Category: Leadership

I believe we’re seeing a new kind of leadership emerging.

It’s been a truism that leadership is about maximizing business results, whatever it takes. As the economist Milton Friedman depressingly put it:

The business of business is business.

He argued that a CEO who spent resources on anything that did not enhance shareholder value was failing his duties and could be fired or sued.

This kind of thinking is still incredibly prevalent in the business world and it leads to attitudes and actions that are incredibly damaging.

This is the kind of thinking that lets a corporation:

• Fire 1,000s of employees to raise stock prices temporarily.
• Engage in environmentally damaging production.
• Introduce a culture of overwork that works employees to the bone while damaging their careers, their health and their private lives.
• Confuse and cheat customers into buying as much as possible at the highest price possible, rather than helping customers buy what they need.
• Exploit workers, always paying them as little as they can get away with to make more money for their investors.
• Create toxic cultures where employees live in near-constant fear and frustration.

You may think me dystopian but these things go on daily in corporations all over the world. And ultimately executives think they are right to do these kinds of things because their only responsibility is shareholder value. They take no responsibilities to do good in the world – or even avoid doing bad.

In fact, they have been so immersed in this kind of thinking that they can do incredible harm and feel no remorse. I have seen way too many press releases where a CEO explains why she/he fired 1,000s of employees to “enhance stakeholder value” without showing even a shred of regret or emotional investment in the fact that their leadership is now harming 1000s of families.

And that is why I think we need a new kind of executive – one that is motivated primarily by doing good. Or, in other words, by increasing happiness.

And I do see a lot of these leaders. They are not perfect people but they have a clear vision of what they want in the world and rather than just maximizing shareholder value, they want to create more happiness in 4 domains:

1. For themselves
2. For their employees
3. For their customers
4. For the world

These leaders create organizations that are a force for good in the world. They lead in a way that is sustainable – not just environmentally but also economically and psychologically.

Their employees’ lives are better and happier for working there. Customers’ lives are improved by the company’s services or products. And the world is in some way a better place because this company exists.

And don’t ignore the first one: These leaders are happy themselves, because they know that their leadership is making things better, not worse.

There are many examples of these leaders in all industries and all over the world. I’ll be writing a book about them next. The ones I know of include Tony Hsieh, Richard Branson, Ben Zander, Ricardo Semler, Lars Kolind, Vineet Nayar, Thyra Frank, Rich Sheridan, Herb Kelleher, Colleen Barrett, Charlie Kim, Patch Adams, Odd Reitan, Ingvar Kamprad, Yvon Chouinard and many, many others.

Your take

Do you see more happy leadership or more if the old kind out there? What does either of them do to you?

And if you know any other happy leaders, I’d love to hear about them.

Related posts

• Video: Leading with happiness
• Should leaders focus on results or people? The answer is yes.
• Why every company should have a CHO (Chief Happiness Officer)

Here is a really scary email I got from a nurse in a US hospital. She was kind enough to give me permission to reprint the email here and you can see my reply below.

I would love to hear your ideas on the healthcare industry.  As you may know, hospitals reimbursement for Medicare are in part determined by patient satisfaction.  Management, in turn, has adopted the “customer is always right” in order to secure positive feedback. As you can imagine, this has not worked.

At the same time, nurses are quitting by the truckloads.  Employee morale is at a ridiculously low point and it has been so ongoing that the phrases you hear from nurses are, “Well, its better here than anywhere else”.  This is particularly concerning since it is seemingly so bad here.  Let me say that the nurses I work with absolutely love taking care of people.  It is the hurdles that are placed in front of us that make the job frustrating.

We work at critical staffing levels routinely, are floated to areas we have not been adequately trained, and are given unreasonable patient loads. It is unsafe.

A patient died recently and was not on the monitor at the time.  The organizations answer was to have staff sign a book at during the shift stating that the monitor was checked and all patients were on them… the reason the patient was off the monitor was because the nurse didn’t have time to do it.

We were critically staffed and even the charge nurse had a full team with 2/3 other nurses floated from a lower level of care and not trained to take care of this type of patient.  When the house charge nurse informed management that the reason was related to staffing, she was written up.

I don’t know of a single nurse who isn’t afraid of being fired.  Nurses routinely lie about this because to voice it would cost them their job.

It would be nice to be able to quit and move to another facility, however, it isn’t any different at other facilities.  This problem is prevalent, endemic, and critical.

Here is an example of the culture…
The hospital policy is for every nurse to take a 30 minute lunch break (its actually the law)
If you don’t take a lunch you can be written up
There is nobody here to relieve you for your lunch
Not enough staff on the floor to safely leave for lunch so we all eat at the desk while we work

We are not supposed to lift patients. There are 3 lifts in the entire hospital so we have to lift patients
When I informed the wound nurse that the increase in pressure ulcers were from staff being given too many patients to take care of properly and no lifts, I was told that we had plenty of lifts and to use proper body mechanics.

I don’t know if you have any ideas….but I’m hoping that you do.

And here’s my reply:

Thank you so much for your email. I have worked with some Danish hospitals and I see many of the same issues you point to, primarily that budget cuts lead to permanent understaffing.

It’s terrible. If there’s one industry where jobs should be fulfilling and meaningful it’s healthcare, because there you get to work directly on making patients’ lives better. But of course, this is impossible when you’re not given the resources to do the job well.

What happens in that case is that jobs become incredibly stressful and frustrating because employees see that the system is hurting patients instead.

Here’s what I think hospitals need: A rebellion. Nurses, doctors and other employees need to stand up and protest conditions in some way that management can not overlook.

I gave a talk about being a workplace rebel – you can see it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU8l4fhcxk0

This will not be easy – but neither is the current situation.

The obvious question is: What can a group of employees possibly do against a huge entrenched and uncaring system? And the answer is We don’t know. Nobody knows what we can do until we do it.

I wish I had something more specific to offer but I don’t think there are any easy solutions to this situation.

I once worked with a large insurance company, where the claims handling employees were measured on a number of factors, including average customer wait time on the phone. This is a very typical metric or KPI for call centers and customer service centers but it suffers from one fundamental flaw: That number is outside of the control of the employees.

The math is simple: Wait time depends on how many calls come in minus the number of calls employees handle. The latter is something employees can control, the first one is completely outside of their control.

Wait times = calls coming in – how many calls we handle.

In the case of this insurance company, employees were busy and wait times were going up because of the weather. An unusually wet summer had resulted in several floods all of which lead to a massive increase in the number of calls coming in.

As an employee of this insurance company you have very little influence on the weather and yet your performance rating is directly affected by it. This is patently unfair and a surefire recipe for unhappiness, frustration and stress at work.

What happened in this case was that the claims handling employees would get a weekly email with a red graph showing how much they were falling behind on their KPIs. This graph was also proudly displayed in all offices and in the cafeteria and covered in every department meeting. And every week it just got worse, even though the team was doing their very best and working as hard as they possibly could.

Even though all employees and leaders knew that the weather was to blame, this still significantly lowered morale and created a lot of stress.

Workplaces everywhere are giving employees metrics and KPIs in the hope of measuring and ultimately increasing performance. I am incredibly sceptical of this whole approach, but it is especially damaging when your performance is rated on factors you do not control.

We know from any number of studies that a lack of perceived control and self-efficacy leads to frustration and stress so if your workplace has to have metrics, at least make sure that no one is measured on factors they have no control over.

And remember: It’s not enough for the metric to be partly under your control. If just one component of a metric is outside of your control, the whole metric is. In the example above, even though the number of calls employees handle is something they can control, the weather clearly is not and therefore the whole metric is suspect.

In the case of this insurance company, we got them to scrap that metric and instead focus only on the number of calls handled – which is something employees control directly. This made the employees much happier at work which in turn made them more productive and the number of calls handled actually increased week by week.

Your take

What metrics and KPIs are you measured on? Are they inside or outside of your own control? Do you find them generally beneficial, ie. that they make work more pleasant and help you do a better job or generally detrimental?

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not.

That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

– Warren Bennis

The TV show Parks and Recreation recently ended and while I was sad to see it go, the final episodes were awesome and very satisfying.

I have admired the show for a while not just for being very funny and moving but also for how much the cast and crew obviously loved their work.

Here are 3 lessons any workplace could stand to learn from the cast of Parks and Rec.

3: Have someone nice at the top

In this clip Chris Pratt talks about the positive atmosphere they had on the set and how that started with their biggest star (#1 on the call sheet) Amy Poehler.

2: Give people freedom to screw up

Here the cast talk about the freedom they have to improvise lines because the set is “a super-safe environment” as Jim O’Heir who plays Garry/Jerry/Larry/Terry on the show puts it.

I love that – it reminds me of an article I wrote previously about Why You Should Celebrate Mistakes at Work.

1: Praise each other

Here are two clips from a late night show where the cast plays a game in which they have to toast each other in 20 seconds.

Could your team do something like this?

I think we all know that the world of movies and TV is not necessarily very happy. Just for contrast, here’s a list of movie co-stars who hated each other’s guts.

So to see a group of people who clearly love each other  working together to create something amazing is all the more encouraging and I think there are some lessons here for workplaces all around the world.