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Work Happiness

Steve Jobs and Customers: The Best of the Internet

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MargeHappy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

How leaders & employees can power up happiness at work.

Luc Levesque, of TravelPod & TripAdvisor, on how to lead your team to excellence and how he uses iDoneThis.

The science of shower creativity.

Why Steve Jobs never listened to his customers.

5 ways to standout performance.

When leaders don’t have time to lead and fear accountability.

imageDundee’s Tip of the Week:  Hey iDT team users, have you noticed that links are now clickable? Include links in your dones to show ALL the things!

 

How the Power-Happiness Connection Matters at Work

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People who feel powerful are happier, according to a recent study published in Psychological Science.

Researchers found that authenticity is what connects that relationship between power and “subjective well-being” (happiness, basically). When you have power, your behavior can align more closely with your desires and values so that you are free to be more authentic. And when you can go about your day being more true to yourself, you feel happier.

“[B]y leading people to be true to their desires and inclinations — to be authentic — power leads individuals to experience greater happiness,” the study authors note. What’s especially interesting is that dispositional power, or your sense of power, is a strong predictor of happiness, so your perception matters.

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If Money Were No Object: The Best of the Internet

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Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week! 

Chart your own path but slow down along the way.

What would you like to do if money were no object? What do you desire?

Turns out there’s something between extroverts and introverts. Dan Pink on the benefits of being an ambivert.

Communicating through the inverted pyramid.

5 things to be more effective at work.

Company Culture: The Best of the Internet

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Baby Girl

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

We wrote about Peter Thiel’s unorthodox management philosophy of extreme focus.

How important company culture is to Zappos.

Using better “behavior design” to motivate, because why we are all basically still four years old.

Happiness is like a butterfly.

Lucky vs. good.

10 Socially Conscious Startups on How They Find Happiness and Motivation in Changing the World

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What’s the secret to happiness at work? Recent studies show that it’s not how much money you make, but how much progress.

We’ve written before about the progress principle, an idea developed by Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer, who found that the greatest indicator of happiness and motivation at work is incremental progress toward a meaningful goal.

Meaningful goals can be anything from the team’s stated objective, to a personal goal. It can be tangible and specific, like tackling the bugs in a program, or more general, like ensuring customer happiness.

We were curious about the progress principle in action, but meaningful goals are so personal and variable that we didn’t know where to begin. So we approached startups that served a social good. For these companies, their meaningful goal was collective, explicit and already built into the job description.

We asked each of these startup founders:

Your startup works towards a meaningful social good every day.
How does your goal motivate your team’s hard work and happiness daily?

Here are their responses:

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Granting Your Employees With Autonomy

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We forget that mastery is something human beings seek because we’re human beings. We like to get better at stuff because it’s inherently satisfying.

Daniel Pink, writing for the Washington Post, argues that we need more renewable motivation. How do we create this? Engage your employees, not by managing them but granting them autonomy.

We’re not mice on treadmills with little carrots being dangled in front of us all the time. Sometimes we are. There’s no question about that. But in the workplace, as people are doing more complicated things, the carrot-and-stick approach doesn’t work.

What’s frustrating, or ought to be frustrating, to individuals in companies and shareholders as well is that when we see these carrot-and-stick motivators demonstrably fail before our eyes – when we see them fail in organizations right before our very eyes – our response isn’t to say: “Man, those carrot-and-stick motivators failed again. Let’s try something new.” It’s, “Man, those carrot-and-stick motivators failed again. Looks like we need more carrots. Looks like we need sharper sticks.” And it’s taking us down a fundamentally misguided path.

The Story Spine

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Teresa Norton writes at HBR about how a simple exercise called the story spine can help you get unstuck and make change while “living truthfully” at work. The story spine is a narrative tool created by playwright, improviser, and theater educator Kenn Adams used to craft well-structured stories. As Norton’s post shows, the story spine can be … Read more