Key points from "Managing for Happiness" book by Jurgen Appelo

1. Management 3.0
Managing for Happiness
Maisara Khedr

2. Managing for
Happiness
Games, tools and practices
to motivate any team
Jurgen Appelo

3. He is pioneering management to help
creative organizations survive and
thrive in the 21st century. He offers
concrete games, tools, and practices,
so you can introduce better
management, with fewer managers.
Inc.com has called him a Top 50
Leadership Expert and a Top 100
Great Leadership Speaker
Jurgen Appelo

4. What is Management 3.0
and how to manage for
happiness?

5. Organization Happiness
How can we motivate
workers?
How can we change
manager mindset?
How can we get team to
take responsibility?
How can we get managers
to trust their team?
● Happiness is everyone’s responsibility
● Management is too important to leave to the managers
● Management is just like testing, no matter whether there
are managers or not, everyone should feel responsible
for management
● When people don’t focus on improving themselves, they
are always complaining about each other

6. Doing the wrong thing
Treating employees like
adult human beings might
be a common sense, but it’s
not a common practice
● Winner-take-all
Rank employees using measurements of their achievements, give more
works to best performers and get rid of the bad one.
● When the cat’s away the mice will play
The boss should return to office regularly to peek around.
● Let everyone know that they’re being watched
Bosses should continuously monitor whether people are actually using
office tools to do work and not for skyping with friends

7. Doing the right thing wrong
Many managers don’t see
that they should manage
the system around people
not the people directly
● People are the most valuable assets
● Managers have to become servant leaders
Everyone recognize that but sadly managers often use
the wrong approach because they’re still stuck with a
hierarchical view of organizations, they adopt good ideas
but force-fit them into bad architecture

8. Doing the right thing
● Doing the right thing means acting in a way that is
consistent with a core belief
● Management practice is a good practice when,
○ It engage people and their interactions
○ It enables them to improve the system
○ It helps to delight all clients
● Creative employees choose to boss themselves
● Principles vs Practices

9. Agenda
➔ Organization’s values
➔ Rewards
➔ Employees Improvements
➔ Sharing Knowledge
➔ Celebrations
➔ Communication
➔ Delegation
➔ Feedback
➔ Bonus
➔ Workers Happiness

10. How can we improve or
maintain the organization's
values?

11. Organization Values
● Clarity of values makes a
significant difference in behavior
and is a force behind motivation,
commitment and productivity
● Everyone who is economically
involved with the organization try
to get some value out of it,
otherwise they wouldn’t
contribute to that collaborative
work project that we call business

12. Creating Values
● You can only create new value when you protect what is
already valuable
● The key is not only to promise to keep these values in
mind but to actually do something to prove that these
values matter guides people’s behavior and decisions.
● The culture should drive the business in the company not
the other way around.

13. Employee Handbook
● Created by human resources department
● Devoid from any emotion
● Values offered as bullet points and accompanied by rules,
policies and legal disclaimers
With such handbooks buried deep down in file system
Employee handbook needs to be written by employees

20. Value Wall
● Create a value wall, with shiny movie picture showcasing
each value along with a brief description
● Shout out
● Add Post-Its with stories on top of the values
● Now, Design the employee handbook with great
illustrations.

21. How can we motivate
people with better rewards?

22. Traditional Rewards
● Managers assume that nothing works like a money.
● Overjustification effect: Instead of expecting and feeling
enjoyment, people expect a reward.
● Rewards based on outcomes increase the risk of
cheating, Since people’s focus on getting a reward
instead of doing a good job.
Rewards that trigger intrinsic motivation (behavior that’s
triggered from within a person) are more effective, more
sustainable and usually cost less :)

23. Rewards can work when ...
1. Don’t promise reward in advance
2. Keep anticipated reward small
3. Reward continuously not once
4. Reward publicly, not privately
5. Reward behavior not outcome
6. Reward peers, not subordinates

24. Kudo Cards
What If ..
● What if our workers doesn’t play fair
● What if two people abuse the system to get rewards?
● What if someone just want to gain the boss’s favor with a
kudo card?
Let the community decide what to do about cheating.
Public system that enables people to give each other small,
unexpected token of appreciation for doing a good job.

27. 1. Create central place or colorful cardboard
2. Print kubo cards and posters to support the new initiative
3. Let everyone know
4. Announce publicly who received a compliment and why
5. Use http://kudobox.co/ for remote employees
Kudos - Getting started

28. How can we make time for
employees improvement
and self-education?

29. Self-education!
● Education of employees is not the prime responsibility of
the organization. On the other hand waiting for people to
start developing themselves is not always a successful
approach
● Education days: Every employee has number of days per
year to be used for self-education
● Employees argued they have no time to learn and always
had some urgent things to do.

30. Ship-it days
● Because organizations can’t really change people and
educate them, We need to tweak the environment so
that people change themselves and educate themselves.
● Select a day on which everyone in the company works for
entire day on an idea of their choosing.
● Work on whatever you want as long as it’s not part of
your regular work
● All employees can rethink the way they do their job not
only software engineers

31. How can we share
knowledge?

32. Sharing Knowledge!
● Organization needs people to share knowledge and
develop their craft by communicating across traditional
organizational boundaries.
● Talks and session not always interesting to all
organizations employees

33. Community of Practice
● A COP is a group of professionals who share a common
interest or area of work, a common concern, or a passion
about a topic.
● They can be organized around roles, technologies,
interests, and anything else.
● Informal and self organized, and membership is voluntary
● People who are involved are passionate about their work.
● COP cover a knowledge domain, community of
enthusiasts, and a set of tools and practices

34. Purpose of COP
● Learn and share ideas
● Document lessons learned
● Standardize way of working
● Initiate new comers
● Provide advice
● Explore new technologies
● Apply some forms of governance

35. Should we celebrate
success or failure?

36. Success or Failure
● When all we do is repeat established practices, It’s hard
to know if we could do any better
● We should celebrate learning not success or failures
● We should celebrate behavior not outcome
● A learning organization shouldn’t aim to minimize the
amount of failure
● Reducing failure will reduce learning
● We should celebrate good practices, not punish mistakes

37. Celebration Board

38. YAY Questions
● What did we do well (by following practices)?
● What did we learn (by running experiments)?
Any answers to these two questions could be a trigger for
celebration

39. Celebrations
● Don’t take what people do for granted, make every small
step worth mentioning
● Celebrate frequently
● Celebrate noticeably
● Celebrate remarkably

40. How can we improve
communication and
understanding?

41. Proximity Approaches
Your proximity can help you create trust, it also can help you
create awareness, So follow these principles:
● Match your proximity to people with the importance of
their work
● Keep your proximity divers, flexible and unpredictable
● Management by flying around
● Management by sitting around
● Management by skyping around
It’s not about geographical distance, it’s about mental distance

42. Personal Map
● Create personal map of a colleague, make an effort to
better understand that person
● Write person’s name in the middle, then write categories
of interest around his name such as home, family,
education, hoppies, goals and values
● Evaluate what you have just created and decide the best
approach to improve communication

44. How can we delegate and
empower workers with
great boundaries?

45. Would it help?!
● The law of requisite variety: Manager should operate at
similar or higher level of complexity than the system, in
order to fully control it.
● With complex system there is no such thing as central
control
● Delegation of control is the only way to manage complex
systems, there is no other option.
● Managers often fear a loss of control when considering
allowing teams to self-organize
● We should see it as empowerment for the system
● Delegate to which level?!! Define boundaries

46. 7 Levels of Delegation
1. Tell: You make decisions, discussions is not allowed
2. Sell: You make decisions, but you try convince them
3. Consult: You ask for inputs first
4. Agree: You and the group agree on the decision
5. Advise: You offer opinions
6. Inquire: They decide and then convince you
7. Delegate: They decide

47. Delegation Board
● Board that vertically lists a number of key decision areas that someone
delegate to others, In the horizontal dimension, the board shows the
seven level of delegation
● It should be applied to key decision areas not tasks and deliverables

49. Delegation Poker
1. Pick a key decision area
2. Every player choose one of the 7 cards
3. Reveal the selected cards
4. The people with the highest and lowest cards explain
their choices
5. Achieve consensus
Self-organizing teams don’t decide for themselves what the
correct delegation level are for key decision areas delegated
to them, But the game can be very useful to reveal
misconception and hidden assumptions

51. How to offer a constructive
feedback?

52. Trust-Only Environment
● Flex time, remote working and unlimited vacations
● Switching from time-only to results-only or trust-only
environment …. How do we evaluate the results?
● If we are not supposed to measure the inputs (time), we
need to measure the output (results).
● Performance appraisals
● Second only to firing employees, managers hate
performance appraisals the most
● Creative workers have a right to receive useful
feedback on their results and they need it fast

53. Praise Sandwich
● Any criticism should be wrapped between
positive comments
● Experts usually look for things to improve,
while novices look for confirmation that
they are doing well.

54. Feedback Wrap
● Write feedback
○ Describe your context
○ List your observation
○ Express your emotions
○ Sort by value
○ End with suggestions
● Language must be softened with “may be”, “a little”, “it
seems that”
● Wrapping up

56. How can we pay people
according to their merits?

57. Traditional Bonus Systems
● Earning = Salaries + Extras
● Making money is good; making difference is better; but
making money while making difference beats all.
● Traditional bonus system rarely have a positive effect on
people’s performance, the effect is likely to be negative
○ Regular reward, people anticipate it with great expectations
○ Individual rewards disrupt collaboration
○ Rely on objective measures, but reality is far too complex

58. A better bonus system
● Flat compensation system, 80% think they perform
better than average, 80% of workers will feel underpaid
● Both salaries and extras should be fair and based on
merits, not equity.
● Compensation system should be
○ Salaries should be expected, but bonuses should not
○ Earning should be based on collaboration not competition
○ Peer feedback is the main performance measurement

59. Merits Money
● Use a virtual currency that represents the merits that
people can accumulate overtime
● Define the total amount of currencies available and how
often they will be passed out
● Every individual can recognize the contribution of other
people
● All employees must give away the passed-out currencies
● The opinions of all individuals have equal weight
● It uses the wisdom of the crowd
● Cash earnings

60. How can we aim for a
happier organization?

61. Engagement & Satisfaction
● Engaged Workers: feel motivated to be productive in the
organization, try to deliver their their best possible work
and keep all stakeholders happy
● Satisfied Worker: feel content in their work environment
because it satisfies most of his needs
● Engagement, satisfaction and happiness are hard to
define concepts that are correlated but not fully
overlapping

62. Happiness Door
● It’s a feedback wall and
happiness index in one
● A playful feedback method
generates happiness
between coworkers

63. Conclusion

65. Thank you
:-)