Category Archives: Leadership

Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.

Happy At Work, Leadership, Leading with Happiness Book

Another CHO is born

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Kristian Fischer, The Global VP of Professional Services at Tradeshift just changed his title to Chief Happiness Officer. Here’s how he announced it:

Yes! Finally got a new a new title – and I’m loving it already…

Strongly inspired by a great new book by Alexander Kjerulf I have taken a decision to change my title to (CHO) Chief Happiness Officer.

And that basically means that my main objective will be to make my colleagues happy. And if they are happy, so are our customers.

And if my customers are happy, I’m happy. And when I’m happy, so is my family.

What’s not to love…

How awesome :)

Here’s  my article on why every company should have a Chief Happiness Officer.

Happy At Work, Happy companies, Leadership, Leading with Happiness Book

Your job: Make someone smile!

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Danish CEO and entrepreneur Peer Krogh had one main message for his employees:

”The most important thing is really this:

Have you made someone smile today?

If you have, you’ve done a good job.”

He passed away in 2013, but the company still has that message written in the office and on badges like the one you see above.

What a great example of Leading With Happiness.

Happy At Work, Happy companies, Leadership

Woohoo – we got to visit Ben and Jerry’s

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We finally got a chance to visit Ben and Jerry’s global HQ in Vermont and it was AWESOME. Not only did we get to hear about the company’s mission to create a better world, see how the ice cream is made and visit the famous flavor graveyard – we even saw a man propose to his girlfriend in the middle of a tour. She said yes :)

Here are some impressions from our visit.

Proudly written on the walls: “Business has a responsibility to give back to the community.”

“If it’s not fun, why do it?”

The flavor graveyard is where Ben And Jerry’s celebrate their mistakes by honoring every ice cream flavor that failed. It looked very pretty in the snow. You can also find it online.

This is brilliant – instead of hiding or punishing their mistakes, they celebrate them. Here are 5 reasons why every workplace should do that.

All in all we got a very positive impression of the culture at Ben and Jerry’s. The employees we talked to clearly loved their jobs, they do their utmost to make great ice cream while protecting the environment and also have a mission to create “Linked prosperity” for their entire ecosystem, including suppliers, farmers and the local community. It’s inspiring to see a company so focused on creating a happier world, which is also why their mentioned in my latest book Leading With Happiness.

 

Happy At Work, Happy companies, Leadership

DHL’s CEO: Increasing revenues is meaningless. Motivate employees by creating a better world.

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Solar charging station in Taiwan

Financial Times has a great interview with Frank Appel, the CEO of Deutsche Post DHL the clearly outlines his philosophy for motivating employees: Increasing revenue is a meaningless goal. When company goals are mainly financial, purpose is lost. The best companies are “driven by making the lives of customers easier by highly engaged employees.”

Appel has set up three initiatives for his 522,000 staff:

  1. Go Teach, where DHL staff educate disadvantaged young people
  2. Go Help, where they work with the UN to use the company’s logistics expertise to respond co humanitarian crises
  3. Go Green, where they work to reduce emissions to zero

Appel sums up his message like this:

“We cannot say, listen, ‘Our strategy is to make money and if we have time left then we’ll do something which is good for the society’,” he says.

“Our job is to do something good for the society, and to do that we have to make money, otherwise we can’t continue to invest.”

This is AWESOME. It’s a clear articulation of a philosophy where a company aligns the quest for financial goals with a clear mission to create a better world.

Conference, Happy At Work, Happy companies, Leadership

Two of the funniest ways to create a happy workplace

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There are many ways to create a happier workplace but this short video has two of the funniest I’ve ever come across: ”Sexy Powersuit Day” and “The Lift of Love.”

This is from our International Conference on Happiness at Work where Tim Dorsett explained how he makes Innocent Drinks a happy workplace. You can see Tim’s full speech here.

If you want more inspiration and tools to promote happiness at work, you should come to our next conference on May 17+18 2018 in Copenhagen – it’s going to be AWESOME.

Conference, Happy At Work, Happy companies, Leadership, Leading with Happiness Book

WD-40 Company keeps growing – and their happy tribe is why

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One of our speakers at the 2018 International Conference on Happiness at Work is featured in an article called WD-40 Company Keeps Growing in This $1 Billion Market which lists the phenomenal results they’ve gotten recently:

If you look at the numbers, though, this is a fantastic business with high rates of return well suited for long-term investors.

This past quarter, the company continued to grow both the top and bottom lines and showed that it’s doing well at exploiting its most promising growth opportunity.

WD-40 is in a relatively mature market, so it’s remarkable that management continues to find avenues to grow sales and earnings.

At our conference, WD-40’s CEO Garry Ridge will explain the main reason behind this success: They’ve built a culture that is characterized by a sense of belonging, communication, having shared values, and continual learning between elder tribal leaders and younger tribe members.

Yes – they don’t see themselves as a team but a tribe, where employees don’t just work – they belong.

Garry is a truly inspiring speaker and what they’ve achieved at WD-40 is definitely worth learning from.

See the full conference program and get your tickets here.

Happy At Work, Happy companies, Leadership

How Pret promotes random acts of kindness

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I just learned that the Pret cafés have a really cool thing going: They let their employees do random acts of kindness by giving away free coffees.

Pret’s CEO Clive Schlee explains it like this:

A couple of years ago, Pret decided to channel the cash we could have spent running loyalty card programmes into a fund for each shop to spend on rewarding its customers. It was as simple as that. We didn’t tell our team members whom they should favour. We let them decide. They could welcome a new customer, cheer up somebody having a bad day or recognise a regular. They could use it to solve a problem. Like everything in Pret, it’s just about lots of individual human relationships, day after day after day.

I love that. Not only is it likely to make customers happy, it will also make employees happier at work because (as research clearly shows) when you do do nice things for others, makes you happier yourself.

As Schlee puts it:

Pret employees tell me that the freedom to give a free coffee is immensely empowering. It injects a random act of kindness into the day. It gives delight and hurts not.

What an incredibly simple but brilliant policy.