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.

  • Top performers leaving in droves

    MoneyOne large company finds that many of their top performers are absconding:

    It’s like clockwork. Every year a portion of our top talent decides it’s time to move on. Once those bonus or holiday checks are cashed, the flood gates open and the resignation letters start flowing in.

    They’ve done an exit survey among the top performing employees leaving the company:

    Of the 178 files, 83 people listed money as a reason for leaving. 62 listed it as the only reason.

    Their conclusion: They must adjust salaries and compensation. My conclusion: They’re wrong. Here’s why.
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  • Is your boss a prison warden or a party host?

    Prison vs. Party

    Here’s a scary tale from the real world:

    When I was just starting out as a legal secretary, I worked for two lawyers who I referred to as Good Boss and Evil Boss.

    Evil boss would never look for a file – he would yell for me to immediately find a particular FILE – which would be on his desk where he kept all of his working files.

    In addition he would go through my in-box after I had left the office and rearrange the stack, move his work up and add new post-it notes with different deadline dates.

    Three drafts to any document was the absolute minimum, and he often wanted to see the previous drafts for him to check my work. Consequently, my wastepaper basket was very organized.

    Source

    The old leadership style of “I’m the boss, you must do whatever I say” is being challenged by a different style which is more about supporting people to let them create results.

    While the old leadership style reminds me mostly of a prison warden, exercising absolute power over his wards, the new leadership role is completely different. It’s about making people like their jobs. It’s about realizing that people are in fact free to leave at any time.

    In short, the new leadership style reminds me much more of the host of a party. Here’s how the two roles compare:
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  • A challenge to all managers: Do you know your people?

    How happy?

    I’m going to risk provoking business leaders everywhere and state that any leader worth her salt knows how happy her people are at work. This is a leader’s most basic responsibility. You shouldn’t need to see a pie chart – you should know already.

    The question of “How happy are people in our organization??? is typically handed over to HR who can then distribute a job satisfaction survey that results in a lot of statistics which can then be sliced and diced in any number of way to produce any number of results. You know – “lies, damned lies and statistics???.

    I’m not saying these surveys are worthless. Wait a minute: I am saying they’re worthless. They’re a waste of time and money because they very rarely give a company the information or the drive necessary to make positive changes.

    As I said, you as a leader/manager shouldn’t need a survey to know how your people are doing so I challenge you to a simple exercise. It goes like this:
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  • The strongest force in business (no, not money)

    Driving force

    As a leader, manager or executive, what is your driving force in business?

    Think about it for a second. What gets you out of bed in the morning and makes you take that drive to work? What is behind the choices you make? How do you set your goals and ambitions?

    There are many possible answers. Ask a thousand people and you’ll get a thousand different answers. Money would probably show up quite often. So would power, influence, getting ahead, recognition, security and success.

    But I believe that there is one underappreciated driving force in business. One force that spurs people on to stellar results, wise decisions and strong business relationships. One strong force that, when harnessed in your work life, will make you more efficient and let you enjoy work more.

    One that all business leaders everywhere need to know about and build into their businesses at the most fundamental level.

    Curious yet?

    Here it is: The strongest driving force in business is happiness! Yes, happiness at work.
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  • Top 5 business maxims that need to go – Part II

    Same same

    It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
    It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
    – Josh Billings

    Much well-known business advice is sadly obsolete but can still be found in articles, business books and, not least, in daily use in the workplace. It seems that some companies are still guided by thinking that is sadly out of date – if it was ever true to begin with.

    The worst of these old maxims are not only wrong, they’re bad for people and bad for business. Businesses who use them are making their employees unhappy and are harming the bottom line.

    I recently wrote a post about the Top 5 Business Maxims That Need To Go, listing 5 horrendous examples. I also asked people to contribute the maxims they would like to get rid of, and got some great suggestions, so here are 5 more pieces of bad business advice that are making people unhappy at work and harming the bottom line.
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  • Ask the CHO: Dealing with uncertainty at work

    A reader sent me this question:

    The company I work at “went global”. That means horrible things like many people fired and so. Thus, people are afraid to lose their job, even when I directly asked a manager I trust and he said that “no one from your department will lost his job”. People don’t trust management. Some are cynical, some are afraid, but I think, at different levels, all are unhappy with the situation. I like these people very much, and I would like to do something to confort them, but so far, listening was the only thing I was able to do.

    Additionally, the people from another site are also unhappy, because even when most of them are very capable professionals, they are being threated like… uhm.. incapable kids (not to mention the fact that they know that they were hired because they are “cheaper”).

    Any suggestions to improve the situation?

    First of all thanks for a great question which describes a situation that is found in many workplaces today: A workplace goes through large-scale changes and people wonder “what will it mean for me?” Management may or may not try to create some certainty, but may fail because of a lack of trust.
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  • Tournament theory – the worst argument ever for overpaying executives

    Overpaid

    The executives in your company may be paid way more than they’re worth, but don’t worry – it’s for your own good.

    That’s the point of a recent Forbes article defending overpaid executives which contains the single most disingenuous and illogical argument it has ever been my misfortune to see in a business context. From the article:

    The ugly truth is that your boss is probably overpaid–and it’s for your benefit, not his. Why? It might be because he isn’t being paid for the work he does but, rather, to inspire you. In other words, we work our socks off in underpaying jobs in the hope that one day we’ll win the rat race and become overpaid fat cats ourselves. Economists call this “tournament theory.”

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  • Top 5 reasons to make your startup a great place to work – and how to do it

    Happiness leads to profits

    When I co-founded an IT company back in 1997 we had many dreams, but one overarching ambition: We wanted to make it a happy place to work.

    We’d tried working for organizations that cared only about sales, billable hours and profits and we were determined to break away from this mentality and make our company a place where people had fun, did great work, constantly learned and developed and had time for their private lives and families.

    It turned out that we were right on the money. The company became happy and successful and four years later when the dot-boom happened and the company’s very survival was threatened, that is what saved us – the fact that everyone at the company loved working there and were willing to go extraordinary lengths to save it.

    Quite simply, happiness at work saved our startup.
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  • Why job descriptions are useless

    Job description

    Let’s do a quick reality check on job descriptions. Ask yourself these three questions:

    1. When was the last time you read your job description?
    2. Do you remember what it says?
    3. When was the last time you did something at work that you could not have done without your job description?

    If your answers are 1) When I interviewed for the job, 2) Ehmmmm… not really and 3) I don’t think that has ever happened – then maybe it’s time to rethink the value of job descriptions.

    I say job descriptions as they exist today amount to little more than organizational clutter and could easily be dropped altogether. Here’s why we should lose’em and what to do instead.
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  • The six practices of happy, succesful workplaces

    This chapter is not yet finished – but I really need your help, so I’m posting it now.

    Am I on the right track? It kinda feels like the advice here is either too simple or too complex to be useful. I want people to read this chapter and be inspired by what other great companies are doing. To get ideas they can implement themselves.

    Is it working? What do you think?

    How to make your business happy – in practice

    What can a workplace do to make its people want to be happy there? Given that raises, bonuses and perks don’t work what are the things that do? We could start from scratch and invent some methods and tools, but it makes much more sense to learn from the best practices already out there. What is it that the best, happiest and most successful companies do to reach high levels of happiness, excellence and profits? What makes their people consistently choose to be happy at work and lets employees and leaders work together to create great workplaces?

    And let’s not just look at what they do, let’s look at what they do that can readily be stolen implented in your workplace. Let’s focus on practices that are:

    • Generic – so they apply to almost any workplace, big or small, private or government
    • Effective – so they make a real difference
    • Fun – so they make people happy
    • Good for business – so they’ll get you more results

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