Work Happy: What Great Bosses Know

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel just published a special section focused on strong and healthy workplaces in southeastern Wisconsin. There are clear distinguishing qualities that set the best apart.  

To help identify and illustrate the leadership aspects of great workplaces, the editors asked me to take part in a Q & A, based on many of the lessons in "WORK HAPPY: WHAT GREAT BOSSES KNOW." Since it's my hometown paper, you can imagine how happy I was to oblige:  

The interviewer asks:

Q: In your book, you talk of the five "symptoms" of a healthy workplace culture. What are they, and what makes them healthy? A: In a healthy workplace culture: Employees know it's not a democracy, but their voices matter. When employees feel they can offer ideas and be heard, they are happier at work - even if they don't get to make all the final decisions.

For the the rest of the symptoms and many more tips, here's a link to the "Top Workplaces" special section.  

I'm in Washington, DC this week, teaching workshops at NPR. Folks here have just moved into a beautiful new building. It's not just a state-of-the-art workspace. It's also designed to bring many creative people together for better opportunities to think and collaborate.

That's important here, for sure, because public radio is built on ideas. But every good organization wants to capture and cultivate good proposals, plans, thoughts, suggestions. It works best when leaders understand how to cultivate great ideas. How to make it easy and effective to pitch, catch and coach them.

In preparation for the teaching, I immersed myself in a good amount of literature about brainstorming, collaboration and innovation.  I turned that into a column and podcast for Poynter.org, titled "Don't Be an Idea Killer: Ten Tips for Cultivating Good Ideas."   Here's how I begin:

Some of our best ideas come when we’re taking a break from concentration. At least, that’s what recent research says. Since the concept for this column coalesced while I was sweating my way through a Zumba class, I’m prepared to believe it.

I’d been doing a lot of reading about the cultivation of ideas — especially the leader’s role in brainstorming, creativity and innovation. I collected insights and advice from all sorts of experts to use in my teaching. I wanted to craft a column, too, but kept debating with myself about the framing.

Not surprisingly, my breakthrough came when I stopped fretting and shifted my focus to enjoying some music and keeping pace with the class leader.

And here's a link to the full column and all ten tips.

Welcome to the Aarhus studios and offices of DR - Danish Broadcasting.

On a Friday morning in April, I spent the day there to teach about leadership and success. To say I was welcomed would be an understatement.  Take a look at the front door! That poster, announcing my morning talk to the full staff, was not only there, but everywhere around the building.

I had been asked to talk to DR employees about a successful, creative and competitive workplace, with both the joys and the demands it places on people. In fact, the talk was titled "Surviving Success."  The shot below is from the back of the gathering.  I'm that tiny spot in the front right corner.

Fortunately, English is a second (or third or fourth!) language for many Danes, because my Danish is quite limited.  It's so limited, I told the group, that I knew only a few Danish words: "tusen takk" -- which means "thank you very much" and "velkommen," which is "welcome."  But for this day, I had learned a new and very powerful Danish word.  Here it is:

Arbejdsglæde

It is the Danish word for "happiness at work."  Isn't it interesting that there's no one-word equivalent for it in English?  We talk about motivation, or job satisfaction, but arbejdsglæde means more than that.  It means the workplace is a great place and people look forward to coming to work.  Great bosses guiding great employees create that culture of arbejdsglæde.

The DR staff applauded my attempt to pronounce the word.  (Sounds like "ah-BITES-glay-the")  Later that day, I applauded their managers for their focus on leadership, during our daylong workshop.

These are the top leaders of various aspects of DR's news and information programming. We talked about their values and how values lead to the choices they make every day as leaders. We focused on communication, collaboration and the development of successful and happy staff.     As you can tell from the extra care DR took to emphasize the positive, right down to putting an image of "WORK HAPPY: WHAT GREAT BOSSES KNOW" on the manager's name cards, the word "arbejdsglæde" might have been new to me, but it's in the leadership lexicon of this team.    

I'm off to Europe for two weeks, working with managers from two organizations who are using "WORK HAPPY: WHAT GREAT BOSSES KNOW" as part of their leadership development.

My first stop will be in Aarhus, Denmark for DR, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation.  I'll start the day with a talk to 150 staff members.  The topic, as you can see from the poster, is "Surviving Success."  The idea came after conversations about the good work that's being done there, and how organizations can continue to keep performance high without burning people out.

After that morning staff talk, I'll spend the day with top regional managers of DR's various units in a leadership workshop.

From Aarhus, I travel to London.  There, I'll spend three days with editors from the Associated Press, who are coming in from a variety of European cities. I've been assisting the AP leaders with training for several years now, both in the US and overseas.

Journalism organizations are experiencing significant change -- with reorganization and innovation as key challenges and opportunities.  That's why communication, collaboration, conflict resolution and change management are essential skills for leaders.  But they're skills that leaders in all organizations must develop in order to be truly great bosses.