An excellent book on creativity

One of the best books I’ve read about being creative is “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon. It’s a short book, more graphic novel than academic text. And it begins with a basic truth about art that can apply to work:

“What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before…Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”

Find good ideas, steal them, and build on them.

When it comes to making work more effective and fulfilling, that turns out to be excellent advice. And the place to steal things from, of course, is the Internet.

Here’s an example.

A typical collaboration problem

Almost anyone with a collaboration platform at work will talk about the importance of having senior people use it. Just their presence online, modeling the behaviors they’d like to see in others, is a powerful source of influence. And getting them to recognize people and interact with them can improve overall employee engagement.

But how do you get busy, skeptical, executives to participate? And, even harder, how do you get them to participate in a way that’s personal and avoids the usual corporate-speak?

Ask Me Anything

reddit.com

A solution to this problem can be found on reddit.com (“the front page of the Internet”). Reddit lets users contribute content and then vote up and down on content and comments as a way to filter what’s interesting. Of the many memes you’ll see on reddit, one of the more popular ones is Ask Me Anything or AMA.

On Reddit, a wide range of people conduct in-depth, open discussions. You might talk to famous people (Arnold Schwarzenegger or Louis CK) or just people with interesting perspectives (an accident victim or astronaut). Then, last August, Barack Obama conducted an AMA.

“Hi, I’m Barack Obama, President of the United States. Ask me anything.”

Over 3 million people viewed the discussion that day. Reddit users of all ages across the world were interacting with the President, asking questions about everything from campaign finance reform to his favorite basketball player (“Jordan – I’m a Bulls guy.”) His last update summed up why participated and why he thought it was important.

“LAST UPDATE: I need to get going so I’m back in DC in time for dinner. But I want to thank everybody at reddit for participating – this is an example of how technology and the internet can empower the sorts of conversations that strengthen our democracy over the long run. AND REMEMBER TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER – if you need to know how to register, go to http://gottaregister.com. By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience – NOT BAD!”

If the leader of the free world could engage his audience using social platforms, then even the most senior executive could do it. It showed how you could be personal and serious at the same time while still being purposeful and getting your message out.

Making the idea your own

Most companies have some kind of management Q&A at work, but most are scripted, edited, impersonal and limited to a few participants. One day, though, a manager at work conducted an open, on-line Q&A using our social platform. That sparked an idea.

Someone in another city noticed that the style of the on-line Q&A was just like an AMA. He started to spread the word and wrote up some helpful guidelines, including an AMA website. A few more managers saw that, liked the idea, and held their own AMAs.

The name stuck. Then the Communications teams saw it and institutionalized it, further developing some processes and enlisting yet more managers. Not everyone needed the extra help, but having it available made it easy for many more managers to participate. Within a few months, dozens of managers across 5 different divisions held AMAs and dozens more are planned. There were thousands and thousands of comments and Likes.

And the best part was seeing people tag the conversations with words like #engaging, #human, #authentic, and #genuine. When have you heard word like that used to describe senior management?

Becoming a student of the Internet

To change how executives interact with people at work, we didn’t have to come up with a new idea. We simply stole AMAs, changed the format a bit, and added some helpful guidelines. The innovation wasn’t the idea. It was applying the idea at work.

The same can be true for improving projects, training, or developing talent. For coming up with new ideas or cutting costs or changing behaviors. For pretty much any problem at work you can think of, there’s a solution on the Internet that can help.

So, as Austin Kleon advises, steal like an artist. If you’re trying to make work better, scour the Internet for good ideas and build on them until you’ve made your own art for you and your firm.

Catarina Mota on TED.com

If you watch TED talks, you’ll hear this phrase over and over and over again. People who are aspiring to make a difference will share their work online so others can use it and improve on it.

Yet it’s a phrase you might never hear at work.

Why not? And what can we do about it?

Eliciting contribution

What the people who deliver those TED talks know – and what any open source developer or student of the Internet knows – is that when you share your work online, you tend to identify relevant experts and elicit contribution.

This may seem obvious for famous examples like Wikipedia and Linux. But it’s true for an incredible range of things. Drones, genetics, gardening, production methods and materials, education. There’s even a blueprint for an entire civilization. Almost anything you can think of can benefit from the contribution of other people.

Given the incredible diversity of examples on the Internet, it follows that people doing similar project work for their firm would also benefit by posting it online where other employees could see it and build on it. And that firms would benefit from a culture of sharing and contribution.

3 barriers to sharing at work

Of the many possible reasons why people at work don’t emulate what we see on the Internet, there are 3 reasons I come across most often:

“I don’t know how.” Despite the large number of examples on the web, the vast majority of people have simply never experienced sharing their work online and collaborating with others as a result. And some may not have a convenient facility for publishing content at work.

“I don’t know if it will be useful.” For the minority of people that know what to do and have a way to do it, there’s often an uncertainty as to whether their contributions would be valuable. They also struggle with how to get the attention of relevant people.

“I won’t get credit.” A more insidious barrier is when people feel their contributions won’t be recognized. Particularly in a management system of competitive ratings and bonuses, there is a heightened sense of internal competition. Feeling like you’re fighting for your share of a finite pie will grossly inhibit your willingness to contribute and collaborate.

One way to start improving contribution

Instead of trying to convince everyone to share and then hoping that specific topic-based networks form, you can form those networks first. Then you focus on helping a few people in that network lead through contribution. (This assumes you have a social platform at work. If you don’t, this might help you implement one.)

Here’s one possible sequence:

• identify a specific role or kind of job at your firm
• create a role-based community of practice to connect those people
• teach people in that community to work out loud – making their work visible and narrating their work as they do it
• help the community manager recognize contribution and share stories of personal and commercial value
• work with community leaders and your initial contributors to teach others

This approach addresses the top 3 barriers. By focusing on a smaller group of people, you can better help them work out loud effectively. By concentrating the effort in a role-based community of practice, the relevance of the contribution – what you might contribute and who might use it – is more obvious. Now, individuals who are contributing don’t have to figure out how to identify relevant people because you’ve already created the exact network they need to leverage.

And credit? This comes in several forms. Social recognition from relevant peers is often powerful enough to drive continued contribution. Beyond that, though, it’s the role-based community that knows about all the good jobs within the firm. When individuals contribute, they do so for their own reputation and their access to opportunities in addition to the good of the community.

To get started, you don’t need everyone to contribute. And you’re not trying to convince people about the value of social media or connecting. It’s just the Internet at work.

Community by community, you’re simply helping people apply the tools and practices we see on the Internet to make work better inside our firms. The value that will create is what will power a movement towards greater openness and contribution at your firm.

A flawed approach to identifying talent

One of the biggest tragedies of modern management is our approach to finding and developing talented people.

For recruiting, we use top schools and other brokers to identify the talent for us. For people already inside the firm, we construct elaborate talent management systems and leadership development programs. These methods, which focus on the few and neglect the many, are extraordinarily ineffective and, worse, they’re actively harming firms and their people.

There’s a better way.

What do you expect?

We tend to treat talent as something innate, something a rare few possess. We create all sorts of filters to spot those with high potential and then do special things to retain and develop those people. Identifying potential in others seems one of the basic responsibilities of management.

Everybody does it – schools, the military, corporations. But studies have shown “potential” isn’t as innate as we think. And, in “Give and Take” , Adam Grant summarizes some surprising research.

The classic study, in 1966, was done in schools. Teachers were given names of students who “had shown the potential for intellectual blooming”. Unbeknownst to the teachers, the experimenters had chosen the students randomly. And, yet, the “bloomers” did indeed score better over time on IQ tests in the following years – by an average of 15 points in the first year and 10 points in the second grade.

Why?

“Teachers’ beliefs created self-fulfilling prophecies. When teachers believed their student were bloomers, they…engaged in more supportive behaviors that boosted the students’ confidence and enhanced their learning and development. Teachers communicated more warmly to the bloomers, gave them more challenging assignments, called on them more often, and provided them with more feedback.”

In the 1980s, researchers discovered similar effects in the Israeli Defense Forces when trainees were randomly selected as “high-potential”. In 2000, in a meta-review of 17 studies in industries from banking to retail sales to manufacturing, researchers again found the same effects:

“Overall, when managers were randomly assigned to see employees as bloomers, employees bloomed.”

A better way to find talented people

In a previous post, I told the story of Jordi Munoz who, who grew up in Tijuana and, despite lacking a college degree or other traditional credentials, went on to become CEO of a robotics company at age 24. The person who hired Jordi was Chris Anderson, the founder and former editor of Wired magazine. He found Jordi through an online robotics community where Jordi was an active member. There, Chris could see his work, see public feedback from others, and could even collaborate with him all before ever speaking with him.

In Chris’ book “Makers”, he pointed out how he never would have found such talent if he looked in the traditional places.

“Why wouldn’t you start a company with people with whom you were already working well, who had already proven their mettle? It seems so much riskier to take a flier on someone you don’t know, just because that person has a degree from a good school.

This is the Long Tail of talent. The web allows people to to show what they can do, regardless of their education and credentials. It allows groups to form and work together easily…”

The reason Chris didn’t need to limit himself and rely on MIT or Berkeley to find talent for him is that Jordi (and all of us) now have platforms where we can make our work visible and discoverable and, importantly, where other experts can provide feedback on it. Through his contributions in the online community, Jordi was able to let his work speak for itself without the need for a broker.

A better way to develop talent 

Inside firms, we can do the same thing: creating environments where people can make their work visible and discoverable.

The idea of a group of managers sitting in a room and deciding who has potential or who’s talented is grossly flawed. It’s based on relationships and similarities more than merit. And, as the studies above show, there’s no evidence that any positive results (if they’re even tracked) are anything but self-fulfilling prophecies.

Think of the kids in that 1966 study. Picture the lucky random few who, when deemed “high-potential”, excelled. And picture the remaining 80% who, through no fault of their own, never got the “more supportive behaviors that boosted the students’ confidence and enhanced their learning and development”.

That’s what we’re doing at work. It’s bad for individuals and it’s bad for business.

And it’s time for smart managers to stop doing stupid things. Stop labeling a few people as having potential, developing them, and telling the rest not to bother. Instead, start viewing 100% of the people as having potential. (The randomness in the studies proves that’s largely true.) And start viewing your job as creating environments where anyone can contribute and learn, where anyone can become talented, and where anyone realize their potential.

This week, though, I participated in an event that was unambiguously good. It was something that made me particularly proud to work for a bank. And something you could be part of, too.

Out on the Street

The extraordinary event was called the “LGBT Leadership Summit” and it was organized by a group called “Out on the Street”.

“Out on the Street is the first lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) leadership organization created for Wall Street by Wall Street, and brings together LGBT and straight ally leaders from the international financial services industry to discuss vital issues, network, and collectively set a forward-looking agenda for the community on the Street.”

It was at Goldman Sachs’ headquarters and I was sitting with a few hundred people from dozens of financial services firms. We were in a beautiful auditorium, listening to fascinating panels: CEOs explaining why they cared; activists and lawyers discussing the issues; and lesbian executives talking about their day-to-day experiences.

Did you know…?

I was surprised to hear political conservative Ted Olson talk so eloquently about his reasons for arguing for gay marriage in front of the Supreme Court. A recent LA Times profile provided more detail:

“Olson says he doesn’t think his politics have changed, though he concedes that he has ‘learned a lot’ about himself from the current case. He believes gay marriage is a conservative cause.

‘There are libertarian conservatives, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives,’ he said. ‘I feel conservative in terms of limited government, individual responsibility, self-sufficiency — that sort of thing.’

‘Why would [conservatives] be against individuals who wished to live together and have a stable, loving, long-term relationship?’”

And I learned about what corporations were doing. For example, one of the topics discussed throughout the day was gay marriage. I’d had no idea how many firms were providing so much support for it:

• Providing health benefits for domestic partners
• Paying for any taxes related to those benefits
• Signing the amicus brief presented to the supreme court in support of gay marriage

I was proud that my firm was one of over a dozen banks that signed that brief. And, listening to gay rights activists, I was amazed to hear them say how corporations were “way out in front” and “taking the lead” in prohibiting discrimination in the workplace.

But I was still wondering: why would they? Why would CEOs go to such lengths to support Out on the Street and LGBT issues?

When corporations are in touch with their humanity

Yes, they mentioned it was good for business. How important it was, for example, to attract the best talent no matter their sexual orientation or race or gender. But they also mentioned various difficulties: lost customers; pushback within their own organizations; friction with other firms.

Towards the end of the day, Lloyd Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, explained how he came to be such a visible supporter. It started when he was co-chariman of a group of NYC CEOs and same-sex marriage was being discussed among the group. Lloyd made a short video describing his position, and that video attracted more attention from the media and other groups. He didn’t see it as an extraordinary contribution but as taking part in a cultural shift that was overdue.

He joked that “If I’m on the right side of history and people give me credit, I’ll accept it.” And he wondered “How would you make the case for the other side?” Like Ted Olson, he talked about seeing the joy of two people getting married in states where gay marriage was approved. “Why would you want to take that away? Whom does it hurt?” 

Over the course of the day it was clear many of these business leaders didn’t aim to be out in front on LGBT issues but they also wouldn’t shy away from it. When people asked them why they would be involved despite some of the negative consequences, it kept coming back to a phrase that’s not often associated with corporations:

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

Everybody’s issue

I used to think LGBT issues didn’t have anything to do with me because I’m not gay. Yet when I heard stories from panelists and learned about what they go through I felt differently. Women who’d been out for decades and yet still feel like they’re having to explain themselves every day, multiple times a day. Gay parents describing the awkward situations for them and their kids.

By the end of the day I understood that LGBT issues at work aren’t limited to people who fit neatly into the acronym. And it’s not just about gay marriage or benefits. It’s about creating a more humane workplace. About not discriminating and letting everyone bring their true selves to work.

That’s something we can all want. Something we can all contribute towards.

Most innovation programs are broken

Despite 1000s of years of evolution and countless books and studies on human motivation, we’re still using the Innovation Program and it’s cousin, the Suggestion Box, to inspire people to create change.

These devices – and the general “let’s offer a prize!” mindset at work – are overused, demeaning, and ineffective.

If you want to improve work, there’s a better way to bring good ideas to life.

How to disappoint people 97% of the time (or more)

The problem with most innovation programs is they ask for ideas and then apply a filter to reject most of them. This week, Nick Milton posted a cogent argument on “Why the Funnel model doesn’t work for small process innovations”:

“I saw a presentation the other day from one company which included a description of their Ideas process. This process was like a suggestion scheme, based on a funnel model, with online submission, and a series of filters which refined the idea until it was accepted. The presenter describing the system said that ideas were sought on improvements at all scales, and that to date they had received 35000 ideas and implemented 1000 of them.

You can hear this statistic, and think ‘Hey, great, 1000 implemented ideas’, or you can think ‘Hmmmm – 34000 disappointed people and wasted opportunities’.”

This kind of ratio applies to most idea programs. mystarbucks, for example, is one of the most celebrated suggestion programs, recently celebrating their 5th year and the 275th idea they’ve implemented. But that was out of over 150,000 submissions.

Of course it’s nice for people to have a voice. And sometimes, like Starbucks, you need significant resources to change products or processes. But for most improvements, the act of filtering out the vast majority of ideas using a central decision-making body, typically people who are far removed from the work, does more to kill innovation than promote it.

The place for prizes

One of the motivations for people to submit a suggestion in the first place is often a prize of some sort. Perhaps an iPad or gift card or recognition on a corporate website.

And sometimes prizes do produce results. The Royal Society of the Arts, for example, produced 1000s of innovations in the 1770s from the spinning wheel to advances in naval construction. The more modern X Prize helped launch the private spaceflight industry.

But in the successful examples, the money wasn’t simply for an idea. Instead, it was to provide resources to implement the idea or to otherwise reward people who had to expend considerable resources on implementation. The real motivation comes from the ability to implement as well as the potential rewards after the idea is implemented.

At work, a small reward for simply having an idea is patronizing and perhaps worse. There’s plenty of research showing that offering monetary rewards actually limits creative thinking. And when there are successful programs – as with Toyota’s famous suggestion program seeing over 80% of the ideas implemented – it’s not because of better prizes, but because people intrinsically wanted to make their work better. And, as Nick Milton points out, because the suggestions they made were approved in a localized, distributed process by people much closer to the work.

A different approach

Want innovation? Connect people.

And so, the best innovation program isn’t a program at all. Because what firms need isn’t soliciting more ideas and waiting for managers to do something with them.

What they need are new ways of  bringing ideas to life. New ways for people who are passionate about something to find each other and experiment with implementation so they can drive change.

One of the best and cheapest ways a firm can increase innovation in this way is to connect employees with a corporate social network and encourage them to use it. Since creating such a environment, we’ve seen improvements in customer service, elimination of waste, executive communications, and other areas. The innovations with the biggest commercial and cultural value never came out of a program and there were no prizes. Instead, the spontaneous online movements were motivated by intrinsic rewards of peer recognition, learning, social connections, and making their own work better.

Want more innovation? Remember that passion and perseverance among connected individuals trumps an idea in the hands of management.

The Ostrich Strategy
Photo credit: http://www.ostrichheadinsand.com/

Imagine you’re a salesperson at a big global firm and you’re paid well into 6 figures. You’re at your office, about to call a client, and you want to research her first. Who’s she connected to? Where has she worked before? What’s she up to these days?

Now imagine your firm won’t let you do any of that research on their office computer (but it’s okay <wink wink> to use your own phone to do it). And imagine your firm spends millions on training but not a nickel on how you can effectively use the most powerful client research tools on the planet.

That’s the state of social media at a lot of financial firms. Many firms block it. (You can’t even read content published by your own firm.) Most don’t train anyone. Most aren’t sure of what to do next. And most have their heads firmly planted in the sand, pretending everything’s okay.

This week, at a small event in London hosted by the Dachis Group, I got a chance to talk with a few other firms as to why that is and what we can do about it.

Risk, Responsibility, and Return

While some firms use social media for marketing, maybe even customer support, that only makes the lack of access and training more striking. For many firms the use of social media is limited to a few specialists sprinkled throughout the firm.

Perhaps the main reason for the lack of progress (at least in banks, pharmaceuticals, and other regulated firms) is that there’s too much risk. The rules are complicated (with plenty of gray areas) and so firms are confused about what they can do and say. Well-publicized missteps and scandals make them even more wary.

There’s also ambiguity as to who’s responsible for helping business lines use the tools effectively. Instead, each team – marketing, recruiting, support – each figures out everything from scratch. For most businesses, that can be overwhelming and expensive.

Then there’s the money. What’s it worth? Without some clear benefits, it seems like a lot of real risk for uncertain rewards. And with no one assigned to figure it out firm-wide, it’s no wonder there’s little progress.

An approach we could all agree on

In discussing this with other firms, it seemed a good approach might be to sell different things to different audiences. To compliance, the argument is that “willful ignorance is not an option”. That they’d better fund an effort to sort out monitoring and training at a minimum or they’ll be at risk given people are increasingly using their own devices anyway.

For businesses, particularly sales, their best use of social media might not require posting at all. They can have the best rolodex they ever had by simply having read-only access to social media and some training on how to use it for client research.

We agreed that fear and greed can be a powerful combination.

Stepping back and moving forward

The discussion that night was strangely reassuring. Despite the lack of significant progress in using social media in financial firms, the absence of evangelism and the abundance of solid next steps made me feel there’s hope after all. After a lot of hype and little real results, most advocates of social media I spoke with agreed on some very sound, practical approaches:

• They stopped talking about “social” at their firm and focused instead on the problems they were trying to solve.
• They formed or sought to form a small center of excellence to sort out the tools, rules, and processes to make it easier for individual business lines to take their first step
• They started with small projects and with people in business lines who were already advocates.
• They positioned their social media work as simply part of a broader portfolio of communications and engagement as opposed to a distinct, disjoint effort.

It’s taking much longer than I expected for firms to help their people use social media effectively at work. But I’m more convinced than ever that it’s “when” and not “if”.

What would you do? How would you discover what you like and the relevant opportunities that might exist? You could wait, hoping for something interesting to come along. You could work your small network to see what’s out there.

Or you could work out loud – a process of making your learning, discovery, and contribution visible. It may be the best way to improve your chances of finding or creating fulfilling opportunities.

Here’s a story of someone I admire who did just that.

The story of Joyce Sullivan

Joyce Sullivan

For more than 20 years, Joyce Sullivan worked at large banks, managing big, complex projects. At times, it was challenging, well-paid, even exciting. Particularly in the earlier years, it felt very entrepreneurial. Joyce felt she could “see the opportunity, find the zealots, organize tasks, connect talented people who were passionate about a sometimes esoteric topic, and get them in a room to create some kind of change.”

But as the banking industry changed, so did the work and so did Joyce. When her firm down-sized, Joyce was ready to do something different. But what?

Building on initial interests

There were some constants throughout Joyce’s career. Trained as an educator, she always enjoyed learning and helping others learn. She enjoyed working with people at all levels, listening to them and learning from them. (“Not just with the leaders but with the people who really do the work.”). And she liked learning about the next new thing.

One of those things was social media. She remembered how she felt when access to personal email was blocked by her firm. She had used it at work to stay connected with family and, when it was blocked, “It started to feel like I was losing my freedom.” Joyce was interested in how social media gave people a voice and some control. And so she made a point of using all the tools herself and talking with other people about how and why they used them.

She was just a banking professional at the early stages of learning and exploring, but she liked it and her efforts grew increasingly purposeful.

Leading with generosity & Leveraging other networks

Over time, Joyce came to know more than her peers about what social media was and how it could be used at work. To increase her learning, she volunteered to serve as the first Chief Digital Strategist for the Financial Women’s Association of New York.  She’d been a member of the venerable, 57-year old institution for years and appreciated how helpful they’d been. Having seen newer networking groups grow through their use of social media, Joyce wanted to help her own organization use those tools and grow, too.

While it was an unpaid role, it allowed her to apply some of her learning in a business context. It helped her leverage an existing institution to establish meaningful business connections. And, importantly, it enabled her to present at conferences.where she could further shape both her reputation and her network.

Joyce was no longer just a banker interested in social media, but a social media professional who also happened to be a banker. By experimenting with ways to apply her interests while working out loud and building a network, she discovered ways her hobby could be much more than that.

And she continued to look for additional ways to contribute. She’d teach finance professionals about LinkedIn, organize her own networking events, and connect people in her growing network who could help each other. With each act of generosity, she would learn more, make more connections, and have yet more to contribute.

Narrating her learning

I first met Joyce via conference call while she was working at another bank. She made a point of connecting via LinkedIn and Twitter. And though many months would go by before we spoke again, I could follow all of her learning on-line: the people and companies she was meeting, the tools she was trying, the work she was doing, and the discoveries she was making.

This was more than just personal branding. Joyce was earnestly narrating what she was doing, including original contributions, in ways that could help others.

I was amazed at the incredible range of things she was involved in – from delivering webinars to making videos to giving talks at big conferences like SXSW and the 140 Conference – and how she knew so many interesting people.

New possibilities

All of this learning and all of these connections opened up new possibilities. People who’d seen her work would contact her about an opportunity: “Joyce, can I talk to you about…” and would ask her about training, coaching, or speaking to their company. One of the highlights was being asked to appear with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC  “offering advice for baby boomers suddenly back at the drawing board.”

Yet the drawing board wasn’t a blank canvas at all. Joyce drew on her 20 years of banking and her years of purposeful exploring and networking. She eventually started her own consulting firm, SocMediaFin, offering “social media strategy development and implementation for financial services and other highly regulated industries”. She’s now a popular speaker at conferences and companies around the country. And she gets genuine fulfillment from her daily interaction with her large, diverse, and still growing network.

When Joyce was laid off, she didn’t recede into the background or just rely on friends and family for access to existing jobs. Instead, she channeled her energy into purposeful discovery – learning, experimenting, meeting people, contributing. And by making all of that visible using social platforms, she turned those experiences into new and more fulfilling possibilities.

You can, too.

And yet every year we neglect to do one of the cheapest, easiest, and most effective things we can do to improve employee engagement: appreciate what people do.

Why?

More than sex and money

Harvard Business Review routinely publishes articles on employee motivation and engagement. One of the most famous is from Frederick Herzberg who, in 1968, wrote “One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?” In that article (which for a long time had more reprints purchased than any other from HBR), Herzberg dismissed ham-fisted attempts by managers to motivate employees and urged them instead to focus on job enrichment and “motivator factors”.

“The growth or motivator factors that are intrinsic to the job are: achievement, recognition for achievement, the work itself, responsibility, and growth or advancement. The dissatisfaction-avoidance or hygiene factors that are extrinsic to the job include: company policy and administration, supervision, interpersonal relationships, working conditions, salary, status, and security.”

Herzberg’s surveys put recognition as the second most important factor in employee satisfaction.

This week, 45 years after Herzberg’s article, HBR published “The Two Most Important Words”. It’s a personal story from former Mattel CEO, Robert Eckert, on the power of saying “thank you” at work. To make his point more memorable, he quotes another CEO, cosmetics entrepreneur Mary Kay Ash:

“There are two things people want more than sex and money: recognition and praise.”

In the decades in between those two articles, there have been countless studies showing that recognition and praise increase engagement, decrease turnover, and lead to to many other very specific business benefits. So why don’t we see more of it?

Praise paralysis

Just this week, in a meeting where people were lamenting all the issues contributing to employee dissatisfaction, someone suggested we should recognize employees more. Another person agreed, saying that even though there wasn’t budget for events and the like, we should try to be creative.

“How about saying thank you?”, I asked. And an awkward silence fell upon the room.

It was as if “recognition” was something that only came packaged in awards programs. As if we have forgotten the simple, powerful, human gestures of sending a hand-written note or publicly recognizing someone’s work (something that’s become easer than ever to do using our social platform).

That meeting wasn’t an aberration. Research “revealed just one in five workers believe a boss at work has ever publicly recognized them. And fewer than half of employees have received even one personal thank-you from their boss.”

Barriers to praise

For many, the potential downsides of rewarding employees – that praise and recognition can be misused, misunderstood, or even bring about negative results – is enough to lead to inaction.

In “Why We Do What We Do”, the psychologist Edward Deci cautions that “rewards can be used as a way to express appreciation, but the more they are used as motivators…the more likely it is that they will have negative effects.”

Too often, managers rely on bonus money or other prizes to reward people. But, as Deci points out, “the results of the studies cast further doubt on the efficacy of these pay-for-performance practices.” Results tend to be short-term and “will likely encourage shortcuts and undermine intrinsic motivation. They will draw people’s attention away from the job itself, towards the rewards it can yield, and that without doubt will result in less effective, less creative problem solving.”

A safe way to start

So what do you do if crude carrots and sticks don’t work? You can get ideas for  comprehensive recognition programs from books like “The Carrot Principle”. They provide useful tools to help you decide on everything from budgets to specific types of rewards for different kinds of achievements.

To start, though, some of the best advice is also the easiest to follow: begin with a genuine, personal “thank you.” Robert Eckert put it well in “The Two Most Important Words”:

“Wherever I show my thanks, these tips work well for me:

• Set aside time every week to acknowledge people’s good work.
• Handwrite thank-you notes whenever you can. The personal touch matters in the digital age.
• Punish in private; praise in public. Make the public praise timely and specific.”

I was thinking about this as I was walking to an appointment yesterday. I noticed a landscaper in Battery Park City pruning back some very tall grasses. It was clearly very physical work and the results were stunning. As I walked by, I thought “I should really say thank you.” Yet, in that moment, I was just like every manager at work. I knew what to do but was too busy with other things to act on it.

This time, though, I turned back, approached the landscaper, and thanked her for making our neighborhood look so wonderful. She looked at me, surprised. Then she wiped her brow and smiled. “Thank you for appreciating it.”

That moment made my day. And for the landscaper, she knew that at least one person valued her hard work and admired her achievement. That moment, multiplied by thousands – by millions – is what the Robert Eckert had in mind when he encouraged readers and their firms to “Foster a culture of gratitude. It’s a game changer for sustainably better performance.”

It is a game changer. And it could all start with a “thank you.”

Career Day

Last week, I was at my son’s middle school for Career Day. I struggled a bit as I thought of how to describe what I do and whether it would be relevant to 11- and 13-year olds.

Could I show them how working out loud would give them access to opportunities that could make work – and life – better?

“How would you find a job?”

So I started with a question: “How would you find a job?” And the responses from the 50 kids in two different classes were largely the same.

“Fill out a form”

“You might see a help wanted sign”

“Apply on line.”

“Ask family and friends.”

They were the same answers I would have given 30+ years ago. Then I followed up with a question they found much more interesting.

“What do you want to do when you grow up?”

A cake by Rosanna Pansino

Now more hands shot up. “Baseball player.” “Something with physics.” “Decorate cakes.”

“Decorate cakes?” I asked. “Okay. How would you get a job decorating cakes?”

The aspiring cake decorator said she might go to her local bakery and apply. Good. But what if she could put her cake decorating skills online so 100 or 1000 bakeries could see what she could do?

Another girl piped up: “Like Rosanna Pansino.”

Um, who? “She bakes things and puts her videos on YouTube.”

So I pulled out my phone, searched for Rosanna Pansino and, sure enough, I found this:

Rosanna, it turns out, is 28 years old and has had some minor acting roles. But she also loves baking. And instead of applying for a baking job, she starting using social media to make her work visible and establish her reputation as the “Baker of Nerdy Things.”

Best. Job. Ever.

As time was running out, one young boy got the courage to say “I want to be a gamer.”

The other kids laughed and the teacher was skeptical. “Are there jobs like that?” But the kids knew better. “Sure! You could test games.” “You could create them.” “You could play them in contests.” “You could write books.”

Having gone through several examples of working out loud with the class, I asked them: “What advice would you give your classmate? How could he find opportunities to play video games for a living?”

“He could post cheat codes online.” “He could post videos of him playing.” “He could play online where other people could see him.”

In short, he could play games in an online, public way that would make his skills searchable and discoverable while helping him connect with people in the gaming world. He could work out loud.

How would you find your next job?

If young people can embrace the idea of working out loud for such a wide range of aspirations, what will you do when you look for a new job? Will you fill out a form? Ask your friends and family for connections?

The universe of possible positions for you is so large and yet the traditional routes to finding a job are so grossly limiting and ineffective. You, your broker, and your close connections will only be aware of a small sliver of the possibilities unless you use social platforms and work out loud.

As the class got ready for their next session, I had one final question.

“You have an incredible advantage. You have ways to make you and your work visible that people my age never had. As a result, you have access to so many more opportunities than your teacher and me.

How will you use that advantage?”

It was a crisp, clear September night. I was walking along the Hudson River, heading home through the park after a nice evening  with friends.

And I was unhappy. Instead of focusing on a beautiful walk home after a good day, I was muttering to myself about some detail at work. I stopped short and asked “Why?”

Why was I focusing on a small problem and not on all of the good things?

The hedonic treadmill

That was a few years ago. Since then, I’ve learned that my experience was reasonably normal. Most people, it turns out, have a “happiness set point”. That is, whether you’re an accident victim or a lottery winner, you tend to revert to the same level of happiness you were at before.

“The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the supposed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.”

To make matters worse, people tend to focus on the negative, just as I was doing.

“The notion of “historical neglect”, that people tend to focus more on negative emotions than positive emotions, can become a great detriment to improving our happiness set point. Negative emotions require more attention and are remembered better, overshadowing any positive experiences that may even outnumber negative experiences.”

So, day after day, most of us dwell on the problems and issues we have and, no matter what happens, we’re as happy as we’re ever going to be.

A cause for optimism

But while research shows your particular happiness point is influenced by genetics, studies also show you can change it. The search for happiness has lead to more research and more research has lead to more books. Here are 10 of the most popular.

“The Art of Happiness”, “Stumbling on Happiness”, “Happiness: Essential Mindful Practices”, “The How of Happiness”, “Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill” , “The Happiness Project”, “The Happiness Advantage”, “The Happiness Hypothesis”, “Real Happiness”, “Authentic Happiness”.

There’s even a movie called, appropriately, “Happy”.

The good news is that all of this material agrees on the same basic formula for being happy.

How to be Happy

One of the simplest, most useful summaries of what we know about happiness is available from one of the best medical institutions in the US, the Mayo Clinic.

“Only 10 percent or so of the variation in people’s reports of happiness can be explained by differences in their circumstances. It appears that the bulk of what determines happiness is due to personality and — more importantly — thoughts and behaviors that can be changed.

So, yes, you can learn how to be happy — or at least happier.

Although you may have thought, as many people do, that happiness comes from being born rich or beautiful or living a stress-free life, the reality is that people who have wealth, beauty or less stress are not happier on average than those of who don’t enjoy those blessings.

People who are happy seem to intuitively know that their happiness is the sum of their life choices, and their lives are built on the following pillars:

Devoting time to family and friends

Appreciating what they have

Maintaining an optimistic outlook

Feeling a sense of purpose

Living in the moment”

My own first step

My problem was that this knowledge wasn’t helping me. After reading the books and watching the documentaries, nothing changed. Until a few months ago.

Instead of just wanting to be happy, I tried developing new habits to be happy. A few months ago, I wrote about some new things I was trying. Watching a video each morning on cultivating a sense of gratitude. Meditating a few times a week. For the first time, I even served food at a wonderful food bank.

Over time, to my utterly pleasant surprise, I noticed a difference. I noticed I was a bit calmer. More grateful for things and, well, happier. It was as if, just as the research showed, my new habits could change how my brain worked.

Now, I haven’t reached some exalted state. I still multi-task too much instead of being fully present, I may be the world’s worst meditator and I don’t give enough yet. But I’m happy-er.

My experience helped me understand why the Mayo Clinic’s prescription for happiness isn’t a pill. It’s “practice, practice, practice.”

And while I’ve only taken a step, it’ll be a lovely walk, and this time I’ll be sure to enjoy it.