I recently blogged about the value of nice bosses and why being nice, considerate and empathetic can actually be quite a challenge for managers. Basically, nice managers are much more likely to make their employees happy and nice managers get better results. However, some forces in business and psychology conspire to make bosses less nice than the could be. Read the article here.

In the latest edition of our newsletter (read more and sign up here), we launched a survey to get a feel for the level of niceness currently found among managers:

The survey only has 5 questions and takes about a minute to do – you can really help us out by taking it here.

So far, the results are… interesting.

First question was: Is your boss nice. Fortunately, it seems that most are:

76% say their boss is mostly or always nice. The pattern repeats when we ask about most managers in the organizations:

So far so good. But here comes the interesting part. Compare these two questions:

94% of you say that having a nice manager matters to you (88% even say it matters a lot) yet 72% of you say that being nice is not a required trait of managers in your organization. That is a major disconnect right there. I think we need to make many more workplaces realize that being nice is not just nice – it should be an absolute requirement for anyone in a management position.

This is reflected in many of the comments on the survey:

I’m lucky to work for a very nice boss right now, but I have worked for miserable bosses in the past. These miserable bosses breed miserable teams and employees. It was such a relief when a miserable boss left the company – a collective sigh of relief from employees.

Ouch!

I’ve often wondered if it’s the job that makes a director/manager into Uncle Joe Stalin or if they were that way to start with. Does anyone have an answer to that question?

I wrote about this in my original blogpost about nice managers. Being given power tends to do some bad things to us. So some managers are born Stalins, others go Stalin as a result of becoming managers.

It is so unfortunate how my boss is disrespectful to myself and others and how she gets away with it. She’s nice to those above her and behaves however she feels like it to the rest of the people below her. I just started this new job in June and am already looking to leave. It’s very unhealthy to be in such an environment. It’s too bad that the crappy bosses never get sought out and fired or, at the very least, reprimanded.

Double ouch!

People get ahead here regardless of whether or not they are nice. It is very discouraging. Nice guys get laid off. And they wonder why morale is poor.

Ouchouchouch!

But this comment takes the cake:

We seem to be naturally selecting for jerks – aggressive win-at-all-costs tyrants. Sad really. So much potential and people just end up checking out.

This is precisely what we need to avoid. Remember that people tend to hire in their own image – so nice managers hire nice people and jerks hire jerks.

Your take

Is niceness a trait you want to see in your boss? Who’s the nicest boss you’ve ever had? Or the nastiest? What did he or she do? What did that do to you and your colleagues? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.

Related reading

• How not to let annoying people annoy you.
• The power of nice – your ultimate resource if you want to explore the value of being nice.
• Bob Sutton’s blog – the author of The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss always has something fascinating to say on the value of being nice.

I consider “work,” in its most universal sense, as meaning anything that you want or need to be different than it currently is.

Many people make a distinction between “work” and “personal life,” but I don’t: to me, weeding the garden or updating my will is just as much “work” as writing this book or coaching a client.

– David Allen in Getting Things Done

I’ve been exploring the question “What is work” on the blog recently. I even got sneaky and asked “What is the opposite of work“?

However, I’m really liking the definition above by David Allen. What do you think?

“We all want to live in a democratic country. None of us would accept living under totalitarian rule. So why do we accept that many workplaces are run like dictatorships?”

Traci Fenton is the founder and CEO of WorldBlu, an organization that helps workplaces around the world become more democratic and less based on “command and control”.

WorldBlu also publishes an annual list of the world’s most democratic workplaces. The 2010 list was announced in Las Vegas in June and we were there for the event, where some of the companies that made the list presented. It was incredibly inspiring to hear from companies like Davita and Zappos how they practice democracy.

From our standpoint it’s also interesting to see that democratic workplaces are also invariably happy workplaces. We are much happier at work when we feel that we are part of creating the future of the company, rather than just footsoldiers who must always follow orders.

Traci gave a great talk at our annual conference on happiness at work in Copenhagen in 2009. Click on the video above to watch Traci’s entire talk (17 minutes). In it she:

• Shows why democratic companies are happier and more successful
• Gives some great examples of democratic workplaces around the world
• Outlines the 10 principles of organizational democracy

If you’d like to put your organization on the path to democracy, you can become a member – and eventually even apply to be on the WorldBlu list.

Your take

Is your workplace a democracy or a dictatorship? Are you in on vital information and important decisions or are you kept in the dark? Do you even want democracy in the workplace, or is it easier when a few people make all of the decisions? Please write a comment, I’d love to know your take.

If you really want to dive into the topic of happiness at work you should absolutely sign up for the Happiness at Work Summit which starts today October 4th and runs for 4 days. You’ll get tips and ideas from some really smart people including Srikumar Rao and myself.

I had a great 1-hour talk with Uta Langley, and when you sign up for the summit, you will get my take on why happiness at work is so important and how exactly you can become happier at work.

And it’s free!! So sign up right here.

I recently asked a seemingly simple question here on the blog:

What is the opposite of work?

A week later there were 30 creative, insightful comments on that simple question and there are some interesting trends you can notice in them.

But first this: I had an ulterior motive for asking this question, and it was of course to get at a usable definition of work, as Martin Mouritzen guessed in the 2nd comment:

I guess that really depends on how you describe “work”. I love my work, so for me work is not work at all, and I can find myself working in the evening for relaxation.
But: The work I do for relaxation is always something which does not have a deadline, which does not have any set expectations and something which can challenge me.

So I guess for me the opposite of work is simply “stuff I do to relax”.

Many other comments echoed this. Rowan Manahan wrote:

My evolving definition of work is “Stuff you HAVE to do, whether you want to or not, because you are not independently wealthy.”

By that definition, anyone who LOVES their job doesn’t work. It may take a lot of their time and make demands on their energy and availability for other things, but if they wholeheartedly LOVE it, it isn’t work per se.

Robbert took a dictionary approach:

Wordnet defines work as “exert oneself by doing mental or physical work for a purpose or out of necessity”.

As such the opposite of work can be several things:
– Excerting yourself for no purpose or necesity (Sport or hobbies)
– Not exerting yourself for a purpose (Sleep or recovery from illness)
– Not exerting yourself for no purpose (Lazing about, procrastination)

Present in these definitions is that work is what you HAVE to do, which fits in well with the traditional, industrial-age-definition of work. It’s what I do for pay and i do it because I need money to survive.

The problem with this definition is of course that many of us love our jobs and would do what we do even if we didn’t have to.

Ioana took another approach:

I prefer the sociological distinction myself: the opposite of work is leisure. Rest would be the opposite of activity and I don’t think the concept of work can be reduced to activity. I believe the productive aspect is the essential one. Work is productive activity. It usually involves some sort of compulsion, but it might be more appropriate to speak of necessity. In a paid job there is compulsion indeed, but not for other types of work, such as housekeeping (for one’s house) and child rearing, which are done simply because they’re necessary.

This approach emphasizes production – work is that which produces results.

Chris Stapper echoed this:

I want to believe that work is something like ‘creating value’.

And so did Ken Ferry:

Work is what I do to accomplish something.

There were also some silly approaches, like this:

The opposite of ‘work’ is ‘krow’.

Thanks, Luc.

And though Noel Coward did not actually comment on the original post, I still thought of this quote of his:

Work is much more fun than fun.

Rather than try to come up with the most correct definition of work, ie. one that would make sense in an economical, sociological and psychological perspective, I’d rather try to find a definition of work or rather a view of work, that promotes happiness at work in most normal kinds of work.

This immediately eliminates some definitions:

• If work is simply that you do because you have to, then happiness at work is almost impossible by definition.
• If work is only what you do for money, it eliminates all volunteer work.
• If work is only what you do for a purpose, then all aspects of your job that are not productive are no longer work.

I’m not claiming to have the answer yet, but as I see it here are some elements of a definition if work that is conducive to happiness:

1. Work is something you choose to do. You may not have a choice of whether or not to work but you have choice in what work you do.
2. Work is something you’re valued for. Either someone pays you for your work or someone takes the time and resources to organize your work.
3. Work is an activity where you make a positive difference for someone else.

Does that make sense at all?