Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.
Last week we had our 7th annual conference about happiness at work in Copenhagen and this one may just have been the best one yet.
We had 14 inspiring speakers and 350 engaged participants to help make it a great day and as always, we filmed all the speeches and will be releasing them over the next few weeks. Here’s the first video – David Marquet’s excellent closing speech on how leaders can improve results by giving up control:
How do you keep employees happy during a crisis, when outside circumstances create uncertainty and fear for the workplace?
Douglas Robar, one of our awesome Woohoo Partners, has some excellent reflections on this:
Sounds like for many employees the anxiety from the fear of change, the unknown, and of people they don’t know pulling the strings of their futures will be very real. Personally, I would treat this more as a pastoral counselling situation. How can you care for your people through this unsettled time?
In happiness terms, this is a time to focus on relationships. The employees (especially those on the lower levels) will want to talk. Perhaps organize meetings in small groups to talk openly about anything they wish to talk about. Speak honesty about the situation (the good, the bad, what you know, what you don’t know, etc.) and as you can, be fully transparent about your and the boss’ motives and feelings and hopes.
The idea is to build relationships with and among the employees, which is often much easier to do in the tough times when people will be more eager to share their lives and not just our jobs. Speak of fear and doubt, offer support and encouragement and strength to one another. The poncho exercise might work well to conclude such a meeting, to cement the reality that each has real worth and are bound together.
Relationships form in crises. Foster that. The results and the foundations for an even happier workplace are being laid even now my friend.
This is not only great advice, but it also fits perfectly with the science that shows that social support is especially important for us when we face uncertainty or external threats.
Unfortunately we are working against our natural tendencies here. When people face some sort of threat or crisis, we often react by becoming more selfish and by closing ourselves off to others – the exact opposite of what we need.
This CEO has a cheeky (and awesome) 45-second answer to the question “Can you prove that happiness at work improves business results?”
If only all CEOs shared his thinking :)
PS: The video has subtitles in English. If you don’t see them, press the cc button in the video player.
Happiness at work starts from the top. This is one of the fundamental truths of happy workplaces.
In any organization where people consistently love to work, you will find a CEO and executive leadership team that places employee happiness among their top strategic priorities and act accordingly.
One of our favorite examples of a CEO who truly gets this is Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines (since retired), who put it like this:
When I started out, business school professors liked to pose a conundrum: Which do you put first, your employees, your customers, or your shareholders? As if that were an unanswerable question.
My answer was very easy: You put your employees first. If you truly treat your employees that way, they will treat your customers well, your customers will come back, and that’s what makes your shareholders happy.
So there is no constituency at war with any other constituency. Ultimately, it’s shareholder value that you’re producing.
If, on the other hand, you have top brass who don’t give a damn about anything but the bottom line and their own bonuses and stock options, I can flat-out guarantee that you will create an organization with very little happiness but with a lot of fear, stress and frustration. And, ironically, with poor bottom line results.
So top executives MUST make employee happiness one of their most important goal. Both because it’s the right thing to do for the sake of their people, but also because it will actually make the company more successful. Studies consistently show that happy workplaces make more money.
But how does a CEO or top executive practice this on a daily basis? What can they do to make their organization happier?
Here are 10 great real-life examples that we’ve seen work really well in workplaces around the world.
During a speech in Istanbul, I met an executive of a huge Turkish organization who has had a monthly lunch with 10 randomly picked employees for years now. Every month 10 employees get a chance to have a nice lunch and over the course of a couple of hours get to ask any question they want and air any concerns or complaints.
They also get a chance to meet him in an informal setting and get a sense of who he is as a person.
Some CEOs enjoy doing little random things to surprise and delight their staff. Here’s an example from Medis, one of our clients in Iceland, where the CEO decided to make fresh pancakes and waffles for anyone passing by.
He even had a great time himself:
I thoroughly enjoyed it – the biggest joy I actually got out of observing the reaction of the colleagues !
FYI we did not announce anything but simply showed up in the corridor without notice and took people pleasantly by surprise.
The Danish Competition and Consumer Authority is a government agency whose 200 employees work to enforce consumer regulations and keep markets competitive.
Every month they have a breakfast meeting where important information is shared with all employees. At this meeting, the director Agnete always shares 2-3 successes that the organization has had since the last meeting. She’ll highlight how they’ve completed a big project or won a court case and make sure that the people who worked on that are recognized and celebrated.
One CEO we know had a strong desire to receive all bad news as soon as possible. He knew bad things happened (they do in all workplaces) but he also knew that some employees were to afraid of reprisals to come out and directly say that they might miss a deadline or have to disappoint a client.
So he has trained himself and his managers to always receive bad news with a smile and a phrase like “Thank you for telling me that.” This took some practice.
That way bad news come out early and can be dealt with before it turns into a disaster.
One fast-growing company of ours has a tradition where the CEO hosts a monthly afternoon tea at his home for all new hires that month.
It’s a completely informal gathering that serves two functions: He gets to meet all the new people and get a sense of who they are and he takes some time to talk about the company’s history and vision which is a powerful way to show the new hires the values and purpose of the organization.
South African social media agency Quirk has a process in place that encourages employees to bring about any problems they see to the attention of the executive team. The process gives all employees a voice and guarantees action from the executives in two weeks at the most.
You can read about their process here.
Here is a letter that US vice president Joe Biden sent to his staff in 2014:
He explicitly tells them that it’s OK to prioritize important family events over work. Appreciating staff and giving them time for family makes them happier – and happy staff are more productive. It also combats the ubiquitous cult of overwork.
Carsten and Karsten, two sales managers at Danish company Solar, wanted to do something nice for their employees.
Early one Monday morning, they stood at the entrance and greeted every employee with a cheerful “good morning” and a breakfast they could take to their desks.
In one company, the CEO was told by a trembling employee, that the company website was down. This was a big deal – this company made most of its sales online, and downtime cost them thousands of dollars an hour.
The CEO asked what had happened, and was told that John in IT had bungled a system backup, and caused the problem. “Well, then,” says the CEO “Let’s go see John!”
When the CEO walked into the IT department everyone went quiet. They had a pretty good idea what wass coming, and were sure it wouldn’t be pretty.
The CEO walks up to John’s desk and asks “You John?”
“Yes” he says meekly.
“John, ” says the CEO, “I want to thank you for finding this weakness in our system. Thanks to your actions, we can now learn from this, and fix the system, so something like this can’t happen in the future. Good work!”
Then he left a visibly baffled John and an astounded IT department. That particular mistake never happened again.
In many workplaces, employees who do good work are rarely recognized but anyone who makes a mistake is immediately and harshly punished. This is dumb.
When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes. And that’s why top executives should help employees celebrate mistakes.
As an example, IT company Menlo Innovations in Michigan has this banner hanging in their office:
The execs wrapped up at 6 in the evening and Ingvar then took a stroll through the entire store as if this was the most natural thing in the world, kindly greeting each and every employee. He encountered two female employees talking to each other and approached them with a smile and the words: “And what are you two lovely ladies talking about?” – following up with big hugs for both of them.
I love this because it shows a genuine interest in the employees and because Kamprad is clearly happy himself and not afraid to show it.
We know from psychological studies that emotions are contagious and top leaders can spread a lot of happiness simply by being happy themselves.
This list is by no means exhaustive and it’s definitely not meant to be prescriptive. We’re not saying all executives should do these things.
What we are saying is that top executives play a huge role in creating happy workplaces. They do this in the big stuff – by making sure that the strategies, plans, goals and values they set for the organization are defined with the employees’ well-being in mind.
But they also do it in small, daily, interpersonal ways where they can show that they genuinely care about their people, can build relationships with employees and can let employees see them as real human beings.
However, this can only work under a few conditions:
Understanding this and acting on it gives the executives in a workplace huge leverage to make their employees feel valued professionally and personally – thus increasing happiness, engagement and motivation as well as productivity.
Not doing this – and let’s face facts, most executives don’t – means failing your employees, your customers and your investors.
Do you think executives should care about the happiness of their employees? Do the executives in your workplace honestly care about their people? How do they show it / not show it?
This announcement from Pernille Hagild, Ikea’s HR Manager in the UK and Ireland, is beyond awesome:
We will adopt the Living Wage (as defined by the Living Wage Foundation) from the 1 April 2016. This means all our co-workers across the UK will receive a minimum of £7.85 per hour and £9.15 per hour within London. The Living Wage is a hot topic in the press at the moment so we feel it’s important to explain why we have made this decision.
Ikea has seen that the UK minimum wage of GBP 6.75 is too low to allow many of their employees to live well and have therefore decided to voluntarily raise salaries to follow the recommendations of the Living Wage Foundation.
Why? Because Ikea’s values are not only about doing good for the customer but also extend to the employees. Pernille puts it like this:
Ikea is a values-driven company. We are guided by a vision “to create a better everyday life for the many people” and this vision includes our co-workers as much as our customers and the communities touched by our business. Providing a meaningful wage to all of our co-workers, that supports their cost of living, is an important part of our values which are fundamental to who we are.
Of course this is not cheap:
The initial £7.5million investment is a big one for us and will benefit over half of our co-workers here in the UK. We have been discussing this for the past year and the thought behind our decision is pretty simple: it is the core of our values to treat people equally and decently. We believe in paying a fair wage for all co-workers regardless of how old they are and that also takes into account where they live.
It does however raise the question of whether this will make employees happier. Do salaries matter?
Here’s what we think: Wages have the power to make us unhappy if we perceive them to be unfair or if they are so low that we spend a lot of time and energy worrying about our finances.
Once salaries reach the point where they are fair and allow us to live comfortably, further raises do not increase happiness.
This move specifically addresses those issues and can take away much potential unhappiness for many of Ikea’s employees.
That being said, it’s also noteworthy that Ikea UK does this voluntarily and out of a genuine desire to improve their employees’ lives. This means that the move might have an actual positive effect beyond just reducing financial unhappiness because it strengthens the relationship between employees and employer, by showing that the company cares about them.
It’ll be really interesting to see how this plays out.
I love everything about this. I strongly believe that if your business can’t afford to pay the employees a living wage, then you don’t deserve to be in business.
The fact that Ikea is a long-term client of ours and that Pernille Hagild is a friend of mine who helped introduce a similar move in Ikea Denmark years ago only makes it MORE awesome :)
This is so far just a small study of employees at one company, but the results are interesting. Researchers Ravi S. Gajendran and Deepak Somaya summarize their study as follows in HBR:
We began our study by surveying over 700 employees at a large multinational IT firm. We asked them to assess their manager’s leadership quality…
Eighteen months later, we went through the list of survey responders to see who had left the company… and… interviewed these former employees, 128 in total, to find out why they left the firm, how their new job was different from their previous one, and — most importantly — if their perceptions of their prior employer had changed.
These were the results:
What we discovered was surprising. Good leadership doesn’t reduce employee turnover precisely because of good leadership.
Supportive managers empower employees to take on challenging assignments with greater responsibilities, which sets employees up to be strong external job candidates.
So employees quit for better opportunities elsewhere — better pay, more responsibility, and so on.
I can already hear the lousy managers out there saying “See – I told you there was no reason to treat my people well.” :)
But that is precisely the wrong lesson to draw here. Though the researchers themselves conclude that “Leadership does not beget retention,” I don’t think that’s warranted yet. That is too broad a conclusion to draw based on a study of one workplace.
I’m sure there’s something to the idea, that if you lead your employees well, they’re more likely to grow and develop to the point where they are able to find work elsewhere or start their own businesses. It reminds of the old quote:
What happens if we develop our employees and they leave?
What happens if we don’t, and they stay?
Other studies have shown that the quality of the leadership strongly affects absenteeism, motivation, creativity and productivity, so even if we accept that good leadership has no effect on retention, it still improves business results.
The study also did not take into account whether employees ever came back to their old workplace with new skills and experience.
Finally, as I have often said, even if good leadership did not have a single proven positive effect on business outcomes it would still be the right thing to strive for, because we know that bad leadership hurts an employee’s career, health and private life.
Link sharing site reddit asked its users a really interesting question:
What work moment made your attitude go from proud employee to “I’m just here for the paycheck”?
The answers are incredibly interesting (if not a little depressing) and roughly fall into 3 categories. Here they are with some examples.
The examples also bear out the research that shows that even star employees resort to bad behavior when they feel mistreated at work.
When the owners and GM looked at my prostate cancer as a major inconvenience – for them.
When they bitched about my being out for cancer surgery – and I’d been out less than two weeks.
When I was back after two weeks wearing a fucking diaper because I was afraid of losing my job because of cancer.
Then they expected me to be concerned whether they made a profit. Yeah, that’s likely.
—
For 7 years I had a boss who valued the work people did, and didn’t care how you arrived at the end product. Motivated and innovative employees were recognized and generally received additional responsibility and challenges.
Then came the new boss, who was the text book example of micro manager, and ran the department like it was a 50’s assembly line. Watched the amount of time people took breaks, watched the minute people arrived, and the minute they left. Achievements were no longer recognized and employees were just cogs in a wheel.
If there is no incentive to do anything more than the minimum amount of effort, the minimum amount of effort will be done.
—
A change of boss.
We went from someone positive and inspiring to work for to a dolt without vision or concern for employee morale or motivation.
When the new guy who relies on me to do his job got promoted.
—
The company cut out a whole department and transferred their duties to my department. Now we must do two people’s jobs for a 52¢/hr raise and the strict no overtime policy remains.
Fast forward 3 months and the company flies all the managers (3,000+) from across the US to Florida for a meeting where they rent out an amusement park and have a concert by a well known artist.
Needless to say, I’m now the saltiest of salty employees.
—
Both of my mentors — two ladies who saw potential in me that I didn’t and helped me turn my life around — were fired (packaged out) within a week of each other. Fired by people who had only started a few months before and then themselves quit a few months later.
When I was told to peel the ‘re-manufactured’ sticker off of the back of the ‘new’ instruments we were installing for a customer.
—
Found out that the product reps were giving a ton of free product to the store for the managers to distribute to the sales team.
The reps would even give the managers the option of getting a few display-only models for customers to check out or giving products directly to the sales team for them to describe to the customers. The managers would blatantly lie to the reps and say that giving them to the sales team would help their sales the most, and then the managers would just take all of it.
Then these same managers would blame the sales team 100% for poor numbers, at our no commission position.
If they’re only looking out for themselves, then I’m doing that exact same thing.
—
At a grocery store: When for 2.5 years I warned that someone was going to slip and fall on the faulty loading dock for the trucks because a drip in the ceiling wasn’t being fixed by the company or the landlord who owned the building. On top of the the thing kept breaking.
I griped loud enough and the solution was to send us pretty much this. Since unloading the trucks was a one person job, having one person drag this 165 pound ramp around was a hazard in itself, we just couldn’t use it.
So, inevitably, someone slipped and fell on the old ramp. And only at that point, and some payout that was kept private, did they replace the faulty ramp we had.
Read the whole thread here and for cryin’ out loud: Stop doing this kind of crap to dedicated employees.
Judging from this video, I’d have to say yes :)
Is it OK to praise yourself at work?
Could you tell a coworker something like “Hey, let me tell you what I just did – it was AWESOME!”
Is it OK to send an email to the rest of your team to proudly share that you found a creative solution to a tough problem?
Can you take a little time in a project meeting to tell others about that task you just completed on time and under budget?
Most people are reluctant to do that. They don’t want to seem arrogant or boastful or like they have a big head. But if you ask me, it’s perfectly OK to be proud of the good work you do AND to share that pride with others.
Just as an example, If I’ve given a speech that I felt went REALLY well (which happens all the time these days) I share that with my coworkers. I tell them what happened and what it was that worked so well.
However, self-praise can become really annoying if you do it wrong :) Here are 8 tips for praising yourself at work:
Just like any other praise, self-praise must be earned. You must have done something awesome before you praise yourself, otherwise it’s completely meaningless.
If you praise yourself for something you’ve done together with others, then you must include them in the praise. In that case you don’t say “I’m awesome,” you say “We’re awesome.”
It’s no good if you always only praise yourself and never recognize others. It’s required of all of us self-praisers that we’re especially good at acknowledging the cool things others do.
If you’re good at praising yourself when you rock, you should be the first to admit when you suck, apologize for your mistakes and be willing to learn from them and improve. People who can only see the good they do and completely overlook their own flaws invite nothing but scorn and contempt.
In fact, why not celebrate your mistakes?
When you praise yourself, do it with an honest infectious enthusiasm. It’s OK to be proud of yourself. It’s OK to have a smile on your face, a spring in your step and pride in your voice when you share your accomplishments. In fact, it will be received more positively by others than if you do it with false humility.
It goes without saying that anything can be overdone – including self-praise. Don’t overdo it.
Practice makes perfect. It’s banal but true. Try it, see what works and then improve from there.
Praise is sorely lacking from many workplace – including self-praise. This may lead to skepticism and resistance from others if you start doing it. If this happens, consider carefully if the criticism is because you’ve gone too far – in which case you should listen to it – or if it’s simply that people are not used to it – in which case you should continue doing it.
We can see four major advantages of self-praise. First, when you share your successes, others can learn from your best practices and maybe apply them themselves.
Secondly, genuine enthusiasm is infectious. When you share something that made you happy, others become a little happier too.
Thirdly, you can inspire others to also share their victories, so the whole team becomes better at sharing what works, to the benefit of all.
And finally, if you are good at praising yourself, you’re not as dependent on receiving praise from others. As Spencer Tracy put it:
It is up to us to give ourselves recognition. If we wait for it to come from others, we feel resentful when it doesn’t, and when it does, we may well reject it.
And if all else fails, there’s always the self-praise machine that an employee at one of our clients built:
What do you think? Do you ever praise yourself at work? How do you do it? What are good ways or bad ways to do it? Write a comment, we’d love to hear your take.
Happy workplaces are more profitable and innovative, attract the best employees and have lower absenteeism and employee turnover rates. Simply put, happy companies make more money.
But how do you create a happy workplace? We believe some of the answers are found in positive psychology – a fascinating field and one of the main inspirations for the work we do with our clients around the world.
Traditional psychology looks at everything that can go wrong with our minds – psychosis, neurosis, phobias, depression etc – and asks how it can be treated/cured. It’s an incredibly important field but positive psychology asks the opposite question: When are we happy? What does it take for people to live good lives and thrive psychologically? The field has been especially active for the last 30 years and we are learning some really interesting and surprising things about happiness.
Here are the five findings from positive psychology that we believe are the most relevant in the workplace.
We tend to trivialize emotions in the workplace. It doesn’t matter what you feel, the prevailing thinking goes – it matters what you think.
You should never show emotions at work and the true professional has no emotions at work. You should be like Spock from Star Trek who once said “Emotions are alien to me. I’m a scientist.”
But this turns out to be impossible. Not only do we have emotions, those emotions affect our physical and mental well-being in many ways and, in general, positive emotions have some strong positive effects on our work performance.
Here’s one example:
… a number of the participants were either shown a comedy movie clip or treated to free chocolate, drinks and fruit. Others were questioned about recent family tragedies, such as bereavements, to assess whether lower levels of happiness were later associated with lower levels of productivity.
… they found happiness made people around 12% more productive.
So far, studies have shown that experiencing positive emotions makes us:
Simply put, happy people not only feel better and thrive more, they also do better work. This helps explain why happy companies are more profitable and hence why no workplace can afford to ignore how people feel at work.
One study in emotional contagion at work brought test subjects together for a simulated negotiation. They didn’t know that one member of the group was an actor extensively trained by the researchers to exhibit certain emotions during the meeting.
Would the emotions of one person affect the rest of the group? The answer is yes – and when the emotions transmitted by the actor were positive, the whole group became more effective:
There was a significant influence of emotional contagion on individual-level attitudes and group processes. As predicted, the positive emotional contagion group members experienced improved cooperation, decreased conflict, and increased perceived task performance.
It turns out that how people around you feel rubs off on you and vice versa. Being around others involves taking on some of their emotions and transferring some of yours to them. We have all experienced this. Being around happy people makes us a little happier. Being around miserable bastards has the opposite effect.
This is highly relevant in the workplace because it shows we don’t exist in isolation. Happiness is a social phenomenon and each of us influence, and are in turn influenced by, the people around us.
One of the coolest things about positive psychology is that it is highly research-based and the various interventions are tested in numerous studies.
You may think that in order to become happier in life, you have to win the lottery or achieve massive amounts of success. But what they have consistently found is that simple interventions are surprisingly effective. Here are some examples of proven happiness interventions:
In the workplace, this means that while organizational factors like strategies, vision, values and processes do matter, it also matters how we work together and interact in our teams on a day-to-day basis. Do managers treat their employees with respect and kindness? Do coworkers trust each other, help each other and maintain good relationships? Do people take the time to treat each other well in the workplace?
However, the research also shows that happiness interventions only work under 2 conditions:
According to research, we become a happier when good things happen to us (duh!) but the effect is even bigger when good things happen to us unexpectedly:
Emory University and Baylor College of Medicine researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans to measure changes in human brain activity in response to a sequence of pleasurable stimuli.
They used a computer-controlled device to squirt fruit juice or water into the mouths of 25 research participants. The patterns of the squirting were either predictable or unpredictable.
The researchers found that the MRI scans showed a brain area called the nucleus accumbens to be much more active when the subjects received unpredictable patterns of juice and water.
So:
This is interesting in the context of happiness at work because many of the things companies do to make their employees happier are utterly predictable: Summer parties, Christmas parties, Bonuses, team events, and so on happen on an almost completely fixed schedule, which serves to diminish their effectiveness.
This is why we advocate also doing random acts of workplace kindness. According to this research, a small well-meant surprising gesture towards an employee or a team may make them much happier.
So what could you do, to surprise a co-worker today? Here are some examples:
5: Making others happy, makes us happy
It’s been shown consistently that doing things to make yourself happier has a small effect on your happiness but doing things for others, elevates their happiness AND yours much more.
In one study, participants received a small amount of money that they could spend either on themselves or on others. Their happiness was measured before and after, and subjects who spent the money on others experiences a much larger boost to their happiness.
This means that one of the most reliable paths to happiness at work is to focus less on your own happiness and more on making others – be it coworkers or customers – happier.
This is not to say that you should sacrifice yourself for others, to the point where you neglect your own happiness. It just means that focusing only on your own happiness is likely to be a shallow, meaningless and ultimately unsuccessful.
Happy employees are healthier and more productive and happy companies make more money.
That’s why every company and every manager need to make happiness at work their most important strategic priority. These findings from positive psychology help point the way on how to do it.
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.