HELP!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Little Bit More Done by Oliver Burkeman If the title (or the cover) makes you smile, then you will enjoy the book. For not only is this a sober review of self-help (personal and professional) literature which also sits well in the genre it is [...]
Mar 132012
For those of you who prefer to listen than read, here is the second podcast of the Leadership in Your Pocket series.
Find out why people guard their creativity at work and what you can do to help it surface;
How to decrease uncertainty in your team during times of change and
Strategies to ensure you set time aside for your own development.
Feb 272012
I am compiling some of my most popular blog posts into a podcast series.
The first episode is now out, with tips on how to support your team members at work; communicating during change and listening to your body in times of high pressure.
All comments welcome.
Enjoy!
Listen to this episode
Download this episode (right click and save)
Feb 232012
Motivating others at work is not easy.
People go to work for different reasons: to find fulfilment, to work with others, to earn the cash to do other things, to pursue a passion or a calling, to make a difference in the world… As a person in a position of leadership you are able to influence people so that they want to do a good job. You are also in a position to help people feel good at work. And as a manager or leader, you will undoubtedly have an effect on people’s “inner work life”.
“Inner work life” has been the focus of much of the research of Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. This is, in their words:
the mix of emotions, motivations and perceptions over the course of a work day.
In their Harvard Business Review article (May 2011), “The Power of Small Wins”, the researchers state that what affects the sensation of happiness in knowledge workers more than anything else, is the feeling that they are making progress. This is the conclusion of a 4-month study, during which 238 individuals who formed part of project teams completed an e-mail survey at the end of each day. The survey asked them about their emotions, moods, motivation levels, observations on the work environment, the work they had carried out and those events that stood out from the day.
The authors of the article, who have gone into more depth about their work in the book ‘The Progress Principle’, found that knowledge workers, those who need to be creative and inventive at work, are more productive and creative when they are happy. These people were happier at work when they felt like they had made some progress, in work that was meaningful to them.
Ah, that’s another unknown thrown into the motivation equation.
Meaningful work.
In the same way as we are all motivated by different things at work, we all have different perceptions of what is “meaningful”. What is worthless to one person might be meaningful to another. Having a good conversation with a potential client or collaborator might be important to someone who values long-term relationships; making a budget balance will give more satisfaction to some than others; answering a bunch of e-mails can leave some people with the feeling that they have achieved a lot, especially if those electronic messages have been lurking around for days.
If progress makes you happier at work, then setbacks will make you feel worse, correct? Correct. And here is where it gets tricky. The setback (in much the same way as the progress) doesn’t need to be huge. Just a small setback can have a strong effect on your inner work life, which, as managers or team leaders, leaves us wondering if there is much we can do when someone has a bad day at work. Once someone has a minor setback, his or her motivation will suffer for it, sometimes disproportionately. In those cases, maybe putting things into perspective for them, reminding them of all the progress they’ve previously made and stating that none of us are perfect might be enough.
Maybe.
This “progress principle” goes against much of current management practice. Leaders need to set clear goals (yes), and create visions (yes) but this study highlights how important it is to make sure the journey includes the notion that you are progressing, however slightly, hence the title of the article I’m referring to “The Power of Small Wins.” This doesn’t mean that you have to be constantly nannying your team members – what you can do, what your unique leadership position gives you, is the opportunity to set the tone in your team, to lead by example.
It would be great if we could all report that we had a good day at work all the time. Surely achieving a good inner work life will make us more productive, better company, more creative: regardless of what motivate us, we can’t but help pursuing something that makes us feel good. So here are some positive ways in which we can contribute to the inner work life of our team members.
In their research, Amabile and Kramer discovered that there were two other types of actions that contributed to people having a good day at work. Catalysts, which have direct effect on the work and Nourishers, actions showing interpersonal support. Let’s have a look at thesetypes of action and their opposites, the Inhibitors and, I love this one, the Toxins, it’s such a strong, evocative word.
Examples of
Catalysts
are:
- Setting clear goals,
- Giving people the necessary time and resources to complete a job,
- Directly helping with the work and helping to learn from problems and successes.
It might be worth stopping and double checking that you are providing enough catalysts to your team. You can encourage others to behave in a similar way by thanking those people who take “catalytic actions”.
Inhibitors
on the other hand, will prevent people from feeling fulfilled at work. One of the examples the authors of this research give is “interfering with your work”. So true. A friend of mine used to freelance at a company workshop, where the manager constantly asked “What are you doing?” in a completely obtrusive, unhelpful way and in the most inappropriate of moments. In addition to that, due to the nature of the job, the core work would continuously be interrupted by other calls to action, making the experience at work quite frustrating and my friend, demotivated and less productive.
The other actions that will help people feel good about their time at work are called
Nourishers.
These are acts of appreciation, comfort, encouragement. Their opposites,
Toxins,
can easily affect the inner work life: disrespect, disregard for emotions, you name it. Returning to the example of my freelance friend, there is a difference between checking in and checking up: the former can be a nourisher while the latter can be toxic.
So in your interactions with your team members, consider how much progress they see themselves as making and see whether there is anything you can do to help their inner work life. Help them see how their actions, however small, are contributing to a greater good, to a larger goal. Avoid unhelpful interference and provide as much practical and emotional support as you can.
You can’t change how people see themselves and how they see their work, but you can begin to create the conditions to make sure they are in a place (an emotional and physical place) where they can access their best.
Getting together for a concentrated period of time can be incredibly beneficial for a team.
During team-away days, those issues and concerns that are never a priority but that need to be discussed can finally be addressed. Team members can find out how everyone else is getting on and help each other through sharing advice or information. During team-away days, everyone can have an input into future strategies, increasing their commitment to the success of the team.
In order for a team-away day to be successful, to create results that can be directly applied back at work, the team leader has to put in quite a bit of work. Yes, it is your responsibility as leader to make sure the away-day is as successful as possible.
Here are ten things you can do to make sure that your time together is fruitful.
1. Define the purpose of the day and share it with your team members.
Be specific. For example, it might be that you are not performing as well as you used to: what have you observed? How do you think a team session can help you? Or maybe you are a leadership team who rarely have time to sit down together. What specifically would you like to address?
Discuss your ideas with someone from outside your team if it helps you to formulate your ideas. Or better still, discuss them directly with your team.
2. Gather input.
Before you decide on the objectives of the team-away day, ask your team members if there is anything they would like to address. If you receive a number of suggestions but can’t incorporate all of them into the final plan, make sure you address them at some point, so that your team members don’t feel like their input was completely disregarded.
3. Set some outputs for the session- or some questions.
What would you like to achieve by the end of your session? How will it move your team forward? Or, if there are no pressing issues but you know that your team would benefit from spending some quality time together, prepare some questions like:
“Do we all feel like we are making the most out of everyone in the team?” or “Are we getting complacent and risk not developing as professionals?”
4. Decide who will facilitate the session.
You will need to give some thought to this. Sometimes it is useful for the team leader to facilitate the whole session. This is a good idea if you are collaborative by nature and have a knack for facilitating discussions. If, however, you are not sure whether your team members might hold back from fully contributing, for fear of appearing to challenge if you are in charge of the day, then I suggest that you find someone from outside the team to be in charge of the day’s programme. This could be someone else within your organisation or an external facilitator.
In both these cases, it is very important that you communicate with them as much as possible what your concerns are and what you are looking to achieve. The added benefit of bringing someone from outside your team to facilitate is that you yourself might not be aware of when people are disagreeing with you or just need more time to think before they can move on. Furthermore, your own creative thinking might be suppressed if you are having to monitor the group process as well as contributing to the discussion.
Personally, I think away-days work best when the team leader and facilitator share the responsibility for moving the day along. The team leader can make sure everything that needs to be covered is covered, while the facilitator can look after the group process. If you don’t want to bring in someone from outside your team, you might consider asking one of your team members to chair the discussions or be in charge of moving the programme of the day along. This is a good way of sending out signals that you value independence and unofficial leadership within your team.
5. Plan.
Plan what you need before you have the away-day.
Plan what should happen during the session.
Plan what will happen after the session.
6. Do you need a change of airs?
If you are having a team session to address issues that need creative thinking (and probably all of them will, or else you wouldn’t need to set quality time aside to tackle them) it is a good idea to leave your habitual surroundings, to move away from a place which might induce routine-thinking habits and which team members might associate with a specific way of working.
Look for somewhere simple, within your organisation, for example, maybe somewhere your team doesn’t regularly use; or use external facilities, making sure there are areas close to the room where you can get some fresh air.
If you are not able to use a room or facility different to the ones you regularly use, then do something different with the space. If you are using a meeting room, change the table layout, place a tray of biscuits in the middle, do anything, however small that signals: today is just a little bit different.
7. Make sure everyone is heard.
If you are organising an event to pull everyone together, make sure it does just that. Discussions might take a long time if everyone has to voice their opinion, but it’s in listening to a range of ideas that the best solutions will emerge. Make sure that the quietest members of the team have an opportunity to express their opinions throughout the day.
8. Wrap up discussions.
As I have mentioned, on days like these, discussions can be lengthy. There is nothing worse than feeling that you have contributed to a discussion which in the end, has led nowhere. So, make sure you wrap up your discussions: what is/are the outcome/s? Is there an outcome? If not, what shall we do about it? Can someone take responsibility for following it through or shall we revisit it at some other point? If so, when?
9. Follow up, follow up, follow up.
End the session or day by deciding how you and/or your team members will follow up the decisions that have been made or the questions that have been raised. Will you be communicating by e-mail? Is there an online space you can use? Maybe you can all catch up in three months time to revisit the outcomes of the day and update each other on any actions you have taken.
10. Turn this into a real team-building opportunity.
Building a team cannot be done in one session, it is something that has to be continuously addressed. Consider how the events of the day will contribute to the team being stronger when you are back at work.
Will it be an opportunity for everyone to communicate face to face so that when they need to collaborate at work, they can do so more comfortably?
Will the day make everyone aware of how different team members are contributing to the team’s goals?
Will the session highlight everyone’s strengths and positive qualities so that work can be allocated and distributed in the best possible way amongst team members?
Team-away days can help a team make a huge leap forward and as such are worth the investment: but this investment doesn’t start and end with the day itself. It begins with the preparation, continues with a thoughtfully planned session and ends… well, it should never end.
Photograph credit: Chris Baker http://www.hectorz.com/
It’s official. Sleeping is essential for survival. We still don’t know exactly why we have to sleep but we know that it is essential to keep us healthy and alert. Our immune system is replenished during sleep. Our neurons fire away making sense of the day and retaining what we’ve learned.
A friend of mine went through a stressful period in her 30s when she only slept four hours a day. She thrived – but now she has very little ability to recall what you told her last week. My father used to be knocked out by his Parkinson’s disease until he found the right sleeping pills. Once he managed to sleep well, things got much better. (The debilitating effects of some neurological diseases are caused by lack of sleep). I’m sure many of us know that if we have a fever, the best thing is just to go to sleep. (Mum, are you listening?)
While I don’t need to point out that during times of stress we are more likely to sleep less, I do want to state that in times of high pressure, sleep should be a priority and not a luxury. Yes, during busy periods, we might work longer hours and cut down on our sleep. However, make sure those “busy periods” become the exception and not your rule.
Stress and Sleep
The problem with arriving home late in the evening after a stressful day is that it takes a while to “wind down” and break down all the adrenalin generated.
The problem with relaxing over a glass of wine is that the mind gets used to using an external substance to relax. (Plus alcohol decreases the quality of your sleep.)
The problem with trying to sleep when you’re stressed out is… that it’s really difficult to go to sleep when you’re stressed out.
So, if you are having trouble sleeping or you feel especially tired during the day, see if any of the following suggestions help you. (If, however, you are someone who is able to get a decent night sleep no matter what, please add any of your own suggestions below!)
Don’t let your wakefulness stress you out
First of all, don’t give yourself a hard time because you can’t sleep. Instead, value the time you are giving your body to rest. Focus on your breathing to try to stop your mind from wandering off and consciously relax your muscles.
Don’t toss and turn
If you are unable to sleep, don’t continue focusing on your breathing and on relaxing your muscles forever. If you are lying in your bed for 20 minutes and are getting restless, then get up. Read a book (fiction, please), watch TV, listen to a podcast, to the radio… Do that for about 20 minutes and then try to sleep again.
Get it all out
If your thoughts are getting in the way of having a good night’s sleep, get them out there. Is something bothering you? Write it down. You had an epiphany? Write it down. You’re wondering what you will write in that dreaded e-mail tomorrow? Write it down but DON’T send it, just write it down on a piece of paper.
Don’t take my word for it
There must be some truth to phrases like “why don’t you sleep on it” or “things will look better in the morning”.
An experiment carried out in 2010, showed that, in a group of people learning typing skills, those who had a good night’s sleep improved their skill by 20% while those who didn’t sleep overnight had forgotten everything in the morning.
Sometimes you don’t even need a full night’s sleep for it to make a difference in your cognitive skills. In another experiment, a team of volunteers had to memorise the layout of a computer-based maze. They were then dropped at a random starting point to see if they could get to a specific point in the maze. All volunteers had a 5 hour break and were then tested again. This time, half of them had taken a nap lasting about one and a half hours. You can guess where I’m going with this. Those who had slept for a bit improved their “maze-solving time” 6 times more than those who hadn’t slept.
A full night’s sleep, a long nap, what’s the best way to administer our sleep? Besides knowing that the average person needs around 7 – 9 hours sleep to perform at their best, it depends.
A recent study showed that recalling words improved after a night’s sleep, but it also showed that this improvement was larger or smaller depending on the individual.
So, monitor your sleep patterns. Pay attention to what helps you go to sleep. When you begin to feel like you’re not performing at your best, consider sleeping as a way of recharging your batteries.
Look after yourself. Don’t neglect your sleep.
Jan 312012
I admire people who come up with creative solutions to their problems, so I wanted to share this Scientific American article with you.
The authors of the scientific study were trying to understand why laughter makes us feel good. One of their theories was that when we laugh, we release endorphins, our internally manufactured painkillers. So they thought that measuring the level of endorphins released during laughter would be a way into understanding the physiological process of laughter. However, measuring the level of endorphins a person is producing can only really be done through a spinal tap (ouch!). In addition to this, they wanted to measure laughter in a social situation, so they took their research to the Edinburgh Fringe.
The scientists got creative.
A way of measuring the level of endorphins in a person is to measure their tolerance to pain. So the scientists found different ways of making people feel pain. They had to do this straight after they experienced laughter, so they got their subjects to lean against a wall in the sitting position until the pain in their legs got too high and they fell over.
I will not go into the details of the experiment here as they are clearly explained in the Scientific American’s blog (click here) but I will of course summarise their findings.
The pain threshold in those people who had attended a comedy at the Fringe and therefore had laughed in a group, were able to withstand more pain than those who had watched a documentary on their own or watched a comedy on their own.
This means that:
Laughter can reduce our perception of pain and
Our body responds to comedy more strongly when in the company of others.
Maybe we should start taking this research seriously and laugh more often when we’re down.
Or maybe we are doing this already: the mechanics of crying (really, proper crying) are pretty similar to the mechanics of laughing. So maybe the body is already protecting us by trigerring off a similar mechanism, if only a less appealing one.
Jan 242012
Sometimes we think we could be happier if…
I’m sure more stress is caused when pondering over what could or couldn’t be done, what we should or shouldn’t change, than by the actions of doing and changing.
Some years ago, I came across a way of tackling this that has helped me enourmously to remain happy at work and in my personal life, but mainly at work, as this is the area where I have to take most decisions. Let me share this with you. Who knows, it might be of some help at some point.
- (Let’s write a list.) Identify what is not right.
- Is changing this beyond your control? Then stop worrying about it and come up with strategies to deal with it.
- If changing it is within your control, decide whether you want to change it. Really, do. If you are going to change it do it soon, it won’t change by itself. (Or it might, but not in the way you desire.)
- If you are not going to change “it”, accept that you are not going to change it and move on.
In case I haven’t expressed myself correctly, here is a more succint way of saying more or less the same thing.
“Focus on what you can do in any given situation, rather than on what you can’t do or aren’t allowed to do.”
Bruce Rosenstein in Learn from Peter Drucker, Leadership Excellence March 2010
WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY AT WORK?
It seems like an easy question but, apparently, it’s not. According to Daniel Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness), people are not very good at predicting those things that make them happy.
It is also possible that the things that are keeping you engaged at work would be classified as “small”, such as solving a small problem, getting a difficult phone call over and done with or helping a colleague at work.
Identify what makes you happy and see if there is any way to do more of it. Give yourself time to think about this: just because it’s not obvious, it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Once you have identified “it” you will be more alert to the possibilities that might form themselves around you. See what things at work can be changed or eliminated to create space for more meaningful activities – “meaningful” to yourself, your team and your organisation.
We spend so much time of our lives at work (or thinking about work or the possibility of work) that we deserve to give ourselves a chance to be as happy there as we can. Not always possible, but worth striving for.
Was this post useful? Make sure to read Roll Out Your Happiness Programme.
Illustration by arte_ram
The Globe awards have just been awarded, the BAFTA nominations have already been announced. With all this talk of glamour, maybe it’s time to roll our your own happiness carpet.
It might sound a bit hippy-dippy, but happiness at work continues to attract the interest of psychologists and neuroscientists alike.
I set up a training business with one goal in mind: to enable people to be happy at work. Okay, two goals in mind, to enable people to be happy at work and make a living out of it. For me, the most effective way of doing this is to work with managers and leaders in organisations, as they have the ability to influence other people’s happiness at work.
By being happy at work, I don’t mean elated (although that could sometimes be the case). I mean being engaged with the work, challenged but not threatened, pleased to be working with those around you and feeling like you make a difference. Even through setbacks, I can be happy if I feel like they are temporary and part of a learning curve. Even routine work can make me happy, if I feel it would be missed if I didn’t carry it out. When the work itself is not particularly challenging, I might enjoy the company of others who seem supportive of what I do.
Yes, it pays to have happy people at work.
- Happy employees show, on average, 31% more productivity.
- Happy employees show, on average, 3 times more creativity. (There goes the whole myth of the unhappy creative person out of the window.)
- Employees scoring low in “life satisfaction” (the standard metric for measuring productivity and happiness) stay at home 1.25 days a month.
So, a happy employee is more likely to use their time wisely, be more able to solve problems and turn up for work.
I think I can stop now advocating for the need to have happy teams and begin to talk about what we can do about it.
A HAPPY YOU
The first step in creating (or, if you’re lucky, sustaining) a happy team is to make sure that you are happy yourself.
If you feel like you could be happier at work, here are some simple things you could try out. There is no way that I am going to attempt to understand your individual situation without having met you first. However, in order to change, you will need to develop new habits and those I am about to suggest, have been proved to work. When these activities were taken up by a group of tax managers during a time of high pressure (Dec 2008), their life satisfaction scale moved from 22.96 (out of 35) to 27.23 after four months.(Source: Positive Intelligence by Shawn Achor. HBR Jan/Feb 2012.)
So, why not give them a try?
Choose one of the following five activities and carry it out every day for 3 weeks. (Don’t give yourself a hard time if you skip a day or two, we don’t want to create unnecessary pressure!)
- Write down (or type), three things you were grateful for.
- Write a positive message to someone in your social support network.
- Meditate for two minutes.
- Exercise for ten minutes.
- Write down briefly the most meaningful experience of the last 24 hours.
Chances are, that one of these will work to make you feel happier or help maintain your sense of thriving. Furthermore, if you respond to this exercise in a similar way to those who took part in the study, you will rip the benefits for months.
CATCHY HAPPINESS
Happiness is contagious: we can’t help feeling good when we’re around those who are happy. I mean genuinely happy, not in-your-face absolutely fantastic. It is therefore worth continuing to invest in yourself and lead by example. One of the things you can do which will raise your happiness levels, is to help others. Yes, in the words of psychologist Daniel Gilbert (author of Sumbling on Happiness):
One of the most selfish things you can do is help others.
Sounds good to me – if you go out of your way to help your team members, you will benefit both your team and yourself. If you want the data to support this argument, here it is.
In a study involving Harvard students, Shawn Achor found that those who went out of their way to help others were 10 times more likely to be engaged in their work. (Source: Positive Intelligence by Shawn Achor. HBR Jan/Feb 2012.)
Being happy, engaged, connected, in flow… all different ways of describing the desired state when at work, where we spend an enourmous amount of our life.
NEXT WEEK: To Change or Not to Change – how solving that dilemma can make us happier.
Five Reasons Why You Should Welcome Resistance During Change
Blatant resistance to change is obviously a hindrance. But it can also be a sign that there is something we have overlooked, something we have missed. Far from immediately dismissing a “no” or “I disagree”, we’d be better off asking “why?” and then listening (really listening) to the reply. None of us like to encounter [...]
