We recently did two full-day workshops for the Copenhagen division of Danish electronics wholesaler Solar, and they have really embraced workplace happiness. Last Monday, the two managers Carsten and Karsten decided to surprise their people with a friendly greeting. They stood in the reception area that Monday morning and gave each of their employees a friendly, high-energy good morning and a breakfast plate.
Watch this:
Several of their employees wrote us later to tell us how much they appreciated this simple gesture and the spirit it was performed in. Kudos to Carsten and Karsten for taking a good idea and running with it.
How could you greet your co-workers on a regular, gray, boring Monday morning to get their work week off to a happy start?
The Chief Happiness Officer’s Monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.
Linda and Robin (authors of the excellent book The Power of Nice) just blogged about niceness in managers, and their post is one of those bad-news-good-news deals. First the bad news. They write that:
Some scientific studies suggest that being in a position of authority has a unique effect on the human brain, that can cause people to become less sympathetic to the emotions and concerns of others—and as history has shown us, this can have a devastating effect on a business’ bottom line.
I agree completely. There are two unfortunate factors working against niceness in management:
1: Many organizations don’t see niceness as a success factor in managers.
When they promote people to management positions, they may pick people who are professional, experienced, assertive, etc. Studies also show, that they tend to pick people who are taller than average and have good hair. Seriously.
In fact, being nice can actually hinder your career prospects. Just think of the old saw that “Nice guys finish last.”
2: Being given authority can actually make a person less nice.
Bob Sutton wrote about this in The No Asshole Rule:
One of the simplest and yet most fascinating experiments to test the thesis is the “cookie crumbles” experiment. Researchers placed college students in groups of three and gave them an artificial assignment — collaboration on a short policy paper about a social issue. They then randomly assigned one of the students to evaluate the other two for points that would affect their ability to win a cash bonus. Having set up this artificial power hierarchy, researchers then casually brought to working trios plates containing five cookies.
They found that not only did the disinhibited “powerful” students eat more than their share of the cookies, they were more likely to chew with their mouths open and to scatter crumbs over the table.
Fortunately, there’s good news too in Linda’s and Robin’s post.
In order for NICE guys who made it to the top to avoid falling victim to the power paradox, all they need to do is flex their NICE muscles, daily.
They go on to give some specific actions that managers can take to stay nice. Go read their post, it’s excellent.
And of course I hardly have to add that nice managers are essential to happiness at work. They’re much more likely to be happy themselves, much more likely to have happy employees and hence are much more successful.
Your take
Is niceness a trait you want to see in your boss? Who’s the nicest boss you’ve ever had? What did he or she do that worked? What did that do to you and your colleagues? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.
“$1.6 million mistake on sister site @6pm.com. I guess that means no ice cream for me tonight. Details: http://bit.ly/blfLnF”
Apparently an employee had made a mistake while updating the prices on the web site, which meant that for a whole day, no item could cost more than $49.95. Some of their items cost a lot more. Ouch!
Now what do you do? In many organizations a mistake like this would be the starting point for a witch hunt. Who is responsible? How did they screw up? What would be an appropriate punishment?
But this is not how they do business at Zappos. At the link above, Tony Hsieh writes:
To those of you asking if anybody was fired, the answer is no, nobody was fired – this was a learning experience for all of us. Even though our terms and conditions state that we do not need to fulfill orders that are placed due to pricing mistakes, and even though this mistake cost us over $1.6 million, we felt that the right thing to do for our customers was to eat the loss and fulfill all the orders that had been placed before we discovered the problem.
PS: To put an end to any further speculation about my tweet, I will also confirm that I did not, in fact, eat any ice cream on Sunday night.
This is not soft or wishy-washy, it’is a great way to handle mistakes in a business. Rather than stigmatizing failure, we should acknowledge and even celebrate it.
Yes, that’s right, I said celebrate our mistakes. I’ve long argued that we should celebrate success at work, but we should also celebrate mistakes, failure and fiascoes. Here are the top 5 reasons why this is a good idea.
1: When you celebrate mistakes, you learn more from the mistakes you make
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.
When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes.
2: You don’t have to waste time on CYA (Cover Your Ass)
Huge amounts of time and energy can be wasted in organizations on explaining why the mistakes that do happen are not my fault. This is pointless.
3: When mistakes are celebrated, you strengthen creativity and innovation
Randy Pausch, was a college professor who became famous after giving his “last lecture” when he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
In his classes, Pausch would give out an award called The First Penguin to the team that took the greatest risk – and failed. The award is inspired by that one penguin out of a whole flock up on dry land who is the first to jump in the water, knowing full well that there may be predators just below the surface. That penguin runs a risk but if no one jumps in first, the whole flock will starve on land.
And check out this sign that hangs in the offices of Menlo Innovations, an IT company in Ann Arbor, Michigan:
Yep, it says “Make mistakes faster”. They know that mistakes are an integral part of doing anything cool and interesting and the sooner you can screw up, the sooner you can learn and move on.
4: Failure often opens new doors
Also, failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Closing your eyes to failure means closing your eyes to these opportunities.
Just to give you one example: Robert Redford was once an oil worker – and not a very good one. He once fell asleep inside an oil tank he was supposed to clean. But failing at that, opened his way to movie stardom.
5: When you celebrate mistakes, you make fewer mistakes
I know that a lot of people stick to the old saw “Failure is not an option”. But guess, what no matter how many times you repeat this maxim, failure remains an option. Closing your eyes to this fact only makes you more likely to fail. Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because:
People who work under pressure are less effective
People resist reporting bad news
People close their eyes to signs of trouble
This is especially true when it’s backed up with punishment of those who make mistakes.
The upshot
Peter Drucker provocatively suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting. Admitting that mistakes happen and celebrating them when they do, makes mistakes less likely.
James Dyson says this:
I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative…
We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually.
So my challenge to you is to start celebrating your failures. Next time you or someone on your team messes up, admit it, celebrate it and learn from it. Tackle the situation with humor (as Tony Hsieh did) rather than with fear and shame.
Your take
How does your workplace handle mistakes? Is it more like a celebration or a witch hunt? What has been your most spectacular screw-up at work so far? How did you handle it and what did you learn from it? Please write a comment, I’d like to hear your take.
Here’s (yet another) great TED presentation – this one is by Dan Pink and is about the mismatch between what science knows and what businesses do to motivate people.
Dan’s point is that rewarding performance mostly doesn’t work and often leads to worse performance.
For tasks that are simple and straight-forward and require no creativity or cognitive skills, extrinsic motivation works fine and promising people rewards for good performance increases performance.
But as soon as a task requires even rudimentary cognitive skills, performance decreases if you offer performance rewards. And the larger the reward, the worse the performance.
A couple of weeks ago I was writing my regular op-ed piece on leadership for a major Danish newspaper and I was plumb out if ideas. It’s funny how your creativity can get stuck when you’re looking at an empty word document and a looming deadline :o)
So I asked for ideas in my twitter feed (follow me on twitter) and got tons of input, of which the email I got from Joe D. Calhoun, Director of Business Development at Paraco Gas Corporation was by far the coolest.
Here is Joe’s email in full – read and enjoy, it’s excellent!
When it comes to leadership … we have all been told leaders are born, not made, that leadership is about ego, nice guys finish last. BUNK …. Leadership is all about happiness. Seeking a means to find the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If you’re happy and your know it … share it … find a way to lead others to it … nice guys DO finish first.
Leadership is also NOT about a title or a job or position. I have had jobs that were very low on the totem pole of life and yet I was looked up to for my leadership of taking on a task and seeing it through to completion … all the while doing it with my “excessively happy” style. Volunteerism is leadership of the happiest sort. A labor of love … working for free (and I have been doing a lot of that lately as I have been un-employed) and supporting a cause – sometimes one that is not sexy and glamorous. This year I helped an organization plan, solicit donations, decorate, facilitate live and silent auctions, all to raise $20,000 for the treatment of drug and alcohol additions. I loved it … Leadership is love.
Leadership takes energy … do you know any energetic people that are not happy? Energy to face the challenges of anything with a smile on your face and find new ways of solving problems.
Ask most leaders … they will tell you … they feel “called” to lead. Every calling has an innermost happiness associated with it. I recently accepted a job offer … I knew 30 minutes into the interview that I would take the job … it felt right in my gut. I felt like I was supposed to be doing this. This sense of calling came while discussing the opportunity and the company. I had prepared three pages of notes for the interview … questions … things I thought I wanted to discuss. Instead we talked about the industry … laughed and I read the plan they had for expansion of the department. I was the right peg for the hole … I knew it … they knew it. Leadership is having a calling and answering it … and that feeling in your gut is ultimately tied to “how happy will this make me?”
I’ve been inspired by Zappos for quite a while now. Not only are they insanely successful, it’s also a genuinely happy workplace, judging from all I’ve read about them.
Here’s a nice little piece from abc news that shows just how happy this company is:
MAN, that’s good to see :o)
Here are my top three reasons to love zappos.
1: They have a culture that promotes happiness at work
Zappos is committed to defining and living a positive, happy culture. Their values are:
1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble
That’s your recipe for happiness right there.
2: They pay new employees to quit
At the end of your training as a new Zappos employee, the company offers you $2000 if you quit right away. This means that the people who stay are committed to the company and the culture.
3: They behave like human beings. Great human beings
The fact that people are happy at work (yes, even the ones answering the phone) means that they give incredibly good customer service.
And often that service goes above and beyond. I dare you to read this story and not shed a tear.
The upshot
Zappos gets it, as do more and more companies. When a business puts its people first (not the customer and not the investors, but the people) you increase happiness, creativity, productivity and profits.
This is not rocket science – and companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, SAS Insititute, Disney, Pixar and many many others will testify to the fact that it works.
So how does your company prioiritize? Are employees at the top of the list – or is that spot taken by profits, growth, customers, or..?
After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature…
As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?
The article gives us the most thorough deconstruction of the whole field of management and the magical, unscientific thinking behind it.
The economy may be bad but Wim Roelandts isn’t really bothered much by that because, as he told me, this is his 8th recession so far.
Wim’s worst crisis as a leader came in 2000 when Xilinx, a computer chip manufacturer based in Silicon Valley, got hit hard and fast by the dot-com crisis. In the December 2000 quarter their revenue was $450 million – 9 months later, their revenues for the September 2001 quarter was down to only $225 million.
Something had to be done, and fast, but what? Wim Roelandts, an affable Belgian who is usually seen with a smile on his face, was the CEO back then and was clearly facing some tough choices. And while Xilinx’ competitors wasted little time in laying off a large percentage of their staff to cut costs, Wim felt here had to be a better way.
He came up with a plan for his organization and the 2,800 people in it and called it “Share the pain”. The plan had three major components.
1: Cut salaries, not jobs
Wim felt strongly that if they laid off people now, they’d just need to rehire them 5 or 6 quarters later when business improved. Couldn’t there be a way that kept people on even during the crisis?
So they instituted a pay cut that was progressive and voluntary. Progressive meant that your pay cut depended on your salary – the higher your salary, the higher your pay cut. These were some typical pay cuts:
Job
Pay cut
Production-level employees
0%
Junior-level engineers
6%
Senior engineers and middle managers
9%
Directors
12%
Vice Presidents
15%
CEOs (that’s Wim!)
20%
So while production employees were not affected at all, Wim himself took the largest pay cut – 20% of his salary. They might have given everyone a 10% pay cut, but chose this way because it shares the pain – not the pay cut. When you’re a production-level employee with a salary of around $30.000-40.000 trying to live in the Silicon Valley area, a 5% or 10% pay cut could really damage your quality of life. When you’re a VP, 15% is entirely survivable.
Secondly the pay cut was voluntary. This wasn’t part of the original plan but it turned out that Xilinx employees in Europe would have to agree to take the pay cut voluntarily, so Wim decided to make it voluntary for everyone.
Amazingly, every one of the 2.800 employees chose to take the pay cut – except one. And no, that one person was not singled out for reprisals of any kind. Voluntary means voluntary. Thinking back to this entire time, the one thing that Wim is the most proud of, is that everyone agreed to the pay cut in order to save their co-worker’s jobs.
Later in the process, when the pay cuts turned out not to be enough to keep the company profitable, they introduced more measures, like closing the company for one day every other week and the option of taking a paid leave of absence to take an education.
Though Wim was very careful never to promise that there would be no lay-offs, this plan meant that Xilinx got through the crisis without laying off one single, solitary employee.
2: Communicate openly
Wim knew that honest communication was essential. His motto was to “keep communicating and force his management team to communicate.”
In practice, he organized meetings with his entire management staff and the managers below them as well. He knew, that when employees had questions, they wouldn’t come to him or the VP’s, they would come to the managers closest to them, so it was important that they knew what was happening and remained optimistic.
This is not easy, as Wim readily admits. “I didn’t know any more than anybody else what was coming and so the tendency is to close your office door and don’t talk to anybody because if you talk with someone, they can ask questions that you don’t know the answers to.
But that’s actually the wrong thing to do, you have to get out there. You have to talk with people and even more important you have to force your management to get out and talk, talk to people, tell them when you don’t know but also tell them all the things you know and good friend to give people some hope that things will get better soon.”
In these sessions with the managers, Wim would go over the company’s situation honestly and thoroughly and then they would discuss how to communicate this to the employees. Typical topics of discussion were:
What can we do as managers?
What do we say?
How do we act?
A key aspect of these meetings was also to listen to the middle managers, so they felt good about the company’s situation and could pass that feeling on to their people.
3: Involve employees in decisions
They involved people in all new initiatives by consulting focus groups of employees. They’d get 20 employees together, tell them about what they were planning to do and get their honest feedback.
One specific decision that came out of these focus groups concerned new employees. Originally, the company had planned not to include them in the pay cuts. When this was tested, the new employees protested – they wanted to be treated like everyone else and “share the pain” too.
An intended byproduct of the focus group sessions was that information about the crisis and how it was being handled spread quickly throughout the organization. When the initatives were announced to the employees, most people had heard about them already, which created more trust.
Wim himself
That was his plan for the organization, but there was another equally important aspect: Himself!
On a purely personal level, Wim did three things to handle the crisis. First, he did his best to be positive. Yes, the very survival of the company was at stake, but he still had to believe that there was a way out.
Wim put it like this:
“You have to be positive yourself. If you are negative and you come in the factory everybody’s going to be looking at you and getting depressed. So however bad it is, however sad you feel, however worried you are, you come to work in the morning and you put on a big smile and you feel optimistic and you exude optimism and positive thinking.
When you are the CEO and you see the numbers go down every week or every day, it’s very easy to become depressed yourself and you really have to find the inner strength.”
Secondly, he saw the crisis not only as a threat but also as an opportunity. This has become something of a stale and ridiculed cliché (the next time some tells me, “We don’t have problems, we have opportunities,” I may punch them) but Wim saw this crisis as a chance to get creative and try something new. To him, creativity and innovation shouldn’t just be applied to creating new and exciting products but also to leadership – to find new and exciting management solutions.
And thirdly, Wim saw this as a chance to prove that there is indeed a better way to handle a crisis than the tried-and-stale ones. He wanted to show the world, that this can be handled differently. “I’m gonna show them” may not be the noblest motivation, but it’s not uncommon. All the leaders I interviewed for this book expressed the same desire to “show them!”
Now make no mistake, Wim faced a lot of resistance to his approach. He had heated discussions with some board members, who wanted to know why he didn’t just lay off 10% of the employees when everyone else in the industry was doing it. The same arguments came from outside the organization from financial analysts, who also would have been much more comfortable with the traditional approach.
Time proved Wim right and the result of this creative approach to crisis leadership was amazing. The results were:
Profitability – Except for the second quarter of 2001, when there was an inventory write down, Xilinx was profitable every quarter of that recession.
Customer satisfaction – Xilinx kept the same people in sales so the customers saw the same people they were used to talking to.
Market share – Xilix gained 15 point of the market share during the crisis. Because they kept their people they could keep momentum.
Product development – They had time and people to keep developing new products – essential in their high-tech industry.
Recruitment and training savings – After three quarters the market started to improve. Because Xilinx had kept their people, they did not have to spend a ton of money hiring and training new people.
Motivation and happiness at work – This showed employees that they were truly valued. Not just on paper and in good times, but also in a down-turn.
At first employees were skeptical, seeing it as a cheap trick. “Yeah, you say you’re not doing lay-offs, but it’s just a matter of time,” was a common attitude. But as many other companies in the area had mass lay-offs and Xilinx employees saw friends losing their jobs and having to sell their houses they started to come around. During that time Xilinx participated in the Fortune Magazine 100 best places to work and came in the top 10 – in the middle of the company’s worst crisis ever.
The effect was also felt outside the company. One day, about two years after the crisis when Xilinx was back on track, Wim was just arriving at the office when he was approached by a female employee who happened to arrive at the same time.
She told him this story:
“My husband got laid off and so yesterday evening we had a family meeting with the children. We had to tell them that their father had been laid off and that they had to do some savings and we had to be very careful how we spend money, to make sure that we get through this tough time until our dad finds a job again.”
One of my children asked ‘but mom what is going to happen if you get laid off’. and I was so proud to say that I work at Xilinx and Xilinx doesn’t lay off people.”
Wim told me that this was his proudest moment in the whole process.
This is a fantastic video of Colleen Barret talking about leadership and service at Southwest Airlines:
Southwest Airlines gets it. Their priority is:
Employees
Customers
Shareholders.
This is the way it has to be.
My favorite quote from her talk:
“The most important priority that we have is our employees… I spend 85% of my time on employees and on delievering proactive customer service to our employees… They in turn spend their life trying to assure that the secondmost important customer to us, ie. the passenger feels good.”
Imagine it’s your first day in a new job. You sit down at your desk for the first time, and waiting for you there is a note from your new boss.
In the note your boss bids you a warm welcome to the company, and then says this:
1: My most important priority is your happiness and productivity at work. If there’s anything I can do to make you happier and more efficient – tell me right away. This isn’t idealism, it’s good business, because happy people are more productive.
2: I will not burden you with endless rules and regulations. You’re an adult – I trust you to use your best judgment.
3: You have my full permission to screw up, as long as you own up to it, apologize to those affected and learn from it.
4: Please tell me when I screw up so I can apologize and learn from it.
5: Please make sure to hunt down people who do great work and praise them for it. I will do this as much as humanly possible, but I can’t do it alone.
6: If I get it right occasionally, I’d love to hear about it from you, too :o)
7: I will always have time for you. My calendar will never be so full that my next free time to talk to you is three weeks from next Friday.
8: I want to know about you as an employee AND as a human being. I DO care about your private life, about your and your family’s health and well-being.
9: Life is more than work. If you’re regularly working overtime, you’re just making yourself less happy and more stressed. Don’t join the cult of overwork – it’s bad for you and the company.
10: I expect you to take responsibility for your own well-being at work. If you can do something today to make yourself, a co-worker or me a little happier at work – 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.
