Creating job ownership

Published on March 28, 2019   21 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Hello. I'm Henry Stewart. I'm Chief Happiness Officer at company called Happy, and I'm going to be talking about, how you create happy workplaces based on job ownership. Did I get to argue that one of the best ways to make your organization more productive and more profitable, is to give few people the freedom and trust they need to do a great job.
0:22
So who is Happy? We're a small company based in London, who have achieved wide recognition. We were rated the best company in the UK for customer service a few years back, and with five years in a row, rated in top 20 best places to work in the UK. So I'm going to share some of the lessons we've learned starting with our core principle.
0:45
People work best when they feel good about themselves. Would you agree? If that is the case, what then should be the main focus of leadership and management? I would argue that it should indeed be creating environment where people feel good about themselves. At congresses, I like to ask people to put up their hands if that is the case in their organization, if their leadership management is focused on making people feel good, and only get about one in 20. But I was on the panel once when the chair of one Britain's largest retail organizations, 90,000 people, put his hand and straight in the air and said yes, "That is the focus of leadership in my organization." You can probably guess who it was, it wasn't sports. So Victor can tell you that, it was John Lewis. Said, "Charlie may you chair of John Lewis explain how the last board meeting." They spent 20 minutes discussing the numbers and three hours discussing people and how to motivate them. From what I drew from John Lewis tests, you spend at least five times much time discussing people than you do finances, and then if you know that John Lewis story that was set up in the 1930s as a work as mutual by Spedan Lewis, and the core of the constitution, is that every decision should be based on how happy it makes its workers.