Story:
Happiness is…a work environment where people feel good about themselves and are empowered to do their best work

Power to the people
Getting managers out of the way and letting people perform was my first priority. That meant giving people freedom…but with clear principles. We didn’t want rigid rules but we did need systems that everyone understood, for getting things done. We needed a climate of trust. Part of that involved banishing the old fear of making a mistake. Part of it meant giving front line people the authority they needed to do their work, including pre-approval of funding requests.  Things changed. A year later, I was out sick for three weeks with pneumonia, and had no contact with the office. I came back to two phone calls, and sales had gone up.

Redefining management
I got more ideas from the work of Marcus Buckingham, and his concept of “strength finder,” which is built around enabling people to do what they actually do best. One of his most powerful messages, for me, was that the old practice of identifying your strengths and weaknesses, and then throwing your efforts against addressing the weaknesses, is a waste of time.  You’re better off acknowledging your weaknesses and simply not working in those areas; instead play to your strengths. And that applies to management, too.

Early on, partly by accident, we realized that people really valued the coaching and sponsorship they had been getting from their managers, which was different from the traditional management role. That led to the radical view that managers should be chosen according to how good they are at managing people, rather than technical competence and how long they’ve been at the job. We call them coordinators. You still need the technical expertise; they’re just different roles.

It also reinforced my faith in “re-evaluation counseling,” which I’ve been involved in for more than 20 years. The basic principle is that what we need is attention, to work things out. Most people need someone to listen to them, pay attention and support them while they get their feelings out. That’s why we believe that feedback is crucial, and insist on upward appraisals for managers.

Rethink recruitment
I think most recruiting is almost designed to recruit the wrong people.  Central to our approach is that we never ask for qualifications. I think it’s profoundly discriminating to ask for degrees because normally it has no relation to the job; and working-class, disabled and black people are all under-represented at universities. It doesn’t happen at Virgin because if it did, they wouldn’t hire Branson. We don’t normally need to advertise job openings for trainers; people sign up on our web site to express their interest. When we have an opening, they are emailed two questions: why do you want to work for Happy, and what makes a great trainer?

When we devised our current recruitment, we thought of other areas where you have to choose from a lot of people in a short time. Two areas we thought of were speed dating, and the TV programme The X Factor. Our applicants are sent the company’s principles, and invited to Happy’s headquarters, in groups of twenty. We’re looking for people who are supportive of each other, so we want to see how they interact.  We have asked them to prepare a 15 minute training session, but about ten minutes before they have to deliver, we tell them they have to cut it to six minutes. That lets us see if they have the potential to train, and how they cope with change, a crucial criterion for a good trainer. Then they train; we assess them using a clear marking system; and we give them feedback – that’s the speed dating part. The X Factor part is that, after the first round, they coach the performers. They try and find the potential. So, second round interviewees deliver a training session; we take them out and coach them; and they deliver it again. If they don’t respond to our coaching, and give the same session, they don’t get through.

Our administrative staff – we call them “smoothies” after Sade’s “Smooth Operator” song – sit in on team interviews for admin staff. We’re not hung up on formal qualifications there either. We recruited someone at age 16 who became the finance manager at 21, without the standard basic math qualification. And, do you know, in her three years in the job she never had to calculate the angle on a triangle or solve a quadratic equation.  She was brilliant at getting people to pay up, and in our business that’s the most important thing.

Happy People
As we gained confidence in our business philosophy and public recognition – we were rated among the top 20 workplaces in the UK - we decided to try to help other organizations create great workplaces. So, we now have three divisions: Happy Computer, for IT training; Happy eLearning, for online IT training; and Happy People.

Our aim at Happy People is to change the way people work in the UK, so people look forward to coming to work, work to their strengths, fulfill their potential, and make the organization more effective. We offer consulting services, but we have also written a book that communicated our philosophy through a fictional tale of how a frazzled small business owner discovers another way to run a business. I recently posted a draft of a second book called The Happy Manifesto on our company site, and invited people to offer feedback, and share examples and stories related to the management principles in it. Sharing what we’ve learned and building on that through others’ experience is just part of what I believe in, and what we do.