You have to honor failure, because failure is just the negative space around success.
– Randy Nelson of Pixar in this excellent article in Wired
Yes! The whole failure is not an option thing is just misguided. Honor failure. If you’re not failing occasionally regularly, you’re not doing anything interesting.
I know a lot of wonderful, cheerful people whose voicemail greetings sound like the recordings of a badly depressed person. “Hi,” a slow, lifeless voice goes, “you’ve reached the voicemail of… [whoever].” Pause. “Please leave a message after the tone”.
Meanwhile I’m wondering if I should call a suicide hotline and stage an intervention.
So this monday tip is simple: Make yourself a cheerful voicemail greeting. One where you sound happy and upbeat. One that will make whoever hears it a little happier at work.
A cheerful voicemail greeting will not only cheer people up, it will also improve the quality of the voicemail messages you receive – if the last thing people hear before they leave you a message is a happy voice, they will tend to be more positive themselves. And of course, when people start calling each other and hearing cheerful voices everyone will become a little happier at work.
This tip also applies to those “Out of office” email messages. Sure you can simply write “I’m out of the office and will be back on xx/xx”, as most people do. But you could also do like the HR manager of one of Denmarks largest grocery chains. The last time I emailed him, I got this back:
I’m not in the office, and will be back on xx/xx. Why not contact one of my stellarly talented colleagues instead?
Stig
Chief of the HR tribe
This email delivers the necessary facts and it also says something positive about Stig who is indeed a happy guy and about Fakta where he works. Let’s bring some more fun into the workplace – and this is one easy place to start.
The Chief Happiness Officer’s monday tips are simple, easy, fun things you can do to make yourself and others happy at work and get the work-week off to a great start. Something everyone can do in five minutes, tops. When you try it, write a comment here to tell me how it went.
Eurogel, the first european edition of the GEL conference, is happening in Copenhagen on august 31st and september 1st. Read all about it.
What the heck is GEL? Good question!
Short for “Good Experience Live”, Gel is a conference, and community, exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, art, society, technology, and life.
The goal of the conference is to create an environment that allows our multi-disciplinary community to explore the idea of “good experience” in a variety of contexts.
Previous participants say GEL is:
- Unexpectedly extremely relevant to how I approach my everyday job
- A way to learn from, and meet, the people who will be changing the world next year
- Inspiring, Exciting, Energizing
- The most unique “conference” experience I have ever known. The thought provoking nature of the event must be witnessed in order to fully appreciate the impact
The people I know who’ve been to the American Gel’s all say it’s amazing, inspiring, weird and wonderful.
I’ll definitely be there and I’ll also be conducting a pre-GEL-event on august 31st (more on that later)! What are you waiting for – sign up for EuroGEL already! You know you want to :o)
Semco has no official structure. It has no organizational chart. There’s no business plan or company strategy, no two-year or five-year plan, no goal or mission statement, no long-term budget. The company often does not have a fixed CEO. There are no vice presidents or chief officers for information technology or operations. There are no standards or practices. There’s no human resources department. There are no career plans, no job descriptions or employee contracts. No one approves reports or expense accounts. Supervision or monitoring of workers is rare indeed.
Most important, success is not measured only in profit and growth.
– Ricardo Semler
And yet they increased annual revenue between 1994 and 2003 from $35 million a year to $212 million. Read more about Semco here.
My driving force in business has always been enthusiasm. I’m easily amazed and get curious and fired up about many different things. In fact, I refuse to work on anything that does not grab me in that way.
I remember one meeting I had with a woman who was… let’s say slightly less positive. At one point in the meeting, she said “You’re very positive, arent you?” I had to agree, that that was indeed so. It was only after the meeting that I realized that she’d meant it as criticism :o)
Positivity has been getting a bad rap at work. If you’re too positive you can be accused of being pollyannaish, uncritical, unrealistic, silly, etc… “Well,” some people say, “it’s all very good for you to be so optimistic but some of us have to work in the real world.”
And while there are many great reasons to be more positive at work, there’s one I’d like to mention specifically:
Being positive at work means you get lucky at work.
(no, not in that way)
Yes, it’s true: Being positive makes you lucky.
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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 (or Mark Twain or Artemus Ward or…)
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.
Here’s my pick of the top 5 business maxims in serious need of an update – with a suggested replacement for each.
UPDATE: Now there’s also a Part II post with 5 more horrendous pieces of business advice.
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I’m introducing a new feature on the blog: I’m now taking questions.
Seriously, ask me anything related to happiness at work. Just call me the Miss Manners or Dear Abby of the workplace.
The way it works is you ask a question (either in a comment to this post or in an email) and I answer it in a post on the blog. If you want me to, I’ll anonymize your question so you won’t get caught asking for outside advice. Go ahead and ask, I’d love to help!
Last week’s tip was about creating positive meetings and so is this week’s. Only this tip is really, really simple. Ready:
Bring a bowl of candy to a meeting today.
That’s it. Bring candy to a meeting. And share it, obviously, I didn’t mean for you to sit there gorging yourself with everyone else looking on enviously.
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Though Jane enjoyed working as the sales manager of Wilbey & Sons, working with Scott, the financial manager, was a constant struggle for her. At every meeting, Scott would take great care to explain why all her ideas were unworkable. Also, Scott was constantly asking for sales projections and financial data from her and always wanted it in excruciating detail. Supplying these figures was taking up a large amount of her department’s already packed schedule. Frankly she thought, he was nothing but a dry, negative perfectionist.
Scott, on the other hand, thought that Jane was a maverick. She always had to interrup meetings with her harebrained schemes and whenever he asked her for the data he needed to keep the company finances in order, she would always stall and make him have to ask her again several times. Jane, he felt, was nothing but a happy-go-lucky, unrealistic show-off.
It got to the point where neither of them could stand to be in the same room together. The company clearly suffered under this conflict between two of its key employees and something clearly needed to be done. Fortunately the CEO had a simple but surprising solution.
I don’t know about you, but I hate conflicts at work. Spending my work days mad at a co-worker, trying to avoid that person and subconsciously finding fault with everything they say or do is not exactly my idea of a good time.
I used to be an expert at dodging conflicts on the job and I’m here to tell you that it just doesn’t work! What does work is biting the bullet and doing something about it here and now. I have seen what looked like huge, insurmountable, serious conflicts go “poof” and disappear into dust when handled constructively. I have also seen an itty-bitty molehill of a problem grow into a mountain that threatened to topple an entire company.
You can’t win a conflict at work. Winning a conflict ie. getting the outcome you want regardless of what the other person wants can be gratifying, sure, but the problem is that the underlying issue has not been solved. It will simply reappear later over some other topic. Much better than winning a conflict at work is resolving it.
And the price of inaction is high, because unresolved, long-running conflicts result in antagonism, break-down in communications, inefficient teams, stress and low productivity. In short, unresolved conflicts make people terribly unhappy at work.
With all of this in mind, here are five essential steps to constructively resolve conflicts at work. The steps can be applied to any kind of conflict between co-workers with maybe one exception – read more at the end of the post.
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Slow leadership is an excellent blog and a great way to increase happiness at work. The latest post is about The Cycle of Respect vs. The Cycle of Contempt..
The new Adam Sandler movie about a guy who gets a remote control that controls life inspired Stephen Shapiro of Goal Free Living to ask: What Is Your Slow Motion to Fast Forward Ratio.
Denmark is the happiest nation on earth. Even though we have the highest taxes. In your face, Steve Forbes :o)
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