Everybody knows that happy people do good work.

It might be true but it’s misleading too. Happy people and good work are correlated but they aren’t cause and effect. In fact, research shows that it actually works the other way around, people who do good work are happy.

Any manager who believes that to get good work out of their staff means making them happy first is looking down the wrong end of the telescope. Managers should focus first on making their staff successful — helping them grow, appreciating their work, making them feel responsible — and they’ll be happy.

Not an end it itself

But neither happy staff or good work are ends in themselves.

The result of all this good work and happiness is better experiences for customers.

Happy people doing good work put more effort into creating better products and providing better service. It doesn’t take Sherlock to work out that customers love the results: products that sing, beautiful design, effortless functionality, smiling service, attention to detail, total presence, focus. You name the measure, anything positive scores more highly with a happy, successful, engaged, and motivated workforce.

Which is good, but still it isn’t the nub — happy customers aren’t an end in themselves either.

All the happiness that’s floating around is useless without the success and sustainability of the business itself.

Start the ball rolling

Leaders shouldn’t challenge themselves just to make customers and staff happy (I’m sure you can do both if you try. Every time). The real challenge is to do it whilst making more money than you spend — which, by the way, lights up owners with success and happiness too.

So here at last is the point: successful sustainable businesses are made with happy and successful customers benefiting from happy and successful staff.

How to start the ball rolling? Make your staff feel successful.

Of course you have to pick your moments, but in general the trick is to do whatever it takes. You might have to set the bar a little low in the beginning, give praise for even the smallest thing and highlight effort rather than results. Whatever it takes.

But when the ball is rolling, use its momentum to climb those hills.

Neatly filed under Leading,Skippiness on December 16, 2010

Does it have to be the leader who comes up with new ideas?

It’s certainly part of the job.

Somewhere in every leader’s job description is something about formulating and managing strategy so it’s definitely in the mix, but must it be their job and their’s alone?

No matter how good a leader you are, there’s one cliché you can’t outrun: nobody is as smart as everybody. And nobody can have as many ideas as everybody can have together.

That’s just maths.

The equation? Great stuff is more likely when you have more people dreaming up great stuff.

So if you’re looking for a source of red hot ideas on how to improve service, cut costs, sell more, or any other kind of innovation … don’t just look in the mirror.

Go to the front line, ask a question, and get your pen out.

Most employees deal with more problems, complaints, issues and snafu’s in a day than you’ll hear about in a month. They’ve been struggling against the system for years and are chock full of ways to improve everything from the voice mail message to the value proposition.

If only you’d ask.

And that’s a BIG point.

A my-door-is-always-open policy never really works. People are too busy, too shy, or just don’t think their idea is important enough to cross the boundary – even if it’s as simple as sticking an envelope in a suggestion box.

Innovation isn’t a waiting game. It’s farming — sow the seed that ideas are important, provide a climate that encourages them to show their heads and grow towards the sun. Reward anyone who helps them on their way.

In other words, you have to ask for help and then show — through action and attention — that ideas are worth nurturing. That ideas have value.

The upside is plain to see. Highly engaged employees actively looking to innovate and serve customers better.

As a leader, you probably can’t stop yourself having ideas, but remember that you’re not alone.

Don’t wait. Seek out and encourage your colleagues, cultivate the ground and shower the best ideas with follow-through.

Neatly filed under Leading,Managing,Skippiness on December 9, 2010

There are times when every thing’s going well. Everyone’s doing their job, you’re doing your job, wheels are turning. Lovely.

And then a fire breaks out.

You jump into the fight to dowse flames and smash problems.

When Thing Go Wrong

Getting involved when things go wrong can be time consuming and draining, yet it’s a perversely thrilling part of leadership. (Don’t tell anyone I said this, but it’s kinda fun.)

Get sucked in too often though, let it become your standard operating procedure, and your team will see you as a professional fire fighter hanging on to a hose — more mess-cleaner-upper than makes-things-happener — and they’ll be right.

But leadership isn’t a fire truck and it’s not about hotspots.

It’s a bus on a journey to some place new.

Sure, every vehicle needs a fire extinguisher and someone who knows how to use it, but it’s only for emergencies. When you gotta use it, you gotta use it, but most of the time you should concentrate on the road ahead.

When you focus your attention on things that drive the bus along, not only do you put more time into making the most difference, you’re also showing everyone what should be at the top of their to-do list.

Get Involved When Things Go Right

A great way to shift emphasis is to get involved when things go right.

Look for anything that contributes forward motion and celebrate every success you see. I’m not saying overdose on awards or go party mad, just sprinkle a little fairy dust to make the good stuff sparkle.

• Go see a customer who’s just signed up for more business. Ask what your company is doing right. Spread the word.
• Sit in on a project meeting. Stay quiet. At the end of the meeting say you’re excited about the project and they should keep at it.
• Talk about progress whenever you can. “Let me take one minute to update you on …”

Leaders must always be prepared to haul on some breathing apparatus and step into the heat, but the most effect you can have (and the most fun to be had), is where things are going right.

Neatly filed under Leading,Skippiness on November 18, 2010

Some marketing messages just hit you between the eyes.

I was in Philidelphia’s Reading Terminal Market to discover the delights of the famous philly cheesesteak and the sign in the picture had me straight away.

“Pizza & Cheesesteaks” is the simplest kind of marketing message, relying on the idea that if you want a pizza or a cheesesteak, and you want it now, you should stop wasting your time and buy it here. It’s a straight forward tactic that worked well for the cheesesteak that day and for commodity products any day.

But what if your product is a bit more complicated than fast and cheesy food?

Leading a team that wants to skip to market with a reputation for great products means weaving four simple ideas into every part of your go-to-market thinking. The first two often get lost under the heading of marketing — remember the old saying though, marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department — the second two are pure product development, but all four are built from the ground up.

Simple Description

What is in the box? The idea here is to give your customers a simple way to describe what you have to offer, whether it’s cheesesteak, a micro-blogging platform or a jet engine.

If you’re struggling to work out what you’re selling, listen in to what your existing customers already call it. Don’t worry about trying to differentiate here — the in-the-box question isn’t supposed to turn up a unique answer, but a framing one.

Simple Value

Why would I buy it? If I’m in the market for what you sell AND you come up with a great reason to buy, you have a least half a chance of turning me into a customer.

So what’s the value, what will it do for me? Will you fill that huge sandwich shaped hole in my stomach, connect me to the world in less than a minute, haul an aeroplane full of paying passengers/cargo into the sky at the lowest cost per unit?

Of course, the best marketing messages are stuffed full of differentiated offers and compelling thoughts. Marketing communications people spend their day doing this but they sometimes lose sight of the true value. However persuasive the copy, and however sophisticated the message you have to get across, make sure you don’t obscure the simple description and simple value of what you have to offer.

The point of marketing is to ease a customer’s path to your door — good marketing means I’m more likely to try, and even persist with a product for a while — but the success of the product comes when I incorporate it into my daily life and tell my friends about it. And that means it better be simple to use too.

Simple to Use

Don’t make me work (too hard). Marketing may provide customers but the product lives or dies in the hands of the customer.

Any product that’s difficult to use risks a future covered in dust and destroys almost all chance of positive word-of-mouth. Products should be as intuitive as possible but the creators are usually the worst judges — so get out of the building, talk to customers, test, test, test, and then act on the results.

Simple to Extract the Value

Help me be successful. Ultimately, you have to deliver the value you promise. You’re not selling widgets, you’re selling what the widgets can do for the customer.

Send your customers on an unsupported voyage of discovery and they might get to the promised land but more likely they’ll bob around on rough seas. Build a support network around your customers that helps them get exactly the result they wanted when they dipped into their wallet.

The Ultimate Benefit

Of the four simple things, the ultimate benefit is the value that customers extract. Great products, reputations, and word-of-mouth are all built when customers do things more quickly, more easily, more cheaply, or just better than before.

The ultimate benefit means success for the customer and success for you.

The success of my cheesesteak? My stomach complained but my face was smiling.

Neatly filed under Leading,Making Promises,Skippiness on July 29, 2010

I’ve been lucky to spend the last few years working with people who want to find a better way of building products and companies they can be proud of.

It’s been quite a school yard with hundreds of meetings, workshops, lunches and late night debates.

This manifesto is the result. You can DOWNLOAD IT HERE as a Free PDF.

I’ve tried to sum up how you can use clarity and cohesion to build teams, companies, products and services, and how to get everybody working together for a common cause.

It’s for anyone with the ambition to skip to market. That is, it’s for leaders and managers in start-ups, established companies, charities, not-for-profits and anyone else interested in bringing out the talent, energy and enthusiasm of their people so that together they can do something extraordinary.

A few things you’ll get out of reading it:

• Why customers love some products and some companies
• Where companies go wrong and what to do about it
• A common cause of success or failure of a company
• What organisations actually look like
• The wavelengths-of-change that affect how companies evolve
• A framework for working beneath the surface of your business

Whether you like it and find it helpful or hate it with a passion, please let me know. You can add comments below, send me an email, Tweet me @sn1ck or just put a message in a bottle and hope for the best.

If you do find it useful though, please spread the word in every way you can think of.

DOWNLOAD THE MANIFESTO HERE and don’t forget to skip.

Neatly filed under Skippiness on July 18, 2010