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.

  • Robert Levering

    Robert Levering is the man behind the “Great place to work” book and concept. Here’s a quote from the introduction to the book

    …I am more optimistic than ever about the prospects for the workplace. When Milton and I began researching this area nearly two decades ago, great places to work were clearly exceptions to the rule. They often were the result of the vision of extraordinary business leaders like FedEx’s Fred Smith or HP’s David Packard. Today more and more senior managers have become convinced that fostering a great work environment is a business imperative. But perhaps more important, employees are no longer willing to put up with the kind of insensitive and demeaning management attitudes that have typified most workplaces since the dawn of the industrial age.

    Grounds for optimism, I’d say. There’s an excellent interview with Robert Levering here.

  • Meditation at work

    Businessweek have an article on medation in the workplace. Vice president Dave Jakubowski of Internet service provider United Online recently turned to a mat and 60 minutes of silence a day, and says
    “I’m in business, and I need results. It’s amazing. I’m able to sort through work challenges in this state of calm much faster than trying to fight through it. And I make fewer mistakes.”

    Via slashdot.

  • Pride on the job

    Once again an excellent article from Fast Company on the importance on pride at work.

    There`s one thing I’d like to add, namely that you can’t “do pride”. Pride is not a practice, it is the result of one or more practices. The article even shows some of these practices like caring for employees, focus on learning, including employees in decisions and focus on long term results. Here’s the list of practices, that I believe promote pride and happiness at work.

  • Job satisfaction and the bottom line

    Gallup have a report from a study involving 200.000 emplyees from 36 different companies, that clearly links high job satisfaction with good financial results. Among other things the report shows that satisfied employees result in:
    * Much lower employee turnover rates
    * Higher customer loyalty
    * Higher sales
    * Higher profit margins

    This is great news for my Project Happiness at Work. And I would love to add something to this study.
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  • Fun

    The more balanced your life is and the more diverse your interests are, the better your thinking will be. If you work 20 hours a day, your product will be crap
    – George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research Inc. in an article in Fast Company

  • Democratic Management in the Real World

    I researched business democracy a little on the net, and I came acrosss this article on democracy in food coops. A teaser from the article: The best-run co-ops weave employee input into every aspect of operations. There is a culture of employee involvement in every decision that impacts working conditions.

  • Leadership

    Last tuesday I hosted a conversation circle on leadership at Arena, and as always it was a great experience. We were a very diverse group, and we had a deep, meaningful conversation on the nature and challenges of leadership.

    One question I was particularly interested in exploring was the role of leadership. What is it that leadership does in organizations and in the world? What is that happens beacuse of leaders, that would not otherwise have happened. In short, “Leadership, what is good for?”. This question is interesting to me, because it examines leadership from the outside. It’s not about trying to understand leaders, or about defining good or bad leadership. It’s an examination of the role that leadership plays. If you have any ideas on this, or any references to information, I’d love to hear about it.

    After this conversation, I was particularly pleased to see that Fast Company have yet another excellent article on leadership, this time by Ronald Heifetz of Harvard.
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  • Disney and creativity

    This article has a brief outline of the Disney-method for evaluating and developing ideas. The method is inspired by the fact, that Walt Disney could play three different roles, when ideas were tossed around the Disney offices: He could be the dreamer, the critic or the realist. And all three roles are vital when new ideas are developed, but ideally you need them in the right order.

    If you criticize an idea to soon, it’s too easy to kill it off. You need to build the idea up a little first, then become critical. However, if you don’t think critically about your idea, you have no idea of whether it will stand up. Finally, you need to be realistic: Is there something good in this idea.

    I have a principle that I try to stick to: Whenever I hear of a new idea for the first time, I always say that it’s a good idea, and try to find the reasons why it’s good. I may off-hand be able to think of a hundred reasons why it’s a bad idea, but I save those for later. Build the idea up first – then try to shoot it down.

  • The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online

    I took a spin on the net looking for material on hosting, which was made kinda difficult by the fact that in an internet context, hosting most often means the technical hosting of an application or a site on a server somewhere. Anyway, one interesting link I did find was an article by Howard Rheingold called The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online.

    This fits extremely well with the ideas on hosting that I’m trying to develop, and almost all the points made apply to both online and offline hosting. Excellent stuff!

  • Interpersonal relations at work

    If you think that all these modern, “soft” management theories of organizational democracy, including people in the decisions and being open comes from a few addle-headed idealists, you should read this article.

    Among other subjects, it talks about W.E. Deming, who “was a hard-headed scientist who arrived at a position that focused on the importance of respect for everyone in the organization and of good communication among them all.” The point being of course, that he was was a theoretician not known for his warmth or gentleness, and he arrived at his conclusions using hard-core scientific and statistical methods. So there!