Happy Management

People work best when they feel good about themselves

This is a statement that the vast majority of people agree with, in my experience. But if you agree with that...

...What then is the key role of people management in your organisation?

Clearly it is to create an environment where people feel good about themselves. Studies find managers spend three times as much time telling people what they did wrong as telling them what they did right. See how often you can spot somebody doing something right. And even when dealing with challenging situations and under-performance the aim can be to leave people feeling good about themselves.

When one of your people gets the message "Your manager wants to see you today at 2pm", do they feel excited and look forward to it?

Question: Is the focus of your management on helping people to feel good and thus improve their performance?

Give people freedom...

Think about when you personally worked at your best. It was pretty likely to have been a time when you were given freedom and trusted to do it your way. Is this what you provide for your people?

What is true of you is almost certainly true of your people too. I have asked thousands of people, at all levels, when they have worked at their best. Virtually never has it been when people are closely monitored and micro managed. Instead it has been when they have been trusted and given freedom. (And also challenged.)

...within clear principles

You need to know your people are working within your organisation's principles (and possibly the law) and have clear targets. And, to succeed, your people need that guidance too. The trick is to make that framework crystal clear while giving people the freedom to work out their own way to achieve it - so it creates the landscape in which innovation prospers.

But it is not about casting them adrift. A key part of the model is Support and Feedback, so the customer regular lets them know exactly how they are doing.

Question: How much freedom do your people have to do the job their way?

Feedback is Crucial to Job Ownership

Do your people only get to hear how they are doing at their appraisal (every six months or every year) or do they regular receive feedback from the one source that really matters - the customer (whether external or internal).

"Without information, people cannot take responsibility. With information, they cannot avoid responsibility" Jan Carlsson, SAS Airlines

Question: How can your people receive more/better feedback direct from the customer?

The Customer Comes Second

That is the title of a book by Hal Rosenblum of Rosenblum Travel, who won the coveted Baldrige award for the best customer service in the US. Who comes first? Your employees, of course. If I can summarise the lesson I took from this book and used to build my company it would be: Hire nice people and treat them well.

Question: Could more focus on your people lead to improved service to your customers?

People should be chosen to manage people on the basis of how good they are at managing people.

An obvious statement, but possibly the most radical belief we hold at Happy. Because the norm is to appoint managers on the basis of core skills or length of service. Many organisations say that "our people are our most valued asset" and then put people in charge of them who ado not have a natural ability to motivate, support and nurture their staff.

Is it surprising that possibly the biggest reason people leave their organisation is in fact to leave their manager?

The radical response is to take the route of Microsoft and Happy and separate the two roles. Have one set of people whose role is strategy and tactics and another whose role is to support and coach people.

Question: What can you do to let some people play key strategic roles without having to manage people? Could every one of your people have a support or coach who has the people skills to help them develop and reach their potential?

How do your managers know how they are doing?

I hope you have in place an appraisal system for your people. But do you have peer appraisal (where colleagues review each other's performance) and upward appraisal (where staff appraise their managers' performance). There is only one way to find out how well a person is managing people - and that is to ask, at regular intervals, the people they are managing. To expect a manager to perform to the highest standards without providing this basic feedback is like expecting an athlete to perform to the highest standards in their sport without ever telling them the score or the time they have achieved.

Question: If you don't have upward appraisal, how could you introduce it in a supportive way?

Systems not Rules

When Happy was voted by Management Today as providing the best customer service in the UK, we asked the judges what made the difference. They said: "You understand what your customers want. But that isn't un-usual. Most companies in the UK understand what their customers want. But most then put in place a set of rules and policies that prevent their front-line people from delivering what their customers want. You don't - you trust your people to deliver it in the best way they can think of."

Some rules are needed and the laws of the land must be obeyed. And there are many processes, learnt over years of experience, that are simply the best way we know to do something. But we like to talk of Systems rather than Rules. The difference is that a system can be changed if any member of staff can find a better way - in that specific circumstance - to meet the needs of the customer.

In one experiment 30 years ago nurses were phoned by a doctor and asked to give a patient a dose that was twice the maximum daily dosage. Over 90% got ready to deliver the dose. The rule they lived by was to obey doctors (even, in this case, people they had never met), not to think. In contrast, I want my people to be thinking at all times and not blindly obeying rules.

"After 20 years of finding creative ways to say 'No we can't do that', I am finally able to say 'Yes, we can'" housing worker

Question: Do your rules, policies and system encourage people to think or to obey? Are they able to say Yes?

Pre-Approved

Every time you are asked to approve something, ask why? How could I step out of the way and give ownership back to this person. What do they need to know to not need to ask me for approval? Because ownership leads to responsibility and innovation.

If you are asking a group to work together to create a new product or new approach, think of saying to them: "Whatever you come up with, I will not alter or change it. It will be pre-approved."

Of course, the group will need to be fully briefed. It is no good saying at the end, "This won't work because of something I forgot to mention". Give them the clear parameters, and the freedom to design - and implement - their own solution. If they genuinely have full ownership, they will make sure it works.

Question: Next time you set a group on a task, will you pre-approve it?

Recruit for attitude, train for skills

This is a principle universally agreed by the companies who deliver the best customer service in the UK. (As decided in the Management Today/Unisys Service Excellence awards.) People can learn new skills but changing attitudes is much harder.

At Happy we have never specified a qualification of any kind in any recruitment. We certainly don't specify 'degree required' (and any organisation who does should ask themselves why they don't want to employ Afro-caribbeans, the disabled and the working-class - all of whom are under-represented in our universities).

At the same time our trainers are not allowed in front of a class without a certification recognised by the Institute of IT Training. But virtually none join with that qualification. We test their potential to be a great trainer and ten train them to be just that.

Too many interviews test for people's ability to talk and would, in recruiting a footballer, recruit John Motson (a commentator) rather than David Beckham (a top player). Our interviews test people's ability to do the tasks we require and test for positive attitude, how supportive they are to others and their ability to cope with change.

Question: Is your recruitment based on qualifications and ability to talk, or on attitude and potential to do the job?

Celebrate Mistakes!

When a new member of staff says to me "I got it wrong" I breathe a sigh of relief. It is a sign of responsibility on their part and a sign our culture is still encouraging honesty and openness. If at the end of their 3 month probationary period they have never said those words, then I'd worry about appointing them. Either they are not able to be open and honest, or our culture does not encourage open-ness. Or worse, they haven't made any mistakes in those three months, and so probably haven't tried anything new!

We learn and find new ways to do things by trying out things and learning from what goes wrong. A culture that tries to stop mistakes is trying to stop that learning culture. I want our people to be learning and innovating, and so I want them to be making mistakes.

Question: How can you move towards a blame-free culture, where people can own up to mistakes?

What would your organisation be like if everybody was completely trusted?

For one moment put aside any doubts and think how your organisation would be if everybody was trusted to do their jobs to the best of their ability - with a clear set of principles and framework but without detailed rules and instructions.

...And what do you need to do to ensure they can be?

It may be training and development. It may be providing a clear framework. It may be switching from rules to systems. But as you ponder what could be involved, think of what the organisation could be if it was both based on trust and your people lived up to that trust.

Question: What could be your next step to moving to a more trust-based organisation?

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