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.

  • Make your organization happy

    Hal Rosenbluth had made a provocative decision: As CEO of Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency employing 6.000 people, he decided that his company would put the employees first. Where other companies aim first to satisfy customers or investors, Rosenbluth made it their first priority to make their employees happy.

    The results were fantastic. Record growth, record profits and, most importantly, customers raved about the service they got from Rosenbluth’s happy employees. Hal Rosenbluth explained the company’s approach in a book whose title elegantly sums up his philosophy: “Put The Customer Second – Put Your People First And Watch’em Kick Butt”.

    A company’s commitment to its values is most thoroughly tested in adversity and Rosenbluth hit its share of adversity right after 9/11. Overnight, corporate travel was reduced to a fraction of its former level and it recovered more slowly than anyone predicted.

    Rosenbluth tried everything in their power to avoid layoffs. They cut expenses. Staff took pay cuts and so did managers and executives. But in the end they had to face it: Layoffs were inevitable and they decided to fire 1.000 out their 6.000 employees. How do you handle this situation in a company that puts its people first?

    In his book’s most moving chapter, an epilogue written after 9/11, Hal Rosenbluth explains that though layoffs don’t make employees happy, not doing the layoffs and then going bankrupt at a later date would have made even more people even more unhappy.

    Hal Rosenbluth recounts how he wrote a letter to the organization explaining the decision and the thinking behind it in detail. The result was amazing: People who’d been fired streamed into Hal’s office, many in tears, telling him they understood and thanking him for their time at the company.

    Rosenbluth’s letter also contained a pledge: That those remaining at the company would do everything they could to bring the company back on track so they could rehire those who’d been fired. Six months later, they’d hired back 500 out of the 1.000 and the company was solidly on its way to recovery.

    Choose happiness

    Once you’ve made yourself happy at work, it’s time to spread that good mood inside the organization and make more people there happy at work. This is obviously a bigger job but it is entirely possible and while some companies are born happy, many more are made happy somewhere along the way.

    The next few chapters are for leaders at different levels, who want to spread some happiness in their team, department, division or, heck, clear across the entire business.
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  • Think a raise will make you happy? Think again!

    Rich. But happy?

    Most people think that having a higher income would make them happier. They’re wrong!

    That is the conclusion of a study by Two Princeton professors, economist Alan B. Krueger and psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who say that:

    The belief that high income is associated with good mood is widespread but mostly illusory. People with above-average income are relatively satisfied with their lives but are barely happier than others in moment-to-moment experience, tend to be more tense, and do not spend more time in particularly enjoyable activities.

    The problem is that people still act on their mistaken belief that making more money means being happier. In short they choose income over happiness:

    Despite the weak relationship between income and global life satisfaction or experienced happiness, many people are highly motivated to increase their income. In some cases, this focusing illusion may lead to a misallocation of time, from accepting lengthy commutes (which are among the worst moments of the day) to sacrificing time spent socializing (which are among the best moments of the day).

    Which is just a fancy way of saying that you may think that switching jobs to get a 25% raise in return for a 2-hour commute or a 70-hour work week or ten days a month on business travel is a good deal. You’re wrong. You’d be happier with a lower salary and more time with your friends and family.

    So if you’re trying to make yourself happy at work by chasing that raise, bonus or incentive, your strategy is doomed to fail. The same goes for managers trying to increase their employees’ happiness, motivation and productivity through the same means. It won’t work! It takes something else to make people happy at work. I wrote about more about it in these two chapters of the Happy At Work Book:

    Read more about the study here.

  • Great Discussion on Corporate Hierarchies

    On his blog The Mutualist, Kevin Carson has a great summary of a previous discussion on my blog about the need for hierarchies in organizations. His running commentary on the discussion is priceless – go read it!

    The discussion Kevin summarizes can be found in these two posts:

    He ends his summary with a deeper question: Why do organizations have to grow so big that they need hierarchies to begin with. Damn good question, Kevin. I give a few observations in a comment on his post.

    Is this a distributed conversation or what? :o)

  • A model for happiness at work

    A simple model for happiness at work

    A simple 3-step model shows what it takes to make a workplace happy, and it’s shown in the figure below.

    Happy model

    The model has three layers, three areas which make a difference to people’s happiness at work. Each of these layers are important, but one is often ignored – and it happens to be the most important one.
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  • Jerks at work – and five ways to deal with them

    Guard dog

    CEO Hal Rosenbluth was once about to hire an executive with all the right skills, the right personality and the perfect CV. His interviews went swimmingly and he’d said all the right things, but something about him still made Rosenbluth nervous, though he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was.

    His solution was genius: He invited the applicant to a company softball game, and here he showed his true colors. He was competitive to the point of being manic. He abused and yelled at both the opponents and his own team. He cursed the referees and kicked up dirt like a major league player.

    And he did not get the job.

    (From Hal Rosenbluth’s excellent book The Customer Comes Second).

    Jerks at work and how to lose them

    Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: The vast majority of people in any given business are nice. They’re helpful, sympathetic, likable and quite simply good people. Only a tiny, tiny minority are consistently unpleasant or abrasive.

    You sometimes hear in business that “nice guys finish last” ie. that in a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog (hence the picture above) business climate you need to be something of a jerk to get results. Consequently people with difficult or abrasive personalities are tolerated (or even celebrated) in many organizations because “they may not be likeable but they get results”.

    I beg to differ. Jerks have no place in the modern business world and cause much more damage than they’re worth. This is not a matter of namby-pamby, soft-shoe “why can’t we all be nice” thinking; it comes down to the fact that jerks are bad for the bottom line! Luckily, many people and companies are starting to realize this and are doing something about it.

    This blogpost presents five different anti-jerk approaches that every workplace might consider.
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  • Quote

    Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by people who could dress whatever way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family.

    – Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, in his excellent book Let My People Go Surfing

  • Does he or doesn’t he?

    Lazy dog

    Some of Fred Gratzon’s readers refuse to believe his claim that he’s the laziest man in North America. If he is, then how could he have created two successful multi-million dollar businesses? Fred’s answer is classic:

    I did not do it with hard work. I did not do it by busting my butt. I did it by having fun – so much fun that people were attracted to that fun. I then picked the most competent attractees to be on my team and off we went. Whatever “hard work??? there might have been, I had long since turned into a game and we had fun “playing??? it.

    Read Fred’s post – it’s excellent.

    That’s a blueprint for happiness at work and success right there! I agree 100% and wrote a post a while back on why laziness is the major force behind my success and happiness. Also read my review of Fred’s brilliant book The Lazy Way To Success.

  • Top 5 reasons why “The Customer Is Always Right” is wrong

    The customer is always right?

    When the customer isn’t right – for your business

    One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.

    She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.

    Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’

    In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’”

    The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:

    1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
    2. Convince employees to give customers good service

    Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.

    Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

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  • What makes people unhappy at work

    Unhappy at workWe’ve looked at what we think makes us happy at work but doesn’t. We’ve looked at what actually does work.

    But what actively makes people unhappy at work? What are the most important things to avoid? Let’s take a look at that.
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  • Organizational Democracy primer

    Traci FentonMy good friend Traci Fenton gave a talk at Harvard Law School on Organizational Democracy. You can hear the talk here and David Weinberger live-blogged it. Check it out, it’s a great primer on the concept of democratic organizations.