Radio 4 Four Thought: Let People Choose Their Managers
Catch Henry on Radio 4's Four Thought talking about why people should choose their managers.
Henry is founder and Chief Happiness Officer of Happy Ltd, originally set up as Happy Computers in 1987. Inspired by Ricardo Semler’s book Maverick, he has built a company which has won multiple awards for some of the best customer service in the country and being one of the UK’s best places to work.
Henry was listed in the Guru Radar of the Thinkers 50 list of the most influential management thinkers in the world. "He is one of the thinkers who we believe will shape the future of business," explained list compiler Stuart Crainer.
His first book, Relax, was published in 2009. His second book, the Happy Manifesto, was published in 2013 and was short-listed for Business Book of the Year.
You can find Henry on LinkedIn and follow @happyhenry on Twitter.
Catch Henry on Radio 4's Four Thought talking about why people should choose their managers.
Publishing the Happy Manifesto has led to a lot of organisations contacting Happy. Some call us in to help them improve their workplace and we love doing this. But there is an even bigger thrill when I get a letter from somebody we’ve not been involved with, who has taken the Manifesto and put the ideas into practice. So I’m delighted to copy the blog below, originally published on the Spiral Health site, about the work they are doing at an NHS site in Lancashire.
Nigel Paine headed the BBC’s Learning and Development operation. He built an award winning Leadership programme, state of the art informal learning and knowledge sharing and one of the most successful and well used intranets in the corporate sector.
Around 80 people came together at Google’s Victoria HQ on 24th April 2013 to share ideas and learn how to create happy workplaces. Watch video footage here.
At our Happy Workplaces Conference last week we got to experience a Google manager induction, from Emma Rapaport. She explained that some years ago Google had discovered, from its exit interviews, that some people left the company at least partly because of their manager. Their response was to work out what made a great manager, in what became known as Project Oxygen.
I’ve written about it before. This is the simple suggestion that you should let people choose their managers. And the great thing is that when people do have the courage to try it, I almost always get positive feedback.
Sitting in the reception of Central & Cecil Housing Association, one of our clients, I flicked through the information leaflets. Alongside the pamphlet on how to make a complaint was a more unusual one – a Compliments Guide. Yes, Central & Cecil had taken the trouble to create a guide to how let their people know when they’d done well.
Happy is today named as one of the most democratic workplaces in the world, in a unique list of companies seeking to run organisations with more freedom and empowerment of their people. Here is the piece I have written for Huffington Post on the subject.
Happy People works with organisations and teams to make them more effective through truly valuing and getting the most from their people…
At Happy we have been developing e-learning for over 12 years. More recently we have got excited about Live Online Learning, where you learn from your desk but with a real live trainer in a virtual classroom. But some of the most effective learning we deliver still takes place in the classroom.