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
Tags: happy, motivation

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
Tags: cohesion, culture, motivation

Ever suffered the long haul getting your team to change the way they do things?

Most leaders have.

It’s frustrating, but the idea that leadership means you can get your people to do what you want is a myth.

Let me qualify that. Changing simple things is pretty straight forward, but if you want something that involves a change in mindset, life becomes more difficult.

What do you want?

Whether you want something easy or hard, the first step is always to say what you want.

I know it sounds obvious. But the number one reason people don’t do what’s expected of them is … they don’t know what’s expected of them.

For simple changes, just letting the team in on the secret might get things off and running, lickety-split.

Shifting mindsets though – to improve customer service or to be more innovative, say – can feel like a wrestling match. But change isn’t an opponent, it’s something to bring in to your corner.

I don’t think you’ll find motivation is the hurdle. Most people want to do a good job. More often the barrier is a simple lack of understanding. Listen hard, and you might just hear your people saying, “I don’t know what [customer service/being innovative/any other conceptual change] means in my job. How. Do. I. Do. That?”

Show and Tell

In other words, a speech (or ten) that simply urges an abstract change might sound like it’s full of good ideas, but it’s probably just noise.

Put your message in context with home-grown stories that show what you mean. It’s the difference between showing and telling, between parables and commandments.

For example, for better customer service, tell tales about heroes. “Did you hear about Brian? He drove home on his lunch break to pick up a jacket to lend to a customer who’d lost his own in an airport snafu?”

Using parables gives change a human face. They show what you want in real life situations, and they break down complex concepts like “improve customer service” into simple and easy actions.

Neatly filed under Leading
Tags: motivation, people, story

A while back I talked about using icons to teach what you stand for. How about just saying it out loud to everyone who’ll listen?

Say it Loud, Say it Proud

That’s what sandwich makers Pret a Manger do. In the very small seating area of their Piccadilly store where I took this picture the other day, every wall had at least one board like these, each telling the story of Pret’s passion for food. You probably can’t read the words under the pictures so here’s the text from the top left board:

Pot Pourri — Made from delicate muslin material, our tea bags are fashioned into little purse-like pyramids, filled with organic whole leaves, hand picked in the Tea Gardens of Sri Lanka.

Ask a Pret team member to show you one — we think the Calming Camomile is particularly beautiful. A lucky coincidence really — what they’re designed to do (and do extremely well) is make a cracking cup of tea.

And it’s labelled Passion Fact No.72. The other two boards in the picture are about in-store baking and looking after basil leaves. I saw more, and I know they’ve been at it for years.

The message? Pret stands for quality, freshness, and care.

Commitment + Transparency = Accountability

Here’s the question … are all those little pictures aimed at the consumer, the staff or the management?

Visible commitments like these play well with customers who like to know what they’re getting, but transparency is even more powerful for the staff and management. With such a public commitment to quality, can anyone inside the company — whether a sandwich maker, food buyer or senior executive — be in any doubt about what’s expected of them every day? About choosing quality over price? About decisions over storage, or packaging, or recruitment or any other operational detail?

This isn’t about top down management. It’s about accountability.

Public declarations make everyone responsible, not only for living up to the commitment itself but to call out inappropriate behaviours too. Seeing this on the wall, what team member wouldn’t argue against reducing quality to save a penny a tea bag?

We don’t all deal in freshness or food, but we can all make our intentions clear, and ask everyone around to help us live up to them.

What boards would you hang on the wall? What else can you do to make your commitments transparent and to hold each other accountable for living up to them?

Neatly filed under Foundations,Making Promises
Tags: motivation, Pret, values

In the last five years I’ve run well over 6000 miles in marathon training. Over that period I’ve been completely sidelined with injuries for over 30 weeks and have run with niggling problems for maybe a third of the time.

There are two things I should point out about that last paragraph: motivation is not a problem, I run every day it’s remotely possible; and, these kind of stats are not unusual for a marathon runner.

Over those five years I’ve used 16 pairs of running shoes and a set of specially made orthotic insoles. Without going in to the glorious marketing-speak of individual running shoe models it’s a fair assumption that my equipment choices have made running easier and less stressful on my body. Right? Or, without all those shoes I’d be injured even more. Right?

Maybe not.

Over the summer I read Christopher McDougall’s book, Born to Run, which promotes the idea that humans have evolved to run, and running shoes aren’t good for us. Apparently:

“there’s no evidence that running shoes are any help at all in injury prevention. In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies — not one — that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.”

My assumption: I need running shoes. The reality: I don’t need running shoes.

Everything I thought I knew is wrong.

What assumptions do you have, impacting your organisational life every day, that stand on no evidence?

The Science of Motivation

Here’s a possible example. In his recent TED Talk on the Surprising Science of Motivation Dan Pink highlighted the ineffectiveness of extrinsic motivators, such as bonuses, most of the time. Despite much of this research being 50 years old, many (most?) managers still rely on the wrong headed ideas of how to get things done.

The key lesson:

“There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does […] If we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks we can strengthen our businesses […] and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world.”

What to do when everything you know is wrong

So much for running shoes and extrinsic motivators. What do you do when something comes along that challenges your assumptions? Instinct may be to turn away and go back to the devil you know. Try this instead:

Stop – just think about it for a moment, is it even remotely possible that what has always seemed true, is maybe not the whole truth? Does this new thing nudge up against problem that just seems a part of the woodwork? Be open to possibility.

Look – dig into the the data. Strip away all the personality of the issue, what does the cold steel of a few facts show you?

Listen – who else is talking about this? Can you trust them? Ignore the doomsayers, trolls, the collapsoconomists and anyone with a vested interest in the status quo. Somebody, somewhere is looking at the edges of this thing. Find them.

Listen again – this time to your gut.

If you do all this and the world looks different … act.

My running world looks different. I’ve ditched the shoes for now. I’m not running marathons barefoot yet (although some people do) and I’ve had to make friends with a my blisters, but I am running again. And funnily enough … I feel stronger.

Neatly filed under Managing,Skippiness
Tags: beliefs, Dan Pink, doing, herzberg, Marathon, motivation