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Design For Ease of Use with Lean CX – Leadership Card 21
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Engineering Happiness In your Team With Significance and Connection
There’s a funny thing about happiness. We all seem to want it, and yet so many times we do things that we know don’t bring us happiness in the long run, don’t we?
That extra piece of chocolate cake, or spending too much time working instead of bonding with friends or partners (which was, incidentally, one of the top five regrets of the dying). Not exercising or being outdoors enough. it all adds up.
But there could be a very good reason for us missing the mark when it comes to performing happiness improving activities – and that is because the real core needs that drive us are actually conflicting.
In the last card, Leadership Card 19, we saw that we deeply crave certainty in our lives, but also variety. And the more variety we have, the less certainty we have. Well it’s the same with Leadership Card 20, where we crave significance and connection, but the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand.
Significance and Connection – At Odds With Each Other
You see, to be significant you have to stand out. You have to lead the pack, often be different to others. And people get significance in different ways. They can feel significant by performing really well, earning lots of money, moving up in their career, or they can feel significant by being difficult, causing trouble to get attention, and other ways like that.
But when we stand out and are different, it’s much harder to fit in, to feel that connection and bonding with people in a team, a family, a friendship group or anywhere else.
So while we crave both, significance and connection are hard to engineer together.
Engineering Both In Your Team’s Work
So how do we create both in our team’s work? Part of Lean CX and the Ease of Use framework is a thing called “Checking In”, where we check in with our team members at least once a week, see where we need to adjust, and then focus on their strengths.
Doing this ensures two things – first, we build that connection by checking in, making sure they know they are on our radar as a leader and that we care about their path and their progress.
But then we focus on their strengths, building that significance of individuality, because we are all slightly different at the end of the day and have individual strengths and things we want to achieve.
So check in with your team, and focus on their strengths. Even research from Gallup on employee engagement has shown that it can improve engagement by up to 27%. And employees who are more engaged have higher productivity, sales, profit, and lower absenteeism and turnover.
Chat soon – David McLachlan
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