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Rethink Culture is the podcast that shines the spotlight on the leaders who are rethinking workplace culture. Virtually all of the business leaders who make headlines today do so because of their company performance. Yet, the people and the culture of a company is at least as important as its performance. It's time that we shine the spotlight on the leaders who are rethinking workplace culture and are putting people and culture at the forefront.
[00:00:08 β 00:01:54] Andreas:
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to another episode of Rethink Culture, the podcast that shines the spotlight on leaders of businesses that people love to work for. My name is Andreas Konstantinou. I'm a micromanager turned conscious leader, and who in the process developed a passion for workplace culture. At Rethink Culture, we help companies build a high-performance culture by finding what stops their people and teams from doing their best work. Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Alex Kjerulf, Chief Happiness Officer at Woohoo. He's a founder of Woohoo, what a lovely name, and globally recognized thought leader in workplace wellbeing. He has delivered keynotes and hosted workshops in over 50 countries, working with companies like Hilton, Microsoft IKEA, Shell, HP, and IBM. He has also authored five books, including Happy Hours 9-5, translated in 11 languages, and his latest book, which is Leading with Happiness. He's also a TEDx speaker and has been covered by CNN, New York Times, BBC, and Financial Times. He's the creator of Headcount or Hardcount, sorry, a feedback tool designed to measure and boost employee happiness. On the fun side, he has been swing dancing with his girlfriend for eight years now. It's a big passion of his. It happens to be a big passion of mine as well. That's amazing. Like myself, he's also someone who has a passion for employee happiness and comes from an engineering background. With all of these fun facts in place, very welcome to the Rethink culture podcast, Alex.
[00:01:55 β 00:01:57] Alex:
Thank you, Andreas. Great to be here.
[00:01:58 β 00:02:14] Andreas:
Tell us a little bit about your story. Tell us about Woohoo, just the highlights, and if there was an influence or a formative experience that led you to your journey here.
[00:02:15 β 00:03:00] Alex:
Sure. First of all, thank you. This is amazing. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with computers. I got my first computer when I was 16 years old. I loved programming, I loved playing computer games, so I studied computer science, got a master's degree, went into tech, and I was in tech for about seven years, including co-founding my own tech company in Copenhagen. I sold that, and then I was like, "Okay, now what do I want to do with my life?" I realized that my true passion in life is not tech and IT and computers, it's happiness at work, helping people find jobs they love. That's why I started Woohoo, Inc. in 2003, and been doing this for a little over 20 years now where I make people happy at work.
[00:03:00 β 00:03:05] Andreas:
Was there a trigger point? How did that realization come about?
[00:03:06 β 00:03:43] Alex:
Yeah, there was. The last year when I had my tech company, I was deeply unhappy at work. I didn't feel in my own company. I started with two other guys and I didn't feel I fit in anymore. I took that experience like nobody should feel that way at work. I think we've all tried it. We've all tried having jobs we enjoy, but we also all tried having jobs we hate. The difference between those two situations is just stark. The effect it had on my performance, the effect it had on my life, the effect it had on my happiness, I was like, "Nobody should ever feel like that." I was deeply inspired to do something to make people happier at work.
[00:03:44 β 00:03:48] Andreas:
How did you get people to listen on why happiness at work is important?
[00:03:49 β 00:04:39] Alex:
I think I have one massive advantage in doing this work, which is that I'm from Denmark. In Denmark, happiness at work is already a part of the conversation. We even have a word for it. The word in Danish is apaet'sglil. Apaet means work, glil means happiness, gladness. Little bit just means work happiness. But it's part of the conversation here. Every Dane expects work to be good. For us, it's not something weird or new or strange, which is part of the conversation already. I started with a lot of Danish clients. Then from there, I started getting clients all over the world. I've spoken in over 50 countries now, which is amazing. I've been to every continent to speak except Antarctica. If there's a South Pole researcher out there who's unhappy at work, I will fly to the South Pole and make them happy. Just cross that off the list.
[00:04:40 β 00:04:47] Andreas:
Godspeed, because we need to be more conscious and aware about happiness at work.
[00:04:48 β 00:04:51] Alex:
I absolutely agree. It is so fundamental.
[00:04:53 β 00:05:07] Andreas:
So, when we were discussing before pressing the record button, you were saying, and I love that French word you used, that we hear about the people who build great results in their business, but at the same time, those people are assholes.
[00:05:08 β 00:05:08] Alex:
Yes.
[00:05:09 β 00:05:16] Andreas:
There's too many people that build great businesses at the cost of people in their business.
[00:05:17 β 00:06:54] Alex:
Exactly. Somehow, we always hear about them. We hear about the Steve Jobs' and the Elon Musk's and Michael Jordan, for that matter. I think our culture has been programmed to believe that you can only create great results if you don't care about other people. So, those stories get retold again and again and again. I think Michael Jordan is a great example. They made the entire... Did you watch The Last Dance, the series on Netflix about Michael Jordan? He comes off as an incredible asshole in that show. This is a show that he approved, where he was involved in making the show, and he still comes off as a horrible person. Everybody's like, "Okay, Michael Jordan was a horrible person. Michael Jordan won a lot of games." That must mean that if you want to win, you have to be a horrible person. But that is just not true. My counter example is always Steph Curry. Do you follow the NBA at all? No. Okay, so Steph Curry, fantastic basketball player. He's won four championships. Michael Jordan has won six championships. But Steph Curry is a nice person. He's a great teammate. He's always... I mean, he wants to win. He's super competitive, but he's also very, very nice. And he always builds up his teammates. He helps them out. He's very appreciative of his teammates. He's never taking full credit for their wins. That just goes to show. But everybody talks about Michael Jordan, and very few people talk about Steph Curry. So I think our culture has been programmed to always look at the assholes, and I think that's a mistake.
[00:06:54 β 00:07:08] Andreas:
And to the people who are having a hard time understanding why it's better to be... Why it's better to be the... What was the name? Curry. Steph Curry. I forgot now.
[00:07:08 β 00:07:09] Alex:
Yeah.
[00:07:09 β 00:07:16] Andreas:
Steph Curry. Yeah, why is it better to be the Steph Curry? Yeah. Rather than the Michael Jordan? Why... How... What's the case you make for that?
[00:07:17 β 00:09:30] Alex:
So for two reasons. First of all, Michael Jordan broke people down. So there's a famous story. That story was not in the TV show, but there's a very famous story about a young player, very talented Kwame Brown, comes to the Bulls, Michael Jordan's team, and Michael Jordan just continually terrorizes this young player to the point where he has to leave the team, and his career as an NBA player completely fails. Because he was constantly harassing him in the worst possible way. So breaking him down. So one reason why you should not be an asshole is that you are not allowed to have that effect on people. I don't care how good you are as a business leader. If your leadership is breaking people down, you're doing it wrong. So that's one reason. And Steph Curry, of course, is the opposite. Last year they got a new player, and they're coming back from a game, and the new player doesn't have a ride home from the airport. So Steph Curry takes him in his car, like drives half an hour out of his way to take this young player home. Completely unknown 20-year-old Dutch player new to the team. That's just basic humanity. And if you're a leader, you should lead in a way that builds people up and not tears them down. So there's an ethical argument here, a moral argument that says that even though you are the leader, that doesn't give you the right to break people down. The other argument is an argument for results. And we know that positive leadership creates better results, because it inspires energy and motivation and better performance and creativity in people. If you are an asshole leader, you create fear around you. And people are afraid to speak up, they're afraid to disagree, they're afraid to come up with new ideas, they're afraid to take a risk. If you lead with happiness, if you build people up, then people around you will be more motivated, more engaged, more creative, more innovative, have better results, they'll stay with the company longer, and all of that together creates better results for the business. And the research is very clear on this, that good leaders actually on the whole, create better results than the toxic leaders.
[00:09:32 β 00:09:44] Andreas:
Have you had a client where you had to convince them of this merit of happiness or positive culture at work? Or do you only get the people who are convinced to come to you?
[00:09:45 β 00:10:30] Alex:
Yes, I think that's a little bit of a problem, right? Because given that our company is called WooHoo, and we talk about happiness at work, those business leaders, the toxic business leaders, they would never in a million years hire us. Which might be a good thing or a bad thing, right? On the one hand, they're the ones that need it the most, but on the other hand, they're not likely to listen. And as a consultant in this field, I long ago decided that I would rather spend my energy helping the companies who believe in this, instead of spending my energy and trying to convince people to believe in this. So instead of fixing this toxic leader over here, I can help this company over here where they have good leaders, and I can make them more productive, and then they can out-compete the bad company and they can go out of business.
[00:10:32 β 00:10:44] Andreas:
And who in the business you find is most, not just receptive, but also likely to act on that message? Is it the CEO or is it HR or is it someone else?
[00:10:45 β 00:11:36] Alex:
I would say that it can be anywhere in the organization. It depends less on position and more on people's mentality. If people are in business but have still retained their basic humanity. So I've talked to people at every level, like from the receptionist to the CEO who just get this message. One of my favorite examples was a pension company here in Copenhagen that we worked with, where the CEO was just like, "We need better results. "We can only create better results "if the customers are happy, "and we can only make the customers happy "if the employees are happy." So he was sold. He was like, "Their only question was, "How do we do this?" And we could help them with that. I love that kind of thing. But these people can be found at any level in the organization. Of course, it's most effective if the CEO believes this, because the CEO has the most power and can make this thing happen very quickly.
[00:11:37 β 00:11:57] Andreas:
Do you find that HR is, I mean, let me revert that or reverse that. I find that HR is very receptive to the message, but HR doesn't have the full remit to be able to act because they're only responsible for certain things in the organization.
[00:11:59 β 00:13:04] Alex:
I find the exact same thing. And it's sad, right? Because it's called human resources. HR should really be all about the humans in the organization. And instead, in many organizations, it's just its systems and processes and legal matters. So it's salaries, it's hiring and firing, its policies, that kind of thing. All of those things are important. They need to be in place, but they're only the foundation for good human resource management. On top of that, you need all of this stuff we're talking about. And HR would be the perfect place to do it. But they are often too burdened with all of those other more administrative tasks. I was just, I just did a workshop for an international client in the Middle East. And they said that they had two HR departments. They had traditional HR and fun HR. Oh. Yeah, a traditional HR was like, they're all there, I did balloons now, it was fun. And traditional HR was like contracts, hiring, firing process, all that. And then fun HR was like learning, training, development, culture, all that stuff.
[00:13:07 β 00:13:27] Andreas:
Yeah, that's very conscious of them. Unusual to find that distinction. Yeah, I thought that was great. What is the difference between some of the words that get thrown around a lot, like engagement, motivation, culture, employee experience and happiness?
[00:13:28 β 00:16:40] Alex:
Yes, I think you can define each of those in many ways. I think they're all great concepts. We focus on happiness. And the way we define happiness at work is that it's about how you feel in the workplace. Does work typically make you feel good or does work typically make you feel bad? And of course, nobody's happy at work every single day. If somebody's happy all the time, there's something wrong with them. We all have good days and bad days at work. So we just define it as do you have mostly, a lot of bad days, a lot of good days, and just a few bad days. But it's about how work makes you feel. For me, motivation, the way it's typically defined is, do you want to do your work? And you could be motivated for many reasons. You could also be motivated for very negative reasons. Like if I don't do my work, I'll get fired and then I'll lose my home and my family will be homeless and you don't want that. So motivation can be positive or negative. It's not necessarily a positive thing in itself. Engagement is kind of the same thing. Engagement means like, are you deeply engaged in your work? But you can also research, you can also be engaged in your work for negative reasons. Again, maybe you're very engaged in your work because you're afraid to be fired or because your boss belittles you, that kind of thing. Culture is sort of an overarching term for all the unspoken rules, spoken and unspoken rules that govern how we act in the organization as I see it. Well-being is kind of like happiness, but also in my, the way I see it, encompasses also physical well-being. Like what's your physical state in the workplace? What's your, are you sick? Are you feeling well? That kind of thing. So all of these terms are super useful. But for me, and that's of course why we focus on it, the most basic and fundamental one is happiness. And can I get philosophical here for a second? Of course. Okay, so philosophically, I am what's called an Epicurean or a Utilitarian. And the basic question philosophy is what is good and what is bad? And you can define that in many, many ways or what is right and what is wrong. And as a Utilitarian, I say that the things that are good are the ones that cause the most, that create the most happiness and the least unhappiness or pain, okay? So in that way, when that is the foundation, you can ask, so you wanna create a good culture, then my claim is that a good culture is one that makes people happy at work. Again, not ridiculously happy every single day, but happy most of the time. If you know why, how do we create engagement in a good way? I say we create engagement in a way that makes people happy at work. So happiness work becomes like the underpinning for all of these other terms. And if you, and again, and if we're talking about, when we're talking about leadership, are you a good leader? And my measurement for that is simple, are your employees happy at work? Then you're a good leader. If your employees are miserable and stressed out and burning out, then you're a bad leader and you need to fix it. So as I see it, all of these terms are related, but happiness is from a philosophical standpoint, the underpinning for all of them.
[00:16:41 β 00:16:47] Andreas:
And if happiness is the result, so the lagging indicator, what is the leading indicator? In other words,
[00:16:47 β 00:17:04] Alex:
how do you say happiness? Yeah, happiness is the leading indicator for things like performance and productivity and all of that. We know from the research that when people are happy at work, they do better work, that people who are happy at work create they're more productive, they're more innovative, or their minds are more open and so on.
[00:17:05 β 00:17:13] Andreas:
I totally agree with that. And if we look before, what comes before happiness, how can you create an environment where people are happy?
[00:17:13 β 00:18:16] Alex:
Yes, I think that takes two things. First of all, you need to know what happens at work, what causes happiness at work, and then you need to do it on a daily basis. And it's something all of us create together, leaders and employees, but of course, leaders need to lead the way here. So our model is that happiness, again, there's a lot of ton of great research on this. And in our model, we both happiness work down to two things, results and relationships. So what makes you happy at work, one thing is results doing great work. And especially when you get meaningful results, you know that your work matters, you make a difference. And then relationships is when you're valued as a human being, you have a good relationship with your coworkers, you have a good relationship with your boss, maybe even a good relationship with the clients, with the customers or whatever. But this feeling that you feel valued as a human being in the workplace, not just as a resource, but as a person, those are the things that make us happy at work. We need to know that. And then of course we need to do it. And so what if things we can do on a daily basis that create results and relationships?
[00:18:16β 00:18:18] Andreas:
So what are some of these things?
[00:18:18β 00:19:51] Alex:
Yes, I'm glad you ask. That those are some of the things we teach. So just like random examples, if there's one thing that the research shows make a difference, it makes a difference, it's positive feedback. So one of the things we do is we teach leaders to actually give positive feedback to their employees if an employee does a good job, if a team does a good job, if a team finishes a project, whatever, tell them in some way. You can tell them verbally, you can write them email, you can use some kind of internal kudos system, whatever you have, tell employees that you've noticed them doing a good job. You can give them a reward, but rewards are dangerous because that moves the focus from the feedback to the reward. So what matters way more here is that, I saw how you worked with that client, I read it at my approach, I thought you were super creative, you worked really hard on this project and the client is clearly ecstatic with the results. Great work Andreas, something like that. One thing we focus on a lot is celebrating our wins. And in many organizations, if something goes well, we never talk about it again. But if something goes wrong, then we have to have meetings and find out who did wrong and punish that person. So again, in our teams, in our companies, with our coworkers, celebrate the wins we have. Super important. Fixing problems, if employees have these minor daily annoyances, find what they are and fix them. Those kinds of things are really important to make people happy at work.
[00:19:51 β 00:20:09] Andreas:
So I was discussing with a client on whether we should recognize effort or award effort or recognize success or results and award success. Where'd you draw the line?
[00:20:10 β 00:21:05] Alex:
I think we should recognize both. But the thing is that effort, I think, is more effective to recognize effort. Because effort is essential, whereas the results, let's say you have two salespeople, right? And one of them is just super lucky and gets a big new client through no effort of their own. So their results are amazing, but they're actually not working very hard. Whereas the other one, the other salesperson is working super hard, building new relationships, communicating with clients, but didn't get the results this month. I think in that case, it makes so much more sense to recognize the effort than the result because the result can come from many things. Would you also reward? So recognizing effort, I think, is absolutely crucial. But both, you should recognize both, both results and effort.
[00:21:05 β 00:21:07] Andreas:
Would you reward effort or would you reward results?
[00:21:08 β 00:23:15] Alex:
I would be super careful with the rewards in general because whenever we reward anything, we move the focus onto the reward and people focus more on that. And I've seen so many examples of companies trying to reward employees with the best intentions. But if the reward isn't what people expected, if somebody else got a bigger reward, if the reward is something they don't enjoy, don't like, then it can actually, rewarding effort or results can actually create a lot of discontent, a lot of unhappiness, as opposed to, I mean, if people have earned a reward, they should get it. But you have to be super careful with how you reward people. Can I give you an example? Of course, I talked to a hospital orderly and he was working at this hospital. He's transporting a patient from one room to another and the patient has a cardiac arrest and their heart stops. Now, of course, he knows heart massage. So he gets the heart restarted, he gets the patient help, patient survives. Amazing, right? That's fantastic. What a worker, right? So this company, this hospital, has an internal reward system where you can earn stars and then you can use those stars to buy things in an internal store. So he got his manager gave him a star for saving this person's life. Now, if you have four stars, you can buy a coffee mug in this shop. So he was like, "I saved the person's life and they gave me 25% of a coffee mug." He was honestly insulted. He was like, "This is a joke." So if his managers had just in kebab, and said, "Holy shit, you're amazing. Well done, you saved that person's life. I am so proud of you. You are a model employee." That would have been great. But the same feedback together with 25% of a coffee mug is an insult. So that's an example of why you have to be super careful with rewards.
[00:23:16 β 00:23:18] Andreas:
Plus to create comparisons between people.
[00:23:18 β 00:23:23] Alex:
Exactly. So you gave me $1,000. That's great. That guy got $2,000. Why did you only give me $1,000?
[00:23:23 β 00:23:59] Andreas:
Yeah. It makes me realize the following. I've always been against, well, not always, but I'm currently against performance-based bonuses. I didn't used to be. I didn't realize the damage they do. Performance-based bonuses focus on individual performance, not collective performance, and therefore they create competition. For the very same reason, like you highlight, rewarding, not recognizing, but rewarding performance or effort, whatever is the case, puts you in competition with your colleagues.
[00:24:00 β 00:24:00] Alex:
Exactly.
[00:24:01 β 00:24:09] Andreas:
And therefore takes away from the team spirit of, "We either win together or we lose together." It's like a basketball team.
[00:24:10 β 00:24:28] Alex:
Exactly. I could not agree more. That's also the problem with something like stack ranking. Like forced employee ranking, same kind of problem. You're pitting employees against each other. It's a stupid system and it breaks people. That makes people miserable. Except the one guy who gets the biggest bonus. He's happy.
[00:24:28 β 00:25:09] Andreas:
Exactly. And next year, he's most likely jealous of the person. Exactly. That took him. He lost it. Exactly. You also mentioned earlier before we press record about the importance of purpose and meaning. Yes. How do you help your clients? How can someone think about purpose and meaning in the organization? Let's say they work for a business that doesn't have a particularly meaningful work. Let's say you build tires or you're in the tobacco business. How do you build meaning in your company?
[00:25:10 β 00:27:33] Alex:
Yeah. So here's the thing. You're right. Some jobs don't have that purpose. Some workplaces are actually bad. If you're making tobacco products, you're killing people. There's no way around that. But if you're making tires, you're helping people get to work. If the buses and cars don't have tires, people are not going to get to work in school. So you're actually like if you're a bus driver, you're still getting people where they need to go safely and on time. That work is deeply meaningful. So many jobs are meaningful. I think the problem is that in most organizations, we forget that. We talk a lot about what we need to do, but we don't talk about why we do it. I can give you an example. I was working with a pharmaceutical company here in Denmark, and they were using medical equipment. And this stuff had to be assembled by hand. So they had a huge assembly line with 100 workers who were putting these things together by hand. And they had a lot of problems with quality. And so many of the problems, many of these products had defects when they came, when they were finished. And so they brought in. So what they did one day was they brought in two people who are actually using these products, whose health depended on these products. And they gave a talk over lunch to these factory workers by like, here's what my life is like. I'm in a wheelchair. Here's why I need these products. Here's what happens when these products work. Here's what happens when these products fail. And now suddenly for the employees on this factory line, it's not just like putting this stuff together. It's if I do this wrong, I'm going to hurt that person. Now your work has meaning and purpose. And what happened was that the defect rate just like went straight down because now people knew not just what they were doing, but why they were doing it. And I think that's what we need to do in our organizations is telling those stories of here's how your work helped somebody. It could be somebody inside the organization. It can be a coworker. It could be somebody in another team. It can be a client. It can be the environment. It can be whatever. But we need that. We need to tell those stories of here's how we made a positive difference. I worked with a tech company in Copenhagen in Denmark and they actually so they they make software for their clients and they asked every client to record a short video of how the company, the company's work had helped the client. And then they showed all of those videos at the annual Christmas party.
[00:27:34 β 00:27:35] Andreas:
That's wonderful.
[00:27:35 β 00:27:47] Alex:
Right. It's such a simple, simple thing to do. It cost them no money. It was something the clients were happy to do. And it gave everybody in the company this this feeling that, oh, yeah, yeah, we're making a difference for our clients.
[00:27:48 β 00:28:56] Andreas:
There's this Chick-fil-A video, this U.S. fast food chain called Chick-fil-A, and they have a video of which is basically a life a day in the life of the customer. And they show you customers coming into order and they zoom into the person and they say that person has recently divorced. This is a girl whose parents are having a hard time making it. There's this elderly person that lost their wife and and they zoom into that person and suddenly behind just another customer that's there to pick something up, pay for it. And then the next customer comes in, you see humans. Yes. And that explains that purpose so well. It's just so well done and it's so empowering to see that the people you're serving, even if you're, you know, an employee on the front line with a base salary that you're actually making a difference to real humans.
[00:28:57 β 00:29:02] Alex:
Exactly. My favorite example of that is Zappos. You know Zappos, right?
[00:29:02 β 00:29:02] Andreas:
Yes, absolutely.
[00:29:02 β 00:30:00] Alex:
Yes. I gave a talk there a few years ago. I've studied them, been like there for like four or five times. And there that's that's their their entire goal is that. And so if you as a Zappos employee, if you have helped work with a client like in a chat or in a phone call or email, then afterwards the customer will get a satisfaction survey. It has one question, which is, do you feel like the Zappos employee you interacted with today genuinely cared about you and your reason for calling? And so they can build those relationships. And it's super interesting thing they do is that they do not measure their customer service agents on how many calls they handle. That would be the normal productivity goal, right? How many calls can you handle? They only measure them on that one thing, which is how happy were the customers after. And I think that is absolutely brilliant. That's why they have so many legendary stories of their employees making a real difference in customers' lives.
[00:30:01 β 00:31:05] Andreas:
We a few episodes ago, we had Joseph Michelli on the podcast who's written books about cultures at a lot of these brand new companies, including Zappos. And he has a book. It's one of the most insightful books on the Zappos culture. I forget the name of the book, but the the author is Joseph Michelli. And it talks about how they've structured the KPIs among other things to really incentivize the right behaviors rather than just ending up picking up on the phone and then talking for a few seconds. He actually there's this story about Zappos customer services employee who was speaking for eight hours on the phone with someone. And that was considered an achievement because that shows people they care. There's another one where I think the CEO Tony Chier at some point called or was it someone else called to ask how can I order pizza?
[00:31:06 β 00:31:09] Alex:
Yeah, I heard that story too. That's a really good story.
[00:31:09 β 00:31:24] Andreas:
And they did help him because they generally wanted to help the other person on the other line. So back to who is there a leadership mistake you learned a lot from Alex?
[00:31:27 β 00:31:56] Alex:
Personally, I suck as a leader. I don't have that in me. The few times I've tried it, I find that I don't do a really good job of getting the best out of people. So I think the number one mistake I've made was trying to be a leader and I shouldn't be. So yeah, so that's why I'm not.
[00:31:57 β 00:32:02] Andreas:
And thank you for being so vulnerable. It's actually rare.
[00:32:03 β 00:32:07] Alex:
It's who I am. I wish I had that in me, but I just don't.
[00:32:08 β 00:32:41] Andreas:
I was recently reflecting on someone, a colleague who has achieved amazing impact. In Germany organizing the biggest conference in Germany on investing in finance. And what's amazing that was not that he actually achieved that, but it's amazing that he was actually, he never told or he never bragged about achieving this. So he was very humble. And so I admire your humility and vulnerability, Alex.
[00:32:42 β 00:32:43] Alex:
It's just who I am.
[00:32:43 β 00:33:00] Andreas:
So what is stopping you from doing the best work of your life? You've written five books. You're a text deck speaker. You work with clients all over the place. Where are you at this point in your life and what's stopping you from doing the best work of your life?
[00:33:00 β 00:33:51] Alex:
I don't think there's anything stopping me, to be honest. I'm very proud that I've tried out new things and developed the business and gone to new places. Can I briefly talk about my newest project? Please. This is hilarious. I was like, I wonder if I could do comedy. So I created a comedy show called Learn How to Become Danish in an Hour. And we just had the first performances last month. Last month to a nearly sold out crowd and people loved it. And just giving myself, I've never performed comedy. I'm a public speaker. I'm a really good speaker, to be perfectly honest. But I've never done comedy before. And going on stage with the express purpose of making people laugh was terrifying.
[00:33:52 β 00:33:53] Andreas:
That is so hard.
[00:33:53 β 00:34:32] Alex:
It was so hard. But I'd written a really good presentation. I researched my topic very closely. I'd thought a lot about what is funny in this. And it worked. I went out the first night and it was a huge hit. And I went out there, changed some things for the second night. It went even better. So just giving myself a challenge like that and trying something completely new and honestly, it's terrible. I was so scared. It's a long time since I've been this nervous before going on stage. But it was fun. It's been a really fun process. And I'm going to develop that further and do it again in August. It's going to be a blast.
[00:34:33 β 00:34:42] Andreas:
Good luck with that. All the best with that. And touching on another off the beaten track topic, you are a swing dancer.
[00:34:42 β 00:34:42] Alex:
Yes.
[00:34:43 β 00:34:51] Andreas:
And very passionate at that. Yes. What does swing dancing teach us about leading in business?
[00:34:52 β 00:37:08] Alex:
This is super interesting. In swing dancing, in all couples dances, you have a leader and a follower. Typically, it's the man who's the leader and the woman who's the follower. But in swing dancing, it doesn't have to be. You can also have two men dance together. One is the leader, one is the follower. You can even change roles in the middle of the dance. That's super cool. But here's the thing. And I can dance both roles. Sometimes I lead, sometimes I follow. But when you're the leader, you give your partner a signal. Maybe you give a little bit of a stretch here, maybe you give a little bit of compression here, maybe you're trying to make your partner turn. But in swing dancing, every lead is not an order, it's an invitation. So you can't, of course, I could take my partner's hand and force them to turn like many business leaders do. They force things to happen. But that would be terrible. That would make for a really awkward and uncomfortable dance. So I give a lead, that lead is an invitation. My partner can take that invitation and say, "Okay, you want this turn? I'll give you that turn." But my partner can also be like, "You know what? I'm going to do something else." And now it's a conversation. Now it's not just a monologue, me telling the follower what to do. Now it's a conversation where we make the dance happen together. And they have to react to what I'm doing, but I have to react to what they're doing. And maybe their idea is better than mine. Maybe their idea is more fun than what I had in mind. And that kind of leadership creates way more interesting dances. Because now it's not just me deciding everything, now we're creating it together. And it creates way better companies, because now people don't feel micromanaged. You said you are a recovering micromanager. And that is the way a lot of business leaders lead, is like, "Here are your orders. Now go do it. I want you to do this. I want you to do it in this way. I want you to use this tool. I want you to do it at this time. And I want you to deliver the result in that way." So people have very detailed instructions that they must follow. That is a terrible, terrible form of leadership. So I really think there's something to learn as a leader from dancing, specifically swing dancing, which has this fun, open, and creative nature.
[00:37:09 β 00:37:35] Andreas:
I love the paradigm of inviting rather than telling. I really love it. And to play devil's advocate to that, how do you deal with someone who's not accountable that you've invited to show up, but they don't show up? How do you deal with accountability? How do you create an environment of accountability?
[00:37:36 β 00:38:41] Alex:
I think what you do, what you can do, is you can make people accountable to themselves. So instead of making them accountable to you, like, "Here's the result I want, and I want you to deliver it in this way," you can ask them, "Okay, what do you think would be a good result? How do you think that result should be measured? When do you think this work will be done?" So they set the goals, and then they're accountable for achieving them. Now, if they keep setting goals and they don't never reach their own goals, then the problem is not accountability. The problem is something else. Maybe they're just really bad at judging their own skills, or maybe they overestimate their own competencies or something, and then that's something you should fix. Maybe they're just not very good at their job, and maybe they should work a different job. Maybe they should work somewhere else, and that's an issue for the leader to fix. But I really like this idea that instead of making people accountable to you, make them accountable to themselves. And then you can follow up with them and say, "Hey, you said you were going to achieve this goal in this way at this time. Did you? If so, great. If not, how can I help?"
[00:38:41 β 00:40:28] Andreas:
Absolutely. In an entrepreneur's organization where we are basically all volunteering for running our chapters or our region, we use the principle of being accountable to each other rather than to the leader. Every time when someone asks people to be accountable to themselves, they're just causing for trouble. They're just looking for trouble because we're all peers. We're not subject to authoritarian or positional leadership. So the only way to work in an organization where there's no rank, there's no job titles, but everyone is a peer, is to have people being accountable to each other. And so when we start the year, we'll say, "Here's what each of us promises to deliver to each other." And we revisit on a monthly basis the promises we made to ourselves and to others. And then we check in on where we have red flags, where we have yellow flags, what we need to take care of, where we need each other's help. And that is a wonderful system that doesn't put pressure on either the leader, doesn't create a sense of conflict for the leader, the leader doesn't have to be confrontational and say, "You said you would do this to me and I have to hold you accountable." No, everyone holds accountable each other. I like it. So it's a really nice system that deals with helping people be accountable to each other.
[00:40:29 β 00:40:30] Alex:
I like it. That's a great system.
[00:40:31 β 00:41:03] Andreas:
So last topic before we close the podcast, and I'm taking a little longer here because I love our discussion. What is the role of emotions, Alex? So we talked before Press and Record, we talked about the tech industry, you and I have both been in the tech industry. And in the tech industry, we often don't consider emotions to be part of the equations. It's something like you said, that we leave at home and we come at work to perform. What's the danger of not factoring emotions in our work?
[00:41:04 β 00:43:43] Alex:
Yeah. And like you're saying, a lot of people don't. A lot of people in tech are in tech because they're not, like you're saying, in touch with their emotions. And a lot of business leaders who are not from tech, but have come up with a traditional business education, have also been taught that the only thing that matters is results, profits and growth. That's what you care about. And people should leave their emotions at home and just be strictly rational. Now, what we know from the research is that this is impossible. We human beings are inherently emotional creatures, and our emotions are absolutely crucial and key to who we are. And we know that emotions play a huge role in things like decision making, in how we relate to other people, in how we perform, in how likely we are to take risks and have new ideas. And also for our health, we know that being constantly in a bad mood can have very, very serious health effects. So emotions are absolutely crucial. And that is the key, like I said, to creating a happy workplace. It's about creating a workplace that creates a lot of positive emotions and as few negative emotions as possible. And for many business leaders, and especially people in tech, this is a tough nut to crack because they're uncomfortable with emotions. If somebody's showing emotions good or bad, they're like, "Oh, I don't know how to deal with this." But we absolutely need to because emotions are crucial. And having been in tech, I've seen it myself. You have a discussion in a project and people have very strong feelings about, "Should we use this technology or that technology?" But nobody can come out and say, "I feel like this is a good decision." So then the discussion center, everybody has to find rational arguments for why they're feeling a certain way. And sometimes it isn't rational. Sometimes it is just a feeling. And if we can't acknowledge those feelings, then we'll never agree. It'll forever be a discussion on the wrong terms. We're talking about the wrong thing. And work is inherently emotional. When you achieve something, you feel proud. If somebody criticizes you for a mistake you didn't make, you feel unfairly treated and you feel frustrated. If somebody belittles you, you feel ashamed or you feel angry, and all of those emotions are perfectly natural and trying to hide them is impossible. Or we can hide them, but only for so long until we explode. So that's why we know this from the research. We're inherently emotional creatures and we need to acknowledge that in the workplace as well.
[00:43:44 β 00:45:31] Andreas:
If I can share a couple of stories. So I recently become very aware of this notion of connection before content. Connections means checking in with our emotions, which means how are you feeling just at the very beginning of a meeting. It could be a 30-minute meeting, it could be a two-hour meeting, but it's very important to start with an emotional check-in. How are you showing up today? It's not necessarily what's happening in your life, but how are you feeling as a result of what's happening in your life today? And the other thing is that the checkout process, which is at the very end of the meeting, how are you feeling? So very often if the meeting works well, you see people checking out much better than they checked in. You see the uplift. It's also very telling. So I'll tell our story. I experienced it in my team about a month ago. So we gathered a whole team about 30 people and we shared some very bad news. A team member was leaving the team for disciplinary reasons. And it was a shock to everyone. They didn't expect it to happen. So there was a lot of emotions. And on the camera on Zoom, you could only see faces, you could see some expressions, some micro expressions, but you couldn't really read the room. And certainly there were so many different emotions you can read every single one of them. So at the end, I asked the question which was pivotal, which is how are you feeling at the end of this meeting? And we had anything from love and support for that person, surprise and shock or fear. Excellent. We had the whole spectrum.
[00:45:32 β 00:45:32] Alex:
Excellent.
[00:45:33 β 00:45:50] Andreas:
And then I could speak to the people. I could hear who was shocked or who was in fear. And I could have the discussions afterwards. So it was a great compass on seeing what was the result in the team as a result of that disciplinary action of that person leaving the team.
[00:45:51 β 00:46:01] Alex:
I love that because here's the thing, people are going to have those emotions anyway. So you might as well bring it out into the open where you can talk about it and deal with them.
[00:46:02 β 00:46:08] Andreas:
Totally. Alex, working people find out more about you.
[00:46:09 β 00:46:33] Alex:
Yes. So if you want to see the professional work I do, I'm at woohooinc.com or at positivesharing.com is my blog. And if you want to come to Copenhagen and see my comedy show, it's at becomedanish.com. Wonderful. I'm also on a YouTube channel and I am of course on LinkedIn. You can just search for the Chief Happiness Officer on LinkedIn and you'll find me and I would love to connect. Wonderful.
[00:46:33 β 00:47:31] Andreas:
Alex, thank you for sharing with us your passion for happiness, for showing up with emotion at work, particularly for being vulnerable on your leadership side, for being so conscious about helping others lead better lives at work. For everyone that's been listening, thank you for giving us your undivided attention over the last four to 45 minutes or so. I learned a lot. I had a lot of fun speaking with Alex. And if you also enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating on your podcast app because that's how more people get to find out about the show and sharing the good work that's happening here. If you want to reach out, you can find me at andresatrethinculture.co. And like I love saying at the end of the podcast, keep leading and keep creating a happier, healthier workplace for you and especially for those around you. Take care.