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Saturday, October 5, 2024

How to Hack Happiness and Lead a Thriving Team

One of the most valuable skills you can develop as you reach management and leadership positions is leveraging people.

Or in plain english, get good at getting other people to want and enjoy doing good work for you.

Most businesses, managers and leaders are stuck in the old, now inefficient way of doing this.

This is leading to a ton of issues in the UK including:

- Low levels of employee motivation
- High levels of employee sickness and turnover
- High levels of stress for managers and leaders

Today I’m going to show you how to make leadership feel almost effortless by ethically hacking human happiness.

​If you’re in management or leadership, you’re not going to want to miss this one.

Human Psychology 101

In the 1940s psychologist Abraham Maslow created the still widely referenced Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

It theorises that humans progress through a series of psychological needs.

Maslows Hierarchy Of Needs

Throughout most of human history daily life has been challenging meaning effective leadership and management only had to focus on the bottom two levels.

Today, in a country like the UK, life is more comfortable than ever before.

This means people are working for you more because they want to and less because they have to.

Learn how to utilise the top levels of the pyramid and this will play to your advantage, stay stuck at the bottom and leadership will feel like an uphill battle.

Levels 1/2 - Physiological & Safety Needs

The first and most important need of humans is survival.

A job supports survival by providing money. This money is used in exchange for the things that enable one to survive i.e. food and shelter.

The basic level for supporting this is providing minimum wage and a decent contract of employment.

By doing this you are supporting levels 1&2 of their basic human needs.

In times of high unemployment and poverty just fulfilling these needs was enough for businesses to never have a shortage of motivated employees.

People would stay and work hard for life out of fear. Fear of unemployment, fear of poverty.

Today people have a choice of jobs available to them so if you aren’t making them want to work for you, they will underperform and probably leave. Fear is no longer your driver, motivation is.

​How do you motivate people to want to work for you? By moving supporting them through the higher needs.

Level 3 - Love & Belonging

When people have taken care of their basic needs they crave love and belonging.

Consider how many businesses are now focussing on their culture and values to attract talent.

Most of the youth of today (again I’m talking from the UK) have grown up in comfort without any concept of poverty.

When choosing jobs their main driver isn’t what’s going to put food on the table but what am I going to enjoy? Where will I fit in well?

They aren’t coming from a place of fear - what don’t I want? but a place of desire - what do I want?

To fulfil this need and attract the right people don't change your culture but be clear on what your culture is.

​Your super power here is getting clear on your values and embedding a system where you hold people accountable to those values - I wrote about this in last week’s newsletter available here.

Behaviours alignment score section from the Better Happy PDP Template - Training available in the Better Happy Business Operating Systems Course

Level 4 - Self-Esteem

Think of this as the confidence building ‘stage’. When a person has their basic needs covered and they are in a team where they feel appreciated, they naturally crave development.

People want to improve in confidence, discover their unique talents and feel a sense of achievement.

Help your people do this and you’ll unlock levels of productivity and loyalty other businesses can’t fathom.

A good sign you’re not making time for this is seeing motivated team members lose their spark and or leave - unexpectedly - after 1-2 years of service.

This is because you didn’t support them in this stage, and they were too polite to tell you.

Some ways you can do this:

Example of a teams strengths table (anonymised) to show different strengths of members within a team.

- Objectives and projects - Give people freedom and responsibility around new projects (bonus if it’s something they thought of). Don’t punish them for mistakes, celebrate progress and achievements. Learn how to implement this as a system here.

- Profiling - Profile and learn about the people on your team. Help them learn what makes them unique, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are. There are enough free profiling tools for you to do this quarterly without any budget.

- Recognition & feedback - Make it a discipline to recognise and celebrate wins every week (next weeks newsletter shows you how to structure weekly meet) . There’s always stuff going wrong and you’re mind is wired to fix problems… but be careful, only ever focus on what’s wrong and you’ll kill peoples confidence (then more will go wrong)

These are some but not all of the ways you can drive self-esteem in your team. The key takeaway is for you to think about and prioritise this.

Level 5 - Self-Actualisation

Help your people become the best they can be. Once a human has developed a level of confidence (esteem, previous section) we start to think about meaning and our full potential.

​​Society and life tends to teach people to suppress these thoughts, to forget their dreams and to focus on fitting in. That leads to a lot of dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
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​​Help people realise what they want in life and give themselves permission to go after it and you’re really hacking happiness.
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​​Get good at this and you’ll never struggle again to motivate or retain employees.
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​​When people know you have a genuine interest in them and you want what’s best for them, they will move mountains for you. Your challenge then will be to prevent them working too much.
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​​Hands down the best way to achieve this is by embedding a Personal Development Plan (PDP process) in your team.

Better Happy 3 stage PDP template and training

​​3-4 times a year have a check in with your key team members and work through three areas:
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​​- Personal check in - hows life, health, wealth, relationships etc
​​- Professional check in - Review performance, get feedback, give feedback
​- Goals and growth - Guide them to create 3 measurable, meaningful goals of growth for the next quarter

Wrapping Up

Maslow’s Hierarchy is your proven framework for easily getting people to love doing great work for you.

If you’re finding it hard to attract, motivate or retain people I guarantee the exact reason why can be easily identified with this model.

We over complicate leadership and management.

It’s all relationships. You don’t have to be a great coach or go on any courses to be good at this stuff.

You just need to understand that business is relationships and your job is to make sure those relationships are win/win.

Your business or department needs your employees to do tasks and grow the business. They will be happy to help your team or business grow when you support them through their psychological needs.

They want a combination of money, security, belonging, development and self actualisation and now you know how to give them that.

About Mike & Better Happy

I am a best selling author, business owner and consultant. As a previous military intelligence analyst, resident with monks and burnt out business owner, I now help business owners, leaders and managers create cultures of health, happiness and high performance without burnout. 

© All Rights Reserved. Mike Jones. Metta Move Ltd