Have a very happy weekend :o)
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Introducing: The Happiness at Work Newsletter
This is it – today is the day that I can finally announce our international newsletter about happiness at work.
We’ve had a thriving and highly popular newsletter in Danish for years, but somehow never got around to doing one in English. Well, no more procrastination – here it is :o)
When you sign up for it you can expect:
- About one email a month.
- Tips, links, inspiration and ideas about happiness at work.
- Articles and videos about happiness at work.
- The occasional thinly veiled attempt to get you to buy some of our stuff :o)
- At least one belly laugh per newsletter.
- No spam what so ever – ever!
And you can sign up right here:
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Another great comment
One of my most popular posts is still the one about The Cult of Overwork and it just got another great comment from Dee:
I work in retail, and it’s true, some enjoy spending all their time at work, and that’s fine. If you want to spend 60 hours at work, that’s your prerogative. What I don’t like is the judgmental attitudes surrounding work hours– the unsaid expectation that if you don’t work 9-9, you’re a failure, or letting your team down.
No, working 12 hours, five days in a row makes me miserable AND a failure– a failure at my job. I work to live, I don’t live to work, as the old saying goes and, when I first started and was eager to fit in, I bent over backwards keeping a similar schedule. I felt ashamed that my ‘meager’ 12 hour day contribution wasn’t enough, and I felt in ‘awe’ of the woman that habitually came in at 6am and leaving at 9pm. Then one day, about a year into the job, I remember wondering why I had gotten the flu yet AGAIN, (the fourth time in two months!) when it hit me. I was working way too much and almost killing myself. Life is going to get me in the end. I don’t need my job to speed up that process.
Now I work less, work better, and win more accolades, get more sales, and get sick less, all because I don’t conform to the cult of overwork. I’m in the minority, but I’m happy. And that lady? Well, she still works her heart out, and complains the whole way.
That’s the way to do it, Dee! Read the rest of the comment here.
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Friday Spoing
I’m now back from Vegas and the WorldBlu Award celebrating the world’s most democratic companies (it was fantastic – more later) and it’s now time for this week’s Friday Spoing:
Have a happy weekend!
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This is how you improve happiness AND productivity at the same time
Yesterday I spoke to 200 people at Umbraco Codegarden 2010, an annual IT developer conference for web developers who use the open source CMS system Umbraco.
Niels Hartvig, the founder of Umbraco, has a clear vision that focuses on both a good platform (so that the actual product is great) but equally on creating a great community, so that people want to be actively engaged in sharing knowledge, developing code and helping each other.
I kicked the conference off with a high-energy presentation on happiness at work and how these 250 coders, consultants and evangelists can create a happy community and it was very well received.
Then Niels gave his keynote in which he also celebrated the people who have gone above and beyond in their work on Umbraco.
Before I went on, Niels told me that here was one person in particular, that they wanted to celebrate for his excellent work and energy. So this is what they gave him:
They bough him a really fancy espresso machine and had his name and award engraved on it. Not only did it make him happy, it will also keep him caffeinated and highly productive :o) The only problem is that the damn thing weights 18 kilos (35 pounds) and Shannon will have to lug it home to Australia.
This is an excellent way to celebrate a person in front of 250 of his peers because it’s fun, personalized, quirky and relevant – all the hallmarks of a good reward.
Have you ever been rewarded in a similar way? How does your organization reward people who go the extra mile? Please write a comment – I’d love to know your take.
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Interview
I just had a great interview with executive coach Lisa Pasbjerg about a wide range of topics from happiness at work to what happens to people who have all the outward signs if success but still hate their jobs.
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Speaking of mistakes…
Danish physicist, Nobel prize winner and all-round nice guy Niels Bohr once said this:
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
Remember that the next time someone calls themselves an expert. And, yes, I do it too :o)
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Happiness on the field
The New York Times has a great article about the talent school at Dutch football (ie. soccer) club Ajax, where young players are discovered and train to be the stars of the future.But how do you know who’s got it? How can you tell if this or that 10-year old kid will be a football legend? Interestingly, the biggest talents are not necessarily the ones who score the most goals. One coach says:
I am never looking for a result — for example, which boy is scoring the most goals or even who is running the fastest. That may be because of their size and stage of development. I want to notice how a boy runs. Is he on his forefeet, running lightly? Does he have creativity with the ball? Does he seem that he is really loving the game? I think these things are good at predicting how he’ll be when he is older.
At our conference in Copenhagen on May 20, the head of talent development of FC Copenhagen, Denmark’s leading football club, said essentially the same thing: He looks for young players who enjoy the game for itself. Playing football should be the coolest thing ever – even if you’re just practicing on a rainy Monday evening. This means that they also focus on making training sessions and games fun.
I like that approach and I think it translates well into business (unlike a lot of other sports concepts). Essentially, this is what Southwest Airlines does when they “hire for attitude and train for skill.” British food chain Pret a Manger also emphasizes happiness. Jay Chapman, their head of communication says:
You can’t hire someone who can make sandwiches and teach them to be happy, so we hire happy people and teach them to make sandwiches.
What about your organizations? Do you look for talent based only on performance or do other factors count?
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Top 5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work
Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh recently tweeted this:
“$1.6 million mistake on sister site @6pm.com. I guess that means no ice cream for me tonight. Details: http://bit.ly/blfLnF”
Apparently an employee had made a mistake while updating the prices on the web site, which meant that for a whole day, no item could cost more than $49.95. Some of their items cost a lot more. Ouch!
Now what do you do? In many organizations a mistake like this would be the starting point for a witch hunt. Who is responsible? How did they screw up? What would be an appropriate punishment?
But this is not how they do business at Zappos. At the link above, Tony Hsieh writes:
To those of you asking if anybody was fired, the answer is no, nobody was fired – this was a learning experience for all of us. Even though our terms and conditions state that we do not need to fulfill orders that are placed due to pricing mistakes, and even though this mistake cost us over $1.6 million, we felt that the right thing to do for our customers was to eat the loss and fulfill all the orders that had been placed before we discovered the problem.
PS: To put an end to any further speculation about my tweet, I will also confirm that I did not, in fact, eat any ice cream on Sunday night.
This is not soft or wishy-washy, it’is a great way to handle mistakes in a business. Rather than stigmatizing failure, we should acknowledge and even celebrate it.
Yes, that’s right, I said celebrate our mistakes. I’ve long argued that we should celebrate success at work, but we should also celebrate mistakes, failure and fiascoes. Here are the top 5 reasons why this is a good idea.
1: When you celebrate mistakes, you learn more from the mistakes you make
In one company, the CEO was told by a trembling employee, that the company website was down. This was a big deal – this company made most of its sales online, and downtime cost them thousands of dollars an hour.
The CEO asked what had happened, and was told that John in IT had bungled a system backup, and caused the problem. “Well, then,” says the CEO “Let’s go see John!”
When the CEO walked into the IT department everyone went quiet. They had a pretty good idea what wass coming, and were sure it wouldn’t be pretty.
The CEO walks up to John’s desk and asks “You John?”
“Yes” he says meekly.
“John, ” says the CEO, “I want to thank you for finding this weakness in our system. Thanks to your actions, we can now learn from this, and fix the system, so something like this can’t happen in the future. Good work!”
Then he left a visibly baffled John and an astounded IT department. That particular mistake never happened again.
When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes.
2: You don’t have to waste time on CYA (Cover Your Ass)
Huge amounts of time and energy can be wasted in organizations on explaining why the mistakes that do happen are not my fault. This is pointless.
3: When mistakes are celebrated, you strengthen creativity and innovation
Randy Pausch, was a college professor who became famous after giving his “last lecture” when he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
In his classes, Pausch would give out an award called The First Penguin to the team that took the greatest risk – and failed. The award is inspired by that one penguin out of a whole flock up on dry land who is the first to jump in the water, knowing full well that there may be predators just below the surface. That penguin runs a risk but if no one jumps in first, the whole flock will starve on land.
And check out this sign that hangs in the offices of Menlo Innovations, an IT company in Ann Arbor, Michigan:
Yep, it says “Make mistakes faster”. They know that mistakes are an integral part of doing anything cool and interesting and the sooner you can screw up, the sooner you can learn and move on.
4: Failure often opens new doors
Also, failure is often the path to new, exciting opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared otherwise. Closing your eyes to failure means closing your eyes to these opportunities.
Just to give you one example: Robert Redford was once an oil worker – and not a very good one. He once fell asleep inside an oil tank he was supposed to clean. But failing at that, opened his way to movie stardom.
5: When you celebrate mistakes, you make fewer mistakes
I know that a lot of people stick to the old saw “Failure is not an option”. But guess, what no matter how many times you repeat this maxim, failure remains an option. Closing your eyes to this fact only makes you more likely to fail. Putting pressure on people to always succeed makes mistakes more likely because:
- People who work under pressure are less effective
- People resist reporting bad news
- People close their eyes to signs of trouble
This is especially true when it’s backed up with punishment of those who make mistakes.
The upshot
Peter Drucker provocatively suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them, because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting. Admitting that mistakes happen and celebrating them when they do, makes mistakes less likely.
James Dyson says this:
I made 5127 prototypes of my vacuum before I got it right. There were 5126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure. I’ve always thought that schoolchildren should be marked by the number of failures they’ve had. The child who tries strange things and experiences lots of failures to get there is probably more creative…
We’re taught to do things the right way. But if you want to discover something that other people haven’t, you need to do things the wrong way. Initiate a failure by doing something that’s very silly, unthinkable, naughty, dangerous. Watching why that fails can take you on a completely different path. It’s exciting, actually.
So my challenge to you is to start celebrating your failures. Next time you or someone on your team messes up, admit it, celebrate it and learn from it. Tackle the situation with humor (as Tony Hsieh did) rather than with fear and shame.
Your take
How does your workplace handle mistakes? Is it more like a celebration or a witch hunt? What has been your most spectacular screw-up at work so far? How did you handle it and what did you learn from it? Please write a comment, I’d like to hear your take.
Related posts
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5 reasons why “the customer is always right is wrong” – now as an ubercool wall chart
I was recently interviewed for an article in Call Center Magazine and they liked my blog post on The Top 5 Reasons Why “The Customer is Always Right” is Wrong so much that they’ve turned it into a wall chart that is waaaaay more colorful and attractive than my original post. Download it here.
