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Happiness@Work Leadership Lessons I Have Learned from the World’s Greatest Thinkers

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Ingrid Ashwin | July 2013. Ingrid Ashwin is the Event Producer for The Progress Conference series.

For 20 years, Ingrid has built personal relations with the world’s top thought-leaders. By staying close to the local business community she has built a very real understanding of the challenges and opportunities required to create and grow value in South African organisations. In response to these requirements she has sought out and secured the participation of the most relevant thought leaders to inspire and develop new management competencies in marketing, leadership, human resources, strategy and finance.

Ingrid’s work has afforded her first hand personal insight to the thinking of Tom Peters the “uber-guru”, Professor Robert Kaplan, Harvard Business School, Professor Dave Ulrich, the leading HR authority, the late Steven Covey, Dr Edward de Bono, Philip Kotler, Rudi Giuliani, Richard Koch, Martin Lindstrom, Dr Martin Seligman, the pioneer of positive psychology and others. Most recently she is working with Ricardo Semler, Tal Ben-Shahar and Jessica Pryce-Jones to develop solutions for South African organisations to achieve happiness at work.

It is Ingrid’s belief that by refusing to accept the status quo we can achieve progress.

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During a recession we suggest that leaders face some new questions: “What makes work either stressful or engaging, rote or rich with meaning? In either good or bad times where do you and your people find meaning?  How do you foster abundance in people? How do you think the story of your work and your life might become a legacy of meaning for your and for others?” Professor Dave Ulrich.

The lessons I have learned from eight of the world’s greatest business thinkers.

They are unanimous on one thing. The business leaders most likely to succeed are those that expect and plan towards a business environment that will be very different in a few years’ time, never mind a decade of half century. The 20th century work model is no longer relevant and there is no contest between the company that buys the grudging compliance of its workforce and the company that enjoys the enterprising participation of its employees.

– Leaders DO People and kindness is free.

– Take care of the people. The people take care of the service. The service takes care of the customer. The customer takes care of the profit. The profit takes care of the reinvestment. The reinvestment takes care of the reinvention. The reinvention takes care of the future.

– Celebrate the small wins on your journey to the BIG wins.

– You hire adults – treat them like adults

– Corporate pyramids are the cause of much corporate evil. They emphasise power, promote insecurity, distort communications and make it difficult for the people who plan and the people who execute to move in the same direction.

– The “Seven Day Weekend” is not an elaborate game of hooky. Going AWOL is sometimes necessary. If we want people to do only the company work while they are in the office, shouldn’t we have corporate police to makes sure they are not working on weekends.

– Don’t tell your employees you trust them and then audit and search them when they go home.

– Don’t send your people on a motivational course – change their job and let them choose their own boss.

– Making meaning makes money.

– Put delight at the top of your list of contributors to meaning at work.

– Create tiny moments of appreciation.

– Notice something beautiful.

– Get a kick out of a shared joke.

– Cultivate moments of playfulness. Brainstorm sources of pleasure and fun.

– Build mental toughness, signature strengths and strong relationships.

– If your business involves setbacks. Risky decisions and problems hire optimists.

– For every negative piece of feedback your people need 3 positive inputs. It is 3:1 to sustain positive emotions and in turn resilience.

– When the going gets tough use your signature strengths.

happiness pays!

– Get people to experience positive emotions so they become more engaged in that they do, their creativity levels go up and relationships improve.

– Where there is democracy there is choice and without choice happiness is but impossible to attain.

– Encourage employees to take regular breaks for recovery to recharge their psychological batteries to fulfil their potential for creativity and productivity.

– happiness@work is not a flaky, happy- clappy new religion – it is a science.

– If you’re conscientious you’ll put in the hours, you will work hard at what you do but it may not make you happy. Engagement in isolation does not promote career and business success.

Give people the opportunity to raise issues that are important to them and to voice their perception that they are doing something worthwhile.

– Ask your people if they would be willing to recommend your organisation to a friend?

Gen X and Y people are likely to stay two years longer if they believe they are learning.

Let people do the work that puts them in “flow: – the feeling where the task is almost effortless and time passes by without them noticing.

– If your mind is dull you have no hope of impressing people in any situation. It doesn’t need a high IQ or reams of knowledge. All it needs is creativity, imagination and empathy.

– Life is something to be enjoyed and lived rather than a well of suffering to be endured on the way to better things.

– For 2400 years we have been obsessed with argument as a way of thinking. It has served us well but is ego driven and adversarial. When people think in parallel they look at the matter from the same point of view.

With final words of advice from Ricardo Semler, the CEO who leads the most unusual workplace with extraordinary financial success.

“The ostrich that buries its head in the sand has a bigger problem than limited vision; its rear end is an enormous target. It’s very simple – the repetition, boredom and aggravation that too many people accept as part of working can be replaces with joy, inspiration and freedom.”

Happiness, Resilience, Leadership, Entrepreneurship and a Better Future for the SA Economy

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Happiness at work is not a flaky “happy clappy – happy hippy” new religion. Neither is it an invitation to an elaborate game of hooky.

For entrepreneur, Ricardo Semler it is very simple. The repetition, boredom and aggravation that too many people accept as an inherent part of working can be replaced with joy, inspiration and freedom. And the bottom line results are evident. They are very rigorous about the numbers and by applying his unconventional participatory model, Semco was rescued from bankruptcy. Despite tough economic times in Brazil, Semco has enjoyed 27% growth for the past 25 years, each year. Making money has been a very nice by-product of a business that is very much on track.

It is estimated that South African productivity has hit a 46 year low. A few days ago Leadership Intelligence Bulletin (www.leadershiponline.co.za) published their weekly newsletter.

What was evident was the excruciating intensity of the difficulties facing executives today.

Headline 1: Labour unrest to impact elections

Headline 2: World economy prospects subdued

Headline 3: Government union relationship under scrutiny

Headline 4: Diversification and human capital crucial – SA Economy may miss targets….

“SA continues to face the triple challenge of chronic high unemployment, poverty and inequality”

Back in 2011, Tom Peters said, “The future for the South African Economy is reliant on enough entrepreneurs getting out of bed excited to start a new business or build the one they already have.”

Right now, more than ever before, the future of the South African economy is reliant on business and government leaders wanting to get out of bed with excitement to create success. At a time when employee morale could be at an all-time low and businesses need to optimise and leverage their assets, the rising cost of misery for our organisations is a strategic priority. happiness@work is a hard core approach if you believe you need people and excitement to make your organisation succeed. According to Semler, companies can no longer rely on buying the grudging compliance of their people and they need to change the way they do things to enjoy the enterprising participation of their people, committed and confident to make a difference.

The mere mention of optimism and happiness@work have traditionally been received with roars of laughter, which is why Jessica Pryce-Jones made it her mission to evidence to the hard-numbered world of business that this “new-agey”, “happy clappy” concept is important if leaders want their talented people to develop and thrive within their organisations.

At the Discovery Invest Leadership Summit in 2012, Adrian Gore spoke about the massive impact that a few good leaders could have on our economy.

“The exciting thing is that leadership, effective leadership is also “Paretian”. Effective leaders make a massive difference on the system. A small number of people can pull the entire system across. We should never underestimate the exponential effect that great leaders have.

Tal Ben-Shahar, the professor who taught the most popular course at Harvard on Positive Psychology and the 3rd most popular course on the Psychology of Leadership has evidenced the significance of positive psychology as a leadership imperative to achieve resilience and innovation in organisations.

According to Tal, most organisational and individual potential is untapped. By creating a positive environment leaders can nurture the inherent potential in themselves and from within their people.

We can only hope that a few good leaders will have the courage and resilience to consider a new way of doing business to pull the entire system across in an exponential, “Paretian” way.

Engagement and Happiness at Work: The Differences

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By Jessica Pryce-Jones | CEO, iOpener Institute for People & Performance

Let’s lay out our position right from the start. There’s no doubt about it that engagement and happiness at work are similar constructs and therefore belong in the same school of thought. And that well-being is a third leg to add to this important stool. And it’s also obvious that it’s better to have more rather than less of all of them, whether you’re an employer or an employee.

But before we go any further let me be clear about what we mean when we refer to happiness at work.

For us at the iOpener Institute for People and Performance, happiness at work is a mindset that helps you maximize your performance and achieve your potential, whether you are an individual, team or organization. So what we’re really talking about are a series of internal processes that determine attitude and approach. Our practitioner experience also tells us that this mindset is governed by a set of measurable and specific conditions which lead to measurable and specific outcomes.

The definition of engagement is rather different and depends on the academic, consultancy or practitioner you like the most. It can therefore range between being defined as an attitude, an organizational approach, a practice, a set of conditions, a manager’s responsibility, a series of behaviors, certain outcomes, vigor for the job, energy, levels of stress and so on. That means comparing and contrasting the two is particularly difficult because it depends on your starting point.

We do however have a couple of major differences to clarify.

Our fundamental research done from the ground up began in focus groups. And this focus group work clearly indicated that individuals want to be responsible for and own their personal happiness at work. They know that it belongs to them and not their managers. Of course those managers can help or hinder that happiness but they can’t drive it: they have way too much other stuff to do.

Now this is typically very different from employee engagement which is generally owned by managers who are responsible for their teams’ annual scores. Which explains why these managers quite often ignore their yearly engagement results until the following year. Because the results often get put into the ‘too-difficult-to-do-anything-about-this’ drawer that’s much easier to quietly shut.

But happiness at work makes sense to any 21st century organization in which employees are empowered to take responsibility for and act on key areas that make a difference to them and their results. In these organizations employees are expected to think and act for themselves, to sort problems out, to work effectively together and not to wait for their manager to do it for them. To reflect this empowered organizational style, we’ve developed sophisticated, empirically-based and detailed individual, team anad organizational reports for anyone working with our methodology. Most importantly we’ve developed a suite of effective follow-up tools so that organizations can help themselves address any issues that they find. Expensive consultants don’t need to be the order of the day. These tools, coupled with clear and meaningful metrics are what matters most.

There’s another interesting thing to note about happiness at work. Positive emotions, the highs that indicate you are on the right path, have no place in engagement. But our data tells us that these positive feelings are important. Both social psychology and social network analysis tells us that emotions are contagious and spread within and between people. Engagement holds no place for these feelings which we know make a massive difference. Think about it. If you don’t feel good about what you do, it’s very difficult to keep on doing it.

Which leads us to what we know about senior leaders.

When we look at our data we can see that senior leaders working in tough circumstances will often report that they are highly engaged but unhappy at work. And their intention to quit scores can be surprisingly high. That tells us there may be some social desirability at work here. In other words people are thinking “I’m working so hard and for such long hours, I’ve got to be engaged in what I do. But I’m certainly not happy.”

I believe that we see this because senior leaders also tend to report high Conscientiousness (in personality terms). If you’re conscientious, you’ll put in the hours, you’ll work hard at what you do but it may not make you happy. As one executive board member said to me “I’m engaged alright, I’m putting in the hours – about 90 a week – but I’m 4 out of 10 happy at work.” Interesting stuff. So we’ve just kicked off a research project to investigate this further.

So how do engagement and happiness at work connect? Our view is that happiness at work drives engaged behavior. Here’s how.

Scholarship tells us that happiness promotes career success (Boehm & Lyubomirsky, 2005, 2008). That means happiness comes first, in other words it’s an input that drives fantastic output. Thinking about it in more depth, this implies that employers and employees need to see happiness at work as a personal resource that helps employees meet the demands of their jobs. Nowadays job demands aren’t getting any smaller. On the contrary everyone is expected to do more for less with fewer organizational resources into the bargain. But when job demands and job resources are unequal, there’s a greater likelihood of missed deadlines, project failure and even burnout. So the major untapped resource here is happiness at work. Because this is what drives sustained engaged behaviors.

In conclusion engagement is part of the picture and an important part too – but happiness at work is the precursor and therefore the most vital area of focus. Because it’s this that drives everything else.

The 2nd Annual FNB Progress Conference on Happiness@Work

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The 2nd Annual FNB Progress Conference on Happiness@Work | How unconventional business leaders harness the energy and imagination of their people to drive success.

17 September 2013 – Johannesburg

In 2012, we presented the 1st Annual FNB Progress Conference on happiness@work. Over 400 executives participated in this event and were inspired by Dr Martin Seligman and Professor Dave Ulrich to leverage Positive Psychology and Meaning and Purpose to capitalise on the psychological capital of the people who work for them.

In the opening address of the inaugural happiness@work conference, FNB CEO, Michael Jordaan had this to say, “I am a firm believer that happy staff makes for better business. Given that work is playing an ever-increasing role in our lives, it stands to reason that is it becoming increasingly important for people to get more out of their jobs and to find inspiration and motivation beyond designated workload, salary and time off.”

Deloitte’s recently published Insomnia Index™ – What keeps CEO’s awake at night? – further evidenced the lack of leadership capabilities for innovation within South African companies. FNB has leadership capability with a strategy driving innovations programme which has resulted in 7000 ideas logged across all business units in 2011, 927 innovations being implemented in a six month period in 2011, with 779 in the preceding 12 months. This innovation is rewarded with big pay-outs. The project profoundly drives the way things are done at FNB. Effectively any employee can be an innovator and can change the way business is done.

This inversion of the historical top-down application of corporate strategies is not dissimilar to that of Ricardo Semler’s democratic and participatory management model that amassed SEMCO their fortune. This privately owned company is now worth in excess of 9 billion dollars. Semler also believes in big pay-outs and a bottom-up approach to all decisions in his company.

Ricardo Semler has a deep passion for innovation and an ability to lead the most unusual workplace in the world with great success. Semler believes that companies emulate rather than innovate.

So no surprise, that this year’s speaker line-up includes Ricardo Semler who will share his secrets of success and the lessons learned in creating an unconventional management model which made SEMCO one of the fastest growing companies commencing at a time they were facing bankruptcy.

So what we know is that lack of innovation is keeping some CEO’s awake at night and heaps of innovation is amassing other leaders’ fortunes for their organisations.

If you still remain dubious, then, you can learn from the professor who taught the most popular course at Harvard University on “Positive Psychology” and the 3rd most popular course on “The Psychology of Leadership.”

Tal Ben-Shahar’s research and findings will evidence how positive emotions heighten innovative thinking. Tal will offer his psychological insights to show you how to stimulate creativity within your organisation. Tal will also provide leadership essentials to build resilience in organisations – a priority for organisations in these difficult economic times.

Jessica Pryce-Jones,

CEO of iOpener Institute will present the latest research findings  in terms of South Africa’s happiness@work rankings on a global scale. iOpener’s work measures the happiness and performance of employees relative to the tangible performance in the workplace.

On the 17th September 2013, you can get to spend the day with Ricardo Semler, Tal Ben-Shahar and Jessica Pryce-Jones at the 2nd Annual FNB Progress Conference on happiness@work. In 2013, we plan to take a hard core approach to evidence the positive effect of happiness@work on your organisation’s bottom line and why learning to play golf on Monday’s might be good for your business.

For more information contact Ingrid Ashwin on 083 228 7440 or email Ingrid – ingrid@brg.co.za

Brand Marketing Secrets for Africa

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Martin Lindstrom has done millions of dollars of research and predicted new brand marketing strategies to tap the African market.

According to a recent McKinsey study on the rise of the African Consumer, private consumption in Africa is higher than in India and Russia. It is anticipated that consumer facing industries are expected to grow to more than $ 400 billion by 2020.

So how do you tap into an emerging optimistic consuming class?

Here is what Martin and McKinsey have to say:

Martin Linstrom McKinsey Study 2012
Is obsessed with brand ROI Quality and Brand Matters
Studies the psychology behind the sweet spots of pricing Price Matters
Says you must get your house in order as the concept of privacy is radically changing Surging digital usage
Predicts that offline social branding is the next big thing after online Word of Mouth is enormously important
Says opportunity 101 to create conversations with your consumers in Africa Mobile and Digital connectivity is surprisingly high
Says you must create a love affair with your consumers, by becoming their obsessive fan Brand loyal customers are willing to pay more

How Your Enemies Power Brand Innovation

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Pepsi’s epic war with Coke and Apple’s public dust ups are evidence that enemies power brand innovation.

According to Martin Lindstrom, “Had Pepsi and Coke, not had each other, the chances are that their brands would not have spread to more than 100 countries around the world. The retired executives of both these companies claim that the real reason why their brands achieved world dominance was in the fighting words of one exec, “Every day we went to work, we went to war.”

Think of 2 successful brands that chose to win support by deliberately positioning themselves as the underdogs. Apple used “I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC commercials ”. Avis positioned itself as number two with a slogan we try harder. In 2013 it is still working hard at it.

Do you deliberately identify your competitors as your enemies and use this declaration of war to inspire innovation when it comes to your brand. Declaring war can be very good for your health.

According to Warren Buffet, “Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.” In all probability it could be your enemy that will be the grateful recipient of the business you just gave away.

FNB did this – they “declared war on all of the other banks” –  which has inspired innovative products, services and marketing strategy. They are at war daily and winning market share fast. Their switching steve campaign has paid off handsomely.

As Martin Lindstrom puts it, “It requires courage, determination and a fierce focus, but aren’t these the very ingredients that successful companies are supposedly made of.” We challenge you to identify your “enemies” and out- innovate them as never before.