Manifesto (def): A public declaration of policy and aims.

What follows are my views about and commitment to work based on 30+ years of being employed and being an employer. These are philosophies I subscribe to and that I desire in those I work with and encounter in the marketplace. MHS

I work because I need to and because I want to. There is satisfaction in work well done. Good work produces value and isn’t just a means to an end but an opportunity to be a productive, contributing member of society. Work helps give life purpose and structure.

I don’t like everything about the work I do but understand that is the nature of work. Work often requires that we do what needs to be done as well as what we like to do. Doing great work is a choice I make; to do less cheats not just my employer and customer but myself.

Impediments to work are temporary. If my place of employment blocks my ability to be productive in an honest and ethical way, I will not sell my soul to continue working there. If my boss doesn’t understand the concept of a healthy work environment I will actively look for a different boss or organization that does. My current situation may not allow me to switch jobs or employers immediately but I refuse to resign myself to a work life of misery. I will endure for the short term with the goal of prospering in the long term.

How I do my work makes life a heaven or hell for others. How I treat colleagues and customers makes their lives better or worse. Neutrality is a myth as any attempt to disengage will appear to others as indifference, and that indifference is an insult to others.

I will not actively or passively inflict pain. While the bad behavior of others might make it tempting to do so, I will choose to play by a higher standard. I will do what I can to make working with me enjoyable.

I do not control how others act, but I completely control how I act. When others act inappropriately to me, I will respond professionally but will not accept and thereby condone the inappropriate behavior. I will politely but directly address the inappropriateness.

I understand that others come to me for solutions to problems and that is what I am paid for. Therefore problems, as difficult as they can be, are not an impediment to my work but often they are my work itself.

I will take responsibility rather than place blame. If I can’t fix it I will either live with it or leave it. There are no other rational options.  I understand there is no perfect workplace, but refuse to make where I work worse by my own apathy or lethargy. I won’t let the poor attitudes and behaviors determine my own choices. I know that I often succeed at work not because of but in spite of undesirable circumstances.

In a time when not all who truly desire work have that opportunity, I am grateful for the work I have.

Note to readers: If you were to summarize your views on work, what would your personal manifesto say? What would you add to what I’ve written? What would you change?

Eric Chester is a long time friend and valued colleague whose work I greatly respect. He’s spent years looking at generational difference in the workplace and how to manage and lead younger employees. His focus has shifted significantly and he is focusing on what many would consider the loss of traditional work ethic and how to get it back. Eric has written a terrific new book called Reviving Work Ethic. The trailer for the book is itself a crash course in understanding what has happened to work ethic in the United States. The following guest blog will challenge your thinking about how we think about work in contemporary culture:

Ask a friend or colleague what’s the first thing that pops into their head when they hear “Labor Day” and they’ll say “the last day of summer,” “a street parade” or, most likely, “a day off.”

Few Americans actually understand the historical significance of the first Monday in September, the national holiday that dates back to the late 1800′s. The U.S. Dept. of Labor website notes, “Labor Day is a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

Why celebrate labor when it’s not supposed to be enjoyed? My wife’s most challenging hours were those she spent in labor. When something is extremely difficult, it’s said to be labor-intensive. Dangerous criminals get sentenced to hard labor.

There’s no way around it…labor is work. And as Mark Twain once quipped, “Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.”

(Ironic, isn’t it that Twain worked so hard to achieve his success?)

But hold on…isn’t work what got us where we are? Isn’t work what has made America great?

Unfortunately, work/labor is not as celebrated or revered as it once was. When polled and surveyed with the question, “What’s the first thing you would do if you won the lottery?” the overwhelming majority of American’s respond, “Quit my job.” This is further evidenced by the result of workers who have already quit their job but failed to notify their employer. As a consumer, consider the poor quality of the products you buy and the lack of customer service you receive in the marketplace.

Made in America used to mean the best you could get, but now wouldn’t you opt for the import? Remember when you used to call customer service and get a friendly voice on the other end? Now it’s an endless series of automated commands, long hold times, and hoping you can be connected to a human being you can understand.

Can you imagine how different you would be now had you grown up knowing only this kind of socio-economic climate? You’d have no understanding of what service really looks like and no reverence for words like hard work and labor.

Time Out. Just because you value work, it doesn’t mean those who work with you and for you share your affinity for it. And if the reality of this brings on feelings of anger as you wonder why they act entitled and don’t take pride in their work…chillax, dude.

While the work ethic that was instilled in you through your adolescence has made you successful, it also serves as a lens by which you judge others. That’s not necessarily a good thing and it can work against you.

When you plan ahead for the rush hour and arrive on time and they’re late and blame traffic, or when you go the extra mile to dazzle your customers and observe them sleepwalking through another lifeless transaction, don’t get angry…get busy leading. Realize they haven’t walked in your moccasins and they’re not operating from the same owner’s manual. So they need you to teach them what they should have been taught at home or at school, but weren’t.

Managers post policies and give orders. Leaders develop people. And that comes down to face-to-face coaching.

Sure it’s easier to hire people who already possess the same core work ethic values that you have, but that assumes you’re fishing from a talent pool that is fully stocked with people like you. And as you have surmised, that pool is dangerously low. So the future belongs to leaders who are able to attract and hire the best, but who are equally committed to developing the rest.

Take a sheet of paper and draw a line separating it into three vertical columns. In the far right column, list the specific attributes you demand from the people you work with including terms like reliability, positive attitude, honesty, cheerfulness, etc. In the first column on the left, list the attributes that you feel are common among most of the people you interview or those that comprise your front line. Those adjectives for many employers include the polar opposite of the items in the third column.

The column in the middle is what ultimately determines your value as a leader. That’s where you fill in the specific action steps you are going to take to move the people whose attributes you have described in the left column into people who consistently represent the adjectives in the right column.

No, the challenge of reviving work ethic throughout your organization is not an easy one, There are no silver bullets, simple steps, and presto-chango formulas. And taking on the added responsibility of instilling core work ethic values in your emerging workforce is not one that your boss had when she hired you. It’s not fair!

So now that we have that out of the way, are you ready to get to work?

You’ve got the opportunity to change the world today.

Sound melodramatic?

“I’m going to change the world today!” I’m guessing that’s NOT what you were thinking when you looked in the mirror this morning to shave or put on your make-up. That’s because we usually thing in terms of Big C Change: company initiatives, global warming, poverty and homelessness.

Big C Change is usually complex, requires a great amount of collaboration and is costly in terms of time and resources.

Pursue Big C Change consistently and chip away at it. Don’t be discouraged. But don’t forget the little c changes.

Little c change is about: how you treat your spouse before you leave for work…making time for your kids…driving considerately…being genuinely interested in those you work with and serve…looking for little ways to add value and enrich the experiences of others.

The little c changes matter. And they add up.

I assure you that you have the opportunity to change the lives and outcomes of many throughout this day. And while the changes are small, they are important. They  make the workplace, community and world a little bit better when done thoughtfully.

And little c change is much easier and quicker to do.

So change the world today, in big and little ways.

Many business books enter my radar. Most I pass by, some I skim and a select few I read. Shawn Achor’s new book The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work was one I read with great interest. Although I’ve read much about positive psychology, Shawn’s work seemed to me the most concise and practical, especially as it relates to individuals in the workplace.

I was so impressed I contacted Shawn and asked him to provide a guest blog which he graciously did. Enjoy this brief look at The Happiness Advantage and if you want to go deeper, read the book,

Most companies and schools around the world follow the same formula: If you work hard, you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you’ll be happy. This pattern of belief explains what most often motivates us in life. We think: If I just get that raise, or hit that next sales target, I’ll be happy. If I can just get that next good grade, I’ll be happy. If I lose that five pounds, I’ll be happy. And so on. Success first, happiness second.

The only problem is that this formula is backwards.

More than a decade of groundbreaking research in the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience has proven in no uncertain terms that the relationship between success and happiness works the other way around. Thanks to this cutting-edge science, we now know that happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result. And that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement—giving us the competitive edge that I call the Happiness Advantage.

Waiting to be happy limits our brain’s potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward. This discovery has been confirmed by countless scientific studies, and in my own work and research on 1,600 Harvard students and dozens of Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

Take, for example, the meta-analysis of happiness research that brought together the results of over 200 scientific studies on nearly 275,000 people—and found that happiness leads to success in nearly every domain of our lives, including marriage, health, friendship, community involvement, creativity, and, in particular, our jobs, careers, and businesses.[i] Data abounds showing that happy workers have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better in leadership positions, and receive higher performance ratings and higher pay. They also enjoy more job security and are less likely to take sick days, to quit, or to become burned out. Happy CEOs are more likely to lead teams of employees who are both happy and healthy, and who find their work climate conducive to high performance. The list of the benefits of happiness in the workplace goes on and on.

At this point you might be thinking: Maybe people are happy because they are more productive and earn higher pay. As psychology graduate students are taught to repeat ad nauseam: “Correlation is not causation.” In other words, studies often only tell us that two things are related; to find out which causes which, we need to look at it more closely and find out which came first. So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does happiness come before success or success before happiness?

One way psychologists attempt to answer this question is to follow people over long periods. One study, for example, measured the initial level of positive emotions in 272 employees, then followed their job performance over the next eighteen months.[ii] And they found that even after controlling for other factors, those who were happier at the beginning ended up receiving better evaluations and higher pay later on. Another study found that how happy individuals were as college freshmen would predict how high their income was nineteen years later, regardless of their initial level of wealth.[iii]

Another way to answer the chicken and egg question is to examine what happens right after you prime someone for positivity. Well it turns out that happiness gives us a real chemical edge on the competition. How? Positive emotions flood our brains with dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that not only make us feel good, but dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They help us organize new information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly and creatively, become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving, and see and invent new ways of doing things.

We even quite literally see more of what’s around us when we’re feeling happy. A recent University of Toronto study found that our mood can actually change how our visual cortex—the part of the brain responsible for sight—processes information.[iv] In this experiment, people were primed to think of positive or negative experiences, then asked to look at a series of pictures. Those who were put in a negative mood didn’t process all the images in the pictures—missing substantial parts of the background—while those in a good mood saw everything. Eye-tracking experiments have shown the same thing: Positive emotions actually expand our peripheral line of vision.[v]

Think of the edge all this gives us in the workplace. After all, who wouldn’t want to see out-of-the-box solutions, spot opportunities, and better see how to build upon the ideas of others? In today’s innovation-driven knowledge economy, business success in practically every job or profession hinges on being able to find creative and novel solutions to problems. For example, when researchers at Merck first began studying the effects of a drug called Finasteride, they were intent on finding a cure for benign prostatic hyperplasia, otherwise known as an enlarged prostate. During checkups with the research subjects, though, they learned that many of the participants were experiencing a weird side effect: They were regrowing hair. Fortunately, the Merck researchers could see the billion-dollar product hiding in the unexpected side effect, and Propecia was born.

The Happiness Advantage is why cutting-edge software companies have foosball tables in the employee lounge, why Yahoo! has an in-house massage parlor, and why Google engineers are encouraged to bring their dogs to work. These aren’t just PR gimmicks. Smart companies cultivate these kinds of working environments because every time employees experience a small burst of happiness, they get primed for creativity and innovation. They see solutions they might otherwise have missed. Famed CEO Richard Branson has said that, “more than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin’s success.” This isn’t just because fun is, well, fun. It’s because fun also leads to bottom-line results.

[ii] Staw, B., Sutton, R., & Pelled, L. (1994). Employee positive emotion and favorable outcomes at the workplace. Organization Science, 5, 51-71.

[iii] Diener, E., Nickerson, C., Lucas, R. E. & Sandvik, E. (2002). Dispositional affect and job outcomes. Social Indicators Research, 229–259.

[iv] Schmitz, T. W., De Rosa, E. & Anderson, A. K. (2009). Opposing influences of affective state valence on visual cortical encoding. Journal of Neuroscience, 29, 7199–7207.

[v] Gallagher, W. (2009). Rapt. New York: Penguin, at 36.

(My long time friend and colleague Eric Chester, an expert in generational differences in the workplace, has just launched a game changing new teen and young employee development program called The A Game. He’s written an interesting and insightful article I’ve posted below.)

In 1860, a lithographer by the name of Milton Bradley introduced The Checkered Game of Life to the nation. His game took players on a journey from infancy to happy old age, earning points for qualities like perseverance, honesty, ambition, and industry. Players lost points for idleness, intemperance, gambling, and a number of other vices.

Bradley wasn’t focused on making money with his invention; he had a much larger vision. He wanted to exemplify and promote the values his game espoused. And he had the right environment in which to do it: the late 1800’s were a golden age when it came to formulating America’s unparalleled, unabashed, uncompromising work ethic.
 
The old world view of labor as a distasteful practice best avoided by the upper classes had been replaced by the spanking new notion that a man could earn his place in the upper class through determination, discipline, and self-sacrifice. Parents, schools, and churches stressed the value of hard work and taught children how to live a virtuous life. Bradley’s game struck a resounding chord by perpetuating these principles.

It was not a coincidence that one hundred years later in 1960, the U.S. was one of the two international super-powers. A century of applied work ethic had seen the nation grow incredibly, and with this growth Milton Bradley became a highly profitable toy manufacturer. A hundred years after its original release, their signature product The Checkered Game of Life had been updated to reflect the prevailing mindset of the baby boom generation and was rebranded as The Game of Life.
           
The object of this revised edition was no longer to accrue points, but to accrue money. The ultimate destination of Happy Old Age was replaced with the wealthy neighborhood of Tycoon Estates. Losers didn’t gamble themselves to ruin or wind up impoverished as a result of their intemperance; they simply moved onto The Poor Farm.

The great religious and moral charges of the sixties—like the civil rights movement and the fight against communism— centered on the way individuals viewed others rather than the way they viewed themselves. Schools focused time on developing social responsibility leaving parents in charge of developing work ethic and virtues. However, the emergence of the dual-wage earning family meant less face-time for accomplishing this task at home.

The next version released in the 70’s and 80’s brought three significant ‘something-for-nothing’ changes to Life. A new “Share The Wealth” card enabled players to either steal 50% of an opponent’s cash windfall, or force them to pay half of their personal tax burden. Additionally, players were now ‘entitled’ to receive cash presents from other players for ‘life events’ like getting married or having children. “Lucky Day” spaces were also added to the game board offering players lottery-like cash prizes just for landing on them, with the option to keep the cash or risk it on a roll-of-the-dice gamble to multiply it. This was a far cry from the original version in which gambling was punished, rather than encouraged.

Revamped again in 1991, Life began to reward players for community service activities like recycling and helping the homeless, and there have been additional modifications since then. While civic-minded activities are certainly admirable, what is totally absent from the 1991 revision of The Game of Life is any reward for honesty, hard work, perseverance, and ambition. But when teaching and reinforcing these kinds of values and virtues are no longer a priority in our homes and our schools, why should they be tenets in today’s version of Life?

If you want to test this, go survey your friends and co-workers who have kids under the age of 25 and ask them what they want for their children.  Seriously, try this.  You’ll find out that the goals of Baby-Boomer/Gen X parents are to make certain their kids are safe, happy, healthy, and have a high self-esteem; not necessarily in that order.  Work ethic won’t be mentioned. 
           
It is into this environment that Generation Y has been born and nurtured.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years working with organizations of every size and kind and I’ve heard thousands of business owners, executives, and managers lament the resulting carnage that the absence of work ethic/values training has wrought. Employers demand it, and yet schools and parents don’t teach or encourage it.

Even if math and science scores improve dramatically for American students, I believe that we’ll continue to lose our global advantage if we don’t address the fundamental cause of the problem: our unwillingness, inability, or refusal to teach and reinforce the work ethic that made our nation great and our citizens strong.

Six years ago, I decided that I could either eulogize the American work ethic or take steps to restore it. Through the combined efforts of a great team, a stellar advisory board, and 18 leading educators and corporate trainers from throughout the country, what began as an idea that day has evolved into The A Game, a fully integrated work ethic training and certification program for teens and young adults.

Unlike Milton Bradley’s Checkered Game of Life, “The A Game” is not a game. It’s a comprehensive, fully integrated curriculum that can train and reinforce work ethic at home, at school, and in the workplace by promoting the seven fundamental values that are the prerequisite to success in every job and every career, in every field and industry.

Most importantly, the curriculum teaches the emerging generation to bring their very best (their “A Game”) to work, just as they would bring their very best to their recreational pursuits like sports, music, and video games.  Furthermore, The A Game is counterculture in that it destroys prevailing myths like, ‘work is a bad thing’ and  ‘do only the work you’re paid to do and nothing more’.  (Read the quotes to the right to see how legendary figures in business, medicine, politics, education, and entertainment view work.)

After a series of very successful pilot tests, The A Game is being officially launched this week, and you, the loyal readers of WhysNews, are the first to hear about it.

I encourage you to take a few minutes to tour the website and learn more about the A Game.  I’m confident that news of this revolution will spread fast as schools rediscover the importance of teaching students these indisputable values, parents recognize their role in preparing teens for success in the workplace, and employers discover how work ethic training of their front line will decrease turnover and increase performance, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Join the movement to return work ethic as a centerpiece in the development of our nation’s youth. Hit the website, share it with two or three friends and ask them to do the same. With your help, we can show America’s youth that when they win at work, they truly do win at life.