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.

  • Metrics

    It’s nice to see that Fast Company agrees with me on the values and pitfalls of metrics :o)

    Here’s a current Fast Company article on the “what gets measured gets done” thinking.
    And here’s one I wrote a while back, and a more recent one.

    Fast Company:
    In fact, the jobs that are most effectively reduced to single quantities are the ones that are the most one dimensional. The broader a person’s responsibilities, the more complex and subjective the evaluation. Measures become more ambiguous. There are more stakeholders with a wider range of needs. Evaluations come at specific points in time, but there are always short-term versus long-term tradeoffs. In the face of such complexity, do you want to motivate only what is measurable?

    Me:
    And this is the whole point: In all organizations, much of the work done and much of the value created is unmeasured and maybe even unmeasureable. Let’s say a person has a great day, and spreads a good mood in his department. Can you measure that? No! Is it important? Certainly! It can have a significant impact on that departments productivity… So what get’s measured is not what get’s done. There’s so much else being done that has huge impact on your organization, which will never be measured. We must learn to live with this!

  • Psycopathic corporations

    The Corporation is a Canadian documentary released last year, which has an interesting premise: Under current law, a corporation is a person. But what kind of person?

    Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a ?person? in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employs a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. What emerges is a disturbing diagnosis.

    Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation?s operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

    I like the premise, and as Noam Chomsky says in the movie, you must distinguish between the system and the individual. It is perfectly likely, that most individuals in a corporation can be nice, thoughtful, compassionate people, yet the resulting system shows behaviour that is selfish, greedy and short-sighted.

    While this behaviour is certainly prevalent in some corporations, I think that more and more organizations are starting to realize, that this way of doing business is not sustainable, and are making positive changes.

    I had the pleasure yesterday of visiting the offices of IKEA in Denmark, to interview them for my book on happiness at work. About 8 months ago, they gave their entire check-out staff a 20% pay raise. They did this partly in recognition of the fact that these people have one of the hardest jobs in IKEA while getting the least amount of money, and partly because they think it will make them money in the long run. This is very far from psycopathic behaviour. It shows a creativity and maturity, based on the realization that there is no inherent oppostion between making money and doing good.

    Sample clip here.

  • Quote

    We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With all these wonderful and innate desires calling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structure or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear and coherent identity, a self that we can organize around.

    – Margaret Wheatley in A Simpler Way

  • The law of two feet

    Inspired by a question on the OSlist (the Open Space mailing list), I wrote the following observations on the law of two feet. The law of two feet states, that in Open Space meetings, any time you feel that you’re not learning and not contributing, you can use your two feet to go somewhere else.

    This of course stands in startk contrast to many other kinds of gatherings, where it is considered impolite, counter-productive or rude to leave in the middle of a session.

    The question was:
    The Law of Two Feet gives you the chance to “step out” of those situations, which seem to be awkward and problematic but if you are brave enough and stay there, maybe you can solve your problems. Isn’t it dangerous to step out of each situation which we find at first sight uncomfortable or boring. Maybe it is just the temptation to escape and avoid something.

    I’ve struggled with exactly this dilemma. If people leave at the first sign of trouble, will they grow and learn? The funny thing is, that stating the law of two feet does NOT induce people to just up and go at the first hint of conflict. Paradoxically, people are probably more likely to stay, and definitely more open and constructive when they know that it is OK to leave – even if they don’t use that option. Being in a difficult situation is made infinitely worse, if you know that you can’t get out of it.

    Also, stating that people are free to leave, is no more than stating a fact. OS participants can get up and go any time they choose – I mean nobody’s tied them to their chairs. In fact this is true of any kind of meeting. There is nothing holding you in your chair, other than your own decision to not get up and leave. So acknowledging the fact that you’re free to go brings us a little closer to how things are, brings us more in tune with reality, than saying “You have to stay for the entire session”.

    This is one of those paradoxical situations, where you actually achieve the opposite of what you might think, ie. where reminding people of their freedom to leave, probably makes it more likely that they stay :o)

  • Coffee, tea or … a chat with the airline CEO?

    Inc. Magazine has an article about JetBlue CEO David Neeleman, who regularly puts in a stint on one of his flights, serving and meeting his customers.

    As we sat there, buckling our seat belts and checking out the televisions in front of us, a middle-aged man with slightly graying hair stood up in the front of the plane. He had on the long apron that JetBlue flight attendants wear, with his name stitched into it. “Hi,” he said, “my name is Dave Neeleman, and I’m the CEO of JetBlue. I’m here to serve you this evening, and I’m looking forward to meeting each of you before we land.”

    This is waaaaay cool. He’s meeting his customers and his employees first-hand. He’s out there sensing and reinforcing company culture. And most of all, to me at least, he’s showing humility. He demonstrates that he’s not above his employees and his customers by serving them.

    Every CEO of every company anywhere, needs to consider doing something like this!

  • Motivation games

    Yahoo has a whole section on Work/Life health with some interesting stuff in it. I especially enjoyed some of the games describes in this article.

  • Nonviolent communication

    Nonviolent communication (nvc) is an excellent tool, especially for communicating in difficult situations. Like telling an employee he’s fired, criticizing someones work or reprimanding a child.

    The Center for nonviolent communication have an excellent overview of nvc.

    Marshall B. Rosenberg, the man behind nvc says in an interview:
    We call the language that we teach ?giraffe language,? though its official name is ?Nonviolent Communication.? I use the image of a giraffe because it?s a language of the heart, and a giraffe has the largest heart of any land animal.

    Unfortunately for myself, I was taught to speak ?jackal language.? You see, a jackal is closer to the ground. They get so preoccupied with getting their needs met that they just can?t see into the future like the tall giraffe. Jackals speak in ways that block compassionate communication, because they?re motivated out of fear, shame, and guilt.

  • The problem with metrics

    Can you know something, that you haven’t measured? Of course you can. I would actually argue, that by far the largest percentage of what you know about the current state of your organization was not something you measured – it was knowledge that came to you via some other process than objective metrics. A few recents posts in different weblogs have been talking around this topic.

    On Intellectual Capital Punishment Sam Marshall (via Smart Meeting Design) wrote about an article in Financial Times:

    What did disappoint me though, was the quote from HP’s CKO, Craig Samuel: ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. Shame on him for using such an outdated cliche. It reinforces the view that management is something you do with spreadsheets. He should be pushing an agenda that changes expectations about what information you need to manage, relying much more on trusting perceptions and qualitative evidence.

    On Reforming Project Management Hal Macomber wrote that:

    When a supervisor, manager, or organization declares measurements people will quickly adjust their behavior to correspond to their understanding of the measurements… But most organizations have too many measurements… the practice of establishing these measurements keeps management detached from the exactly the operations that they are interested in performing well. Try something else: forego the measurements. Get engaged instead.

    Chris Corrigan took a more political perspective and wrote that:

    How do I know I have four apples? I count them. This is notable because the subjective truths, the good and the true (in Wilber’s terms) are truths that only exist if you participate in them… To simply sit back and accept the measured approach (pun intended) is to give up responsibility for the truth, and to become complicit in the system that generates that truth from outside of its subjects.

    I was thinking about this when a thought struck me that may be painfully obvious to everyone else, but seemed kinda interesting to me. I thought that there are two reasons why we measure anything:
    1: To know
    2: To become aware

    Measuring something will ideally give me concrete, specific knowledge, but it will also affect whatever it is that I’m measuring. Remember the experiments they performed in the car industry (in the 50’s I think) where they modified working conditions to increase productivity? For instance, they turned up the lighting in an area, and that made the workers more efficient. They tried dimming the lights in another area and, strangely, this also increased productivity! What affected the workers’ productivity in these cases was not more or less light, it was a couple of guys with clipboards in the background constantly taking notes. (On a side note, the notion that you can’t measure anything in a system without affecting the system is also a consequence of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics.)

    So metrics aren’t bad. Not at all. The problem comes mostly when metrics are seen as the only way to increase knowledge and awareness – eg. when HP’s CKO, Craig Samuel says ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’.

    The question then becomes whether you will allow yourself to trust knowledge obtained without objective metrics and, frankly, I believe that not to do so is absurd. I would even take it one step further, as I did in a previous post and say that most of the important stuff that goes on in an organization is
    a) Not measured
    b) Not even measureable

    Metrics are used to generate both awareness and knowledge, but to treat metrics as the only trustworthy source is absurd!

  • The Paradoxes of Being a Servant-Leader

    I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Meng at the Kaospilots chaordic conference, and he mailed out this quote, which illustrates the paradox of being a servant leader, who must be:

    Strong enough to be weak
    Successful enough to fail
    Busy enough to make time
    Wise enough to say “I don’t know”
    Serious enough to laugh
    Rich enough to be poor
    Right enough to say “I’m wrong”
    Compassionate enough to discipline
    Mature enough to be childlike
    Important enough to be last
    Planned enough to be spontaneous
    Controlled enough to be flexible
    Free enough to endure captivity
    Knowledgeable enough to ask questions
    Loving enough to be angry
    Great enough to be anonymous
    Responsible enough to play
    Assured enough to be rejected
    Victdorious enough to lose
    Industrious enough to relax
    Leading enough to serve

    – Brewer, as cited by Hansel, 1987

  • At the chaordic conference

    I just hosted a session at the chaordic conference here in Aarhus. I talked about the practice of chaordic organizations, based on my experiences from Enterprise Systems, Arena and the happy at work project. I set myself the challenge of doing the presentation based solely upon practices – what is it that we do (or did) in these chaordic organizations. No values, no principles, no beliefs – just hardcore actual practices that will help a chaordic organization emerge. Not that these are the only practices that will support chaordism (chaordicity?), they’re what’s worked for me. This also gave me a chance to think about what the practices are, and here’s what I came up with:
    Open space meetings
    This is the backbone of the organization. Regular meetings which are open to the whole organizaton, This is where big decisions get made, and where responsibility gets delegated.

    Workgroups
    This is where the actual work gets done. Each workgroup is defined at the open space meeting, and then goes and does the work. A workgroup may have a budget and a charter, and as long as they stay within that, they don’t need to ask permission – they can do what they want. If they need to exceed what was decided at the ope space meeting, they must ask for permission to do so at the nect open space meeting. Workgroups are open to anyone who’d like to participate.

    Wiki
    Since decision making and work is distributed among meny people, it’s important to have a place to centralize information. We use a wiki site for this. If you don’t know what that is, you can read more about it here. Each ongoing project has a wiki-page with all the relevant information, and the names of the people working on it, so you can contact them if you have any questions.

    Try it!
    In a distributed organization, it’s very important to cultivate an attitude of “Try it!”, meaning that when decisions are made, you don’t need to analyze everything. Rather than planning for three months and then coming out with “the perfect plan”, you can outline some alternatives and then decide to try one. It may not work, but then you can try something else. No decisions are set in stone, if something doesn’t work, we’ll do it differently.

    Yes, and…
    Yes, and… is a very powerful method for meeting other people. It means saying Yes to new ideas and then adding your own input. It’s about not automatically saying no, which can otherwise be very tempting. You can read more about it here.

    In my experience, these are the practices that have led to a chaordic organization. The big advantages of these organizations has been that they are:
    Alive – people are enthusiastic and energetic
    Efficient – Stuff gets done fast and well, because people work on the stuff they like
    Dynamic – They can adapt to different situations
    Fun – They’re great places to be!