Jessica Pryce-Jones on Happiness at Work

Your first book is First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. What do they do differently?

I’m a sucker for books and I always buy management books when I get on planes. There I am at Heathrow Airport going on a business trip, and I think, ‘I’ve got to read this stuff!’ And normally I pick a book up, read the first few pages, then find I can’t face it and end up leaving it in a hotel room. But this book, I picked it up, started to read it and I thought, ‘Hallelujah! Here is a book that makes sense at last.’ And that was just so refreshing. I don’t even have a copy at the moment, because I have given about ten of them away to people saying, ‘You have just got to read this!’

The main messages of the book are: first of all, as a manager, focus on what a person is really good at. Don’t insist on stuffing into people what they haven’t got; just try and claw out the best of what’s there. And that is a very positive message. Secondly, don’t promote people to their own level of incompetence. Make them feel that they can excel as an individual contributor, that they can be doing good things without becoming a manager. Thirdly, the book is very keen on setting outcomes: tell people what to do, don’t tell them how. And the fourth point is to spend time with your best people. And those four pieces of advice are seared on my brain – I can never forget them.

Spending time with your best people, what does that mean?

You should spend time encouraging your top performers. Because if someone is a star, performing at 95 per cent, if you get five per cent more from them, that’ll get you a hell of a lot more than an additional ten per cent from your 30 per cent performer. So it’s about getting the really good people to do even more. And actually that’s not what most managers do. They spend all their time trying to nurture their weakest players. I hadn’t twigged that myself, but when I read it I thought, how marvellous to spend half an hour with a person who is doing a really great job, and show them some appreciation and recognition and be curious about what they’re doing, rather than spending four hours with someone who is not doing very well.

What do the authors base this all on? 

It’s based on Gallup research. They interviewed 80,000 of the best leaders. They didn’t tell leaders to nominate themselves, they told teams to nominate leaders. So this was research done the other way around, because normally you go into an organisation and say to the executive team, ‘Who are your best leaders?’ And they pick the people. And they are not the same people that everybody else would pick. This is common-sense stuff, but of course common sense isn’t very common.

The next book is Authentic Happiness, subtitled ‘Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment’, by Martin Seligman.

When I heard the title I thought, Oh God! What a title! It’s so American. But I like it because I read Seligman’s work way back when I was a psychology student. He was the man who gave us ‘learned helplessness’ – why men don’t learn how to use washing machines. He did experiments shocking dogs and noticed that two or three out of every ten dogs wouldn’t just lie back and be shocked, they would try to escape. And instead of focusing on the helpless ones, he looked instead at the resilient ones, and set out to find out what made them resilient. What is good about this book is that it puts together lots of his work, as well as lots of other psychologists’ work, in a way that is absolutely readable. It’s also very practical – it tells you why happiness matters, what you can do about it, and how to go about it.

Do you want to quickly explain what positive psychology is?

Psychology has always been about fixing the broken. The standard huge tome that is beaten into all psychology students is called DSM3R, which is diagnostic. How do you tell if someone is a schizophrenic, or if they’ve got depression, or if there is something worse going on? And Seligman said, ‘Hang on, what works? Let’s focus on what works. How do you get more of what works?’ Because just fixing the broken is very, very downbeat. He also argues that we should be grateful for bad experiences, because you only grow by going through tough stuff. You may not like it at the time, but afterwards you benefit from it. 

So Seligman is the founding father of positive psychology, though in real life he’s Mr Gloom. He acknowledges that at the beginning of the book, which is very sweet. I’ve seen him lecture and he turns up in a terrible bait, and it’s so funny to have the founding father of positive psychology sitting there in this terrific bait. But it’s a very positive message – think about your strengths and what you’re good at, even if some of them felt a bit a cheesy to a Brit. Could you walk into work and say, ‘My top strengths are my love and my spirituality and my wisdom’? That wouldn’t feel too good to a Brit. But it’s a very uplifting message and approach to life.

How is it relevant to the workplace?

For example, how you argue with yourself when you’re in a low place. He gives you four ways – A E I U.