See The Leadership Card Deck Here
Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 20
View All The Leadership Cards (48)
- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting
Give Your Team Happiness, By Meeting Their Core Needs
Happiness. People want it, talk about it, reminisce about it, and miss it when it’s not there. And it can be everything from instant gratification (like a big meal) to deep meaning in a person’s life (like having meaningful work).
Seeing as anyone can eat a big meal or piece of chocolate and get instant gratification, I’m going to talk about the deeper meaning, that you can actually engineer into your team’s work to make them happier, more productive, and ultimately want to do a good job.
In fact, one study I found for the Lean CX Score book showed that people perform around 12% better simply by being happy.
Anthony Robbins’ Six Human Needs
You’ve probably heard of a few different types of “Needs hierarchies”, like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that goes from safety to self-actualization. But in the 1990s Anthony Robbins came up with a deep set of human needs that completely make sense, because they actually conflict with each other.
They make sense because in a way we are all striving for happiness, and the ebb and flow of life, and events that happen over time make it either easy to get or elusive.
The first combination of needs are Certainty and Variety.
Certainty and Variety
We need certainty that what we do will turn out OK. Some people need more certainty than others before they do something, and others need no certainty at all.
The only problem is, having certainty conflicts with our other need, which is to have variety in our life and work. After all, if we have a lot of certainty, doing the same thing in the same way every day, then we don’t have a lot of variety. but if we have a lot of variety – spontaneous things, ideas, and outings – then we don’t have as much certainty.
And yet we need them both for fulfilling work.
How Can We Engineer Both Into Our People’s Work?
Over the years, I’ve experienced a few ways to engineer both of these things into a team’s work. The best ones I’ve seen involve this:
- Having clear outcomes, and a clear path or process to get there (certainty)
- Allowing (and encouraging) our team to problem solve ways to improve that work regularly (giving variety)
Not everyone is a natural problem solver. It can be hard to work through uncertain territory, and that is why it helps to have a standard process for problem solving and improving our work, making it easier to use.
The Lean CX Score is that framework that improves the ease of use and engages your team at the same time. Using things like a repeatable process, error proofing, visual management and checking in, you can go a long way to building the meaning back into your team’s life and work, no matter what they are doing.
Chat soon – David McLachlan
View All The Leadership Cards (48)
- or - Have the Leadership Cards delivered for your next meeting