Management 3.0 Practitioner — Part 7: The choice of the happiness path

Many times we try to make the day-to-day as good as possible for our teams. Sometimes these attempts can fail, leading us to wonder what we need to do to make our team happy.

Jurgen Appelo, the founder of Management 3.0, discovered the following after extensive research: “Happiness is something we create, it is not something to achieve. It is a path you choose, not a destination to arrive at.” Thinking about this, we have to find the path that leads us to that happiness, and every path is traveled step by step.

Management 3.0 shares the “12 Steps to Happiness” (more information in this link https://management30.com/practice/happiness-steps/), shared here:

The objective here is to reflect on these areas, and possibly generate actions that bring us closer to our well-being through improving one of them. Whether it is from us as individuals, or from our team. The areas are the following ones:

• Thank someone and be appreciative toward your colleagues, every single day.
• Give something to another person or make it possible for others to offer gifts.
• Help someone who is in need of assistance, or enable colleagues to help each other.
• Eat well, and make good, healthy foods easily available for everyone.
• Exercise and work out regularly and make it easy for people to take care of their bodies.
• Rest well, sleep sufficiently, and enable colleagues to refresh their minds.
• Experience new things, try stuff out, and let people run all kinds of experiments.
• Hike outdoors, enjoy nature, and allow people an escape from the office and the city.
• Meditate and get people to learn and adopt mindfulness practices.
• Socialize, relate to other people, and make it easy for colleagues to develop connections.
• Aim for a goal and get people to understand and realize their own purpose.
• Smile whenever you can, appreciate humor, and get colleagues to engage in fun activities.

I had the opportunity to use it a while ago, working in a software development team, made up of 7 people who were demotivated by the pandemic’s lockdown and the daily remote routine. We chose to dedicate a space of time to find a way to improve our mood, supported by these 12 steps, as follows:

• We asked each team member to choose the 3 areas that had the most impact on their life.
• Then, of those 3, choose the one in which they most felt they needed to act.
• For that activity in which they most needed to take action, we asked each one of them to reflect on possible actions that they could start that week and help them to get better. We left the result of this reflection on each one, without asking them to share it with the team.
• As a next step, we looked for the two areas most chosen to work: in the case of this team, they were “Socialize” and “Thank”.
• Finally, we had an open conversation with the team about what actions we could take to improve in those areas. Among the ideas that came up (and we applied later on), I can mention the use of Kudo Wall for “Thank”, and the setting of a daily “Coffee Break” space to find and talk about anything outside the work context.

As a facilitator, I learned that it is important to provide these spaces regularly in the team, to pause the routine a bit, and stop to see how we are doing. Also, together with the team, we reflected on what we learned about how even the smallest actions can bring great benefits if they arise from what we truly need.

After this exercise, the team began to notice a more fluid dynamic of gratitude, sharing knowledge, among other things (as shared by the members themselves in a Retrospective meeting).

For my next experiment, continuing with this first activity, I would like to have a recurring conversation with the team, where we review our current condition in the “12 Steps to Happiness” and see how we change (or not) over time. A dynamic similar to the one previously commented on but supported by input from the previous sessions.

If you are part of a team, I recommend you to stop for a moment to understand how everyone feels and create actions that can contribute to the well-being and getting one step closer to happiness.