness at work and consequently on productivity.
Here is a radical idea: I believe that you will have more success if you select managers with excellent social skills, and train them to become more focused on results. I believe that it is much easier for a person with good social skills to learn to focus on results, than it is for a hard-core results-driven person to develop social skills and empathy.
Southwest Airlines have long done this. The excellent book “The Southwest Airlines Way” by Jody Hoffer-Gittell reveals the secret to Southwest’s remarkable success: high performance relationships that create enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among Southwest employees. For instance, when Southwest looks for new managers, the most important skill is the ability to connect with others and create good relationships.
Personally, I am convinced that the most important leadership skill is to actually like other people.
We also have to consider how we reward managers. Most workplaces reward managers for creating good results, but how many have bonus arrangements considering those who build good relations? Why not split the managers’ bonuses 50/50 between results and relations? If we only reward one of the two, it only encourages one type of behaviour, and the one-sided focus on results will eventually harm results and the bottom line.
Think about the best manager you’ve ever had or met. What made that manager effective? What about examples of bad management you’ve seen – what made those managers bad?
Do you agree that relationship skills are the most important for managers?
Write a comment – I’d love to hear your take.
For most of us, work is not optional – we have to make a living somehow.
Finding work we enjoy given that, is a paradox we all must resolve.
The Chief Happiness Officer Academy is our most in-depth 3-day training where we share everything we know about creating happier workplaces. Get an in-depth background in happiness at work, hear about the latest research in the field and learn how to use this in your own business.