The Next Level: Where the Happy Talk About Corporate Culture Is Wrong

The Next Level

Avoiding the pitfalls of fast growth.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” is what I think every time I see another article, blog post or book on the value of happy employees. And here is what I find disturbing about these happy-employee propagandists. They are mostly off about what it takes to motivate employees and keep them happy in a fast-growth culture.

Don’t get me wrong — I want happy employees, too. But I think there are two types of happiness in a work culture: Human Resources Happy and High Performance Happy. Fast-growth success has everything to do with the latter and nothing to do with the former. Unfortunately, 99 percent of the discussion and solutions are focused on Human Resources Happy.

Here’s how I define H.R. Happy: Bosses are at least superficially nice and periodically pretend to be interested in employees as people. These employees can count on birthday-cake celebrations and shallow conversations about what their hobbies are outside of work. This approach allows H.R. people to do the job they love — compliance and regulations — instead of the job they should be doing — finding and recruiting the best available talent.

And this may work in a call-center environment or in a second-rate corporate culture where people resign themselves to the fact that they will get more if they accept being treated like children. But these H.R. Happy employees can have a rough time at fast-growth companies when they meet people who are High Performance Happy. Think of an Olympic athlete jumping into the pool for those 4:30 a.m. laps. High Performance Happy is an attitude with a skill set that says we are on a mission that is bigger than any one of us. We find our happiness in being on a world class team that is making a difference.

H.R. Happy says we should do what pleases us first — bring your dog to work! High Performance Happy says I will fight for every inch. I will be there at 4:30 a.m. no matter what and until the last dog dies. Respect is core to the success of High Performance Happy, and it is based on what you are giving not on what you are taking. For example, if one person has a sick child, we all have a sick child, and we all give more that day. And this is why High Performance Happy builds deeper bonds.

In the movie “American Beauty,” Annette Bening played Carolyn, the personification of Happy H.R. Set aside her bedeviled husband, and no matter what was said to her, she felt compelled to say something positive, even though it was as phony as the eyelashes she batted. But that is what the H.R. propaganda teaches on how to build a company. Be nice to people and they will work hard for you. But , by the way, that was not the approach at successful companies like UPS and Apple, which magnify the outcomes of the high-performance elite and obliterate the happy talk.

Steve Jobs was well known for his rants about time-clock punching morons, but his high performance elite got better not bitter. Why? Apple’s mission — making technology cool — was far more important than a few harsh words or even a little immaturity. And before its founder passed way, UPS was a great example of high performance elite with an almost military culture. At UPS, performance reviews were called “agent orange” because they were orange in color and dreaded if you had not met or exceeded your commitments. Back in the late ’80s, UPS was disciplined by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for being too hard on its management employees at its six-week, basic-training school for supervisors. I attended it, and let’s just say it was taxing. The company ended the program shortly thereafter. On the other hand, UPS managers often had to be disciplined for working too many hours, week after week. Why? We truly believed that the American economy depended upon our moving packages from point A to point B.

High Performance Happy means you give employees tremendous responsibility, and they are happy to show that they are the best. You don’t have to con them into doing things with a flavor-of-the-month methodology that suggests they will only perform if you make them happy first. H.R. Happy says, I want you to think that I like you. High Performance Happy says, I believe in you. Here are the guideposts for building a High Performance Happy culture.

First, you can’t hide the duds the way you can in corporate America. If high performance is level 10, then duds aren’t the two and threes who are quickly shown the door. The duds are the fives and sixes who are the happy slackers — the ones who do just enough to get by, but hey, they’re happy! They befriend the boss, love meetings and are the first to check the scores and Facebook when they get back from lunch. Their H.R. Happy habits will do one of two things — bring the high performance elite down to the middle or push them out the door. The duds have to go. Today.

Here’s what you tell the high performers. Come spend time with us if you want to do something special. Don’t take it personally if you get yelled at for something you did not do. Get over it, and I am sure we will apologize when we find time. If you ask for help, we will be there. If you do not ask for help, we will assume that you are performing in a blaze of glory so be ready to show it. Don’t tell us later that you were confused or did not agree with what we were doing. You can say whatever you want to whomever you want when the decision is up for discussion — and this will be encouraged in many formats, from quick huddles to day-long strategy sessions. But when the decision is made, you march with the decision and not with what makes you happy.

High Performance Happy does not like a lot of unnecessary processes and rules, which is why entrepreneurs have to let high performance people make decisions. If you trust them with your mission and with hundreds of important daily choices, you can also trust them to handle their vacation schedule, their paid time off, and the tools they need to get the job done.

High performance organizations do not hire family members. That’s because it’s very hard to fire family, and you have to earn your spot in a high performance lineup every day. Here is the deal: I love your work if you are making the plays. If you are not, I have to find someone who can.

In High Performance Happy, you cannot have people behaving like liberal Democrats or right-wing Republicans. It has nothing to do with politics. In fast-growth organizations, life is not fair every day, and you can’t have liberals running around trying to make sure everything is equal and no one is offended. I am sorry but there are going to be days when not all is equal and someone is offended. We always try to go back and make it up, but there are times when you have to take it for the team — and not bring it up three years later at a company meeting.

But you also don’t want right-wing types who really don’t understand how the world works and lack the emotional intelligence to get over anything that bothers them. If they think somebody got more than they did, they stew over it every day until you give them more. Again, I am sorry, but in fast growth there are times when one group gets more than the other. “Get over it” is the natural response in a high performance environment. Of course, that would be considered the height of hypocrisy at an H.R. Happy company.

The toughest part of High Performance Happy is dealing with the exit of a high performance employee. What do you do when one of the chosen chooses to leave? First, you ask if there is an issue that you have not discussed. Then you ask if there anything you can do. If the answer to both questions is no, and the employee is just leaving to go to another team, the person exits with a thank you. No good-bye parties. No H.R. exit interviews. No farewell dinners. The person is gone, and the quicker the better.

But here’s the flip side. When it comes to lay offs of high performance employees during downturns, you simply cannot do it. You have to figure out other ways. In 2001, after the dot-com crash, my information technology company lost about 20 percent of its revenue. I remember the chief financial officer came to see me with what was supposed to be good news. With some belt-tightening measures, he said, we only had to lay off 12 or 13 people. We looked at our list of folks and could find nothing but High Performance Happy.

We had just made the Inc. 500, so they had delivered, and I did not want to break the we-are-in-this-together bond. So I decided the 40 highest paid people would take a 10-percent pay cut, and we would make up the rest in travel reductions. I was not surprised when I did not hear any whining, moaning or groaning from the top 40. I was surprised when the person who would have been No. 41 came into my office and said he wanted the same cut. The next day, the H.R. director came to see me and said, “Cliff, I have had a stream of people in my office all day — team leaders, front-line people, just about every role — asking if they can take the 10-percent pay cut, too. I don’t even think we need the money.”

I think it was that day that I knew for sure we had a great company that was High Performance Happy.

Cliff Oxford is the founder of the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. You can follow him on Twitter.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/where-the-happy-talk-about-corporate-culture-is-wrong/?partner=rss&emc=rss