The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Leadership

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

  • Podcast about motivation

    PodcastThere is a lot of talk about motivation in the workplace these days. Both from managers complaining that their employees aren’t motivated and from employees complaining that their managers don’t know what makes them tick.

    And frankly, it’s no wonder, because there are some fundamental misconceptions about motivation in the business world. There are four different kinds of motivation, only one of them works, and businesses and managers rely almost exclusively on the three that don’t.

    That is the topic of my first podcast, which you can download here. It’s 23 minutes long and will take up 7 Mb on your computer.

    Please let me know what you think. Is the sound OK? The content? What do you like about it? What can I do better? What great podcasts should I listen to, and get inspiration from? This is my first podcast, but all the cool kids have’em and I wanted one too :o)

  • Work less, do more

    ClockHere’s a quote from the horrible book “You Can’t Win a Fight With Your Boss” by Tom Markert, the global chief marketing and client service officer at ACNielsen. Markert says:

    You can forget lunch breaks. You can’t make money for a company while you’re eating lunch . . . if you don’t put in the hours, someone just as smart and clever as you will. Fact of life: the strong survive.

    [If you ignore this] you might just end up as roadkill – lying dead by the side of the corporate highway as others drive right past you.
    I have always made a habit of walking around early and late to personally see who’s pumping it out. If they are getting results and working harder than everyone else, I promote them.

    Riiiiiight. Remind me never to go work for this guy!

    Here’s how you do it instead, from a comment from Sarah S. on this post about implied overwork:
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  • Journey into leadership: Two interesting days

    New leaderThis post is part of a series that follows A.M. Starkin, a young manager taking his first major steps into leadership. Starkin writes here to share his experiences and to get input from others, so please share with him your thoughts and ideas.

    Dear me! – and dear anyone. Let me pick out two significant days since my last post that are really significant.

    Thursday last week, 9:15 in the morning – everyone comes in systematically late.

    My ops manager/deputy pulls me aside and says that she has had enough of this place, and that she is only waiting for a better salary offer to leave. And that I might as well begin thinking of hiring because two others are going to leave real soon.
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  • National Worklife Balance Week

    HappyOn Monday October 30, the Danish National Worklife Balance Week kicks. It’s a whole week of activites that companies can participate in to create awareness around worklife balance. You can read all about it here (in danish).

    The week starts with a conference about leadership on Oct. 30 in Copenhagen. One of the speakers will be yours truly, talking about how some of the best organizations in the world make their people happy at work.

  • Happy hiring

    SouthwestI found a great interview where Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines explains some of their thinking behind leadership and culture. Here’s what he says about hiring leaders:

    For our interviewing in general and looking for leadership in particular, we use model employees to do it. We bring in our mechanics to interview mechanics, pilots to interview pilots, flight attendants to interview flight attendants, etc. We want their insights. They’re out in the field, they know the kinds of people we want and so we involve them in the hiring process. And of course they can give us some pretty good insight. Most of our pilots have a fairly keen sense of humor. One day a bunch of applicants thought one of our pilots was also an applicant and sat down and started discussing things very frankly and two or three of them eliminated themselves from consideration by their comments. We also watch applicants when they go to the cafeteria and watch how they relate to our people while they’re up there.

    So it’s not just a question of sitting down with them and asking, “Are you a good person? Do you have great leadership qualities???? We try to put them in situations and have conversations where this naturally comes out.

    This is a fine application of Southwest’s “hire for attitude, train for skill” principle. When you put people skills and being a nice person first when hiring or promoting leaders, you get waaaaay better leaders. And waaaaay better employees!

    UPDATE: And this is what happens in real life, when you hire your employees that way (a great story about Soutwhest from Church of the customer).

  • Don’t coddle me at work

    Don't coddle me at work

    Some businesses seem to think that they must protect their employees from all the dangers of working life.

    Before people can be happy at work, the thinking goes, they must be shielded from all manner of ills: angry customers, unrealistic deadlines, unfair decisions, overwork, boring meetings, stress, annoying co-workers, insecurity, diffiult situations, hard choices – you name it.

    Wrong.

    The best and happiest workplaces in the world haven’t become so by shielding their people from problems, but by giving their people the skills, the energy and the freedom to deal constructively with problems.
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  • Part 2 of podcast up at The Engaging Brand

    PodcastAnna Farmery has posted the second (and last) part of our conversation at her blog.

    In the second part we talk mostly about how you can create a happy business. Give it a listen and tell Anna what you think of it!

  • Journey into leadership: Introduction

    New leaderThis post is part of a series that follows A.M. Starkin, a young manager taking his first major steps into leadership. Starkin writes here to share his experiences and to get input from others, so please share with him your thoughts and ideas. This post is the first in the series.

    Hi, I am a young manager who has very recently got his first Profit-and-Loss responsibility in a large corporation where I have to turn around a small and loss-giving company rather quickly.

    Would it be interesting and inspiring if I shared my thoughts and experiences with you on this task?

    A lot of us – statistically at least – work for big corporations that may or may not share our points of view and our ethics. We all have the choice whether we want to make the best of it, quit or just stay passive. How do you make a difference if you are just a pawn in a chess game with 100.000 pieces?

    That is what I want to explore and share with anyone, and that is why I agreed with Alexander to post those thoughts and experiences on his site, which is read and contributed to by a lot of inspiring people, who at least have in common that employees are real people, not “human resources”.
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  • Announcing: Journey into leadership

    New leaderI’m totally excited about announcing the newest feature on the site: Journey into leadership.

    I was contacted by A.M. Starkin, a young manager who recently got his first profit-and-loss leadership position of a small company. He must turn this company around from loss to profits and must do so quickly.

    He believes that happiness at work is a major part of the solution, but is also a part of a larger organization that may not always share these beliefs.

    Starkin will be chronicling his journey, thoughts, ideas and questions about once a week, but not on a fixed schedule.

    This is real life, as it happens. Not a business case, edited after the fact. Not an anecdote from a “friend of a friend”. This is a real person in a very real situation, and I’m totally jazzed about following his journey and about seeing how the readers of this blog, as a community, can help Starkin.

    You can see all the posts about Starkin’s journey into leadership here.

  • How did you lose your innocence

    CleanDavid Maister asks a great question: How did you lose your business innocence?

    I keep meeting people who have given up their ability to believe in the power of standards and ideals (or to believe that anyone else in business has them).

    An example: “the firm pretends that it wants to inspire us, but the truth is that we do boring work, and so do those more senior than us. We cannot imagine that there are people who do work they are still excited about. That’s a luxury we cannot dream about. They just want us to work harder and get the people who report to us to work harder.???

    So here’s my question to you: How did we / you end up here? Clearly, something was missing from my education and upbringing – the world forgot to “beat out of me” my ideals, but seems to have done a good job of beating them out of most other people.

    I’m really interested: What (specifically) happened to you that made you lose your innocence about how business (or academia) was run (stories please?)

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