Your company culture isn't as friendly and supportive as you want it to be. What can you do about it? Seth Godin has an unorthodox idea.

As if you needed any more evidence that bullying behavior is corrosive to your culture, here on Inc. last week we reported the results of two studied that found being a jerk is actually contagious, spreading from the original bully to his or her unfortunate victims and then outward to infect the office culture in general.

For business leaders, this science tracing how bad behavior spreads through a group may be interesting, but the more pressing question about bullying for bosses probably is: How do you put the genie back in the bottle?

If your company has somehow become infected with nastiness and your culture (and team productivity) is suffering, is there any way to battle the malaise and re-instill a sense of safety and support among team members?

A fascinating recent blog post by best-selling author Seth Godin offers a suggestion. For inspiration, Godin looks to perhaps the world's most bully-intensive environment--yes, you guessed it, high school—to explore the roots of nasty behavior and what interventions are effective to stop it.

He starts out with a clever definition of what bullying actually is: "Bullying is what happens when an individual with power exercises that power against people who don't fit in. By threatening to expose or harm or degrade the outlier, the bully reinforces the status quo in a way that increases his power." And goes on to suggest that to combat jerk behavior at its root, organizations, whether they be schools or small business, need to explicitly celebrate the weird:

Bullying persists when bureaucracies and hierarchies permit it to continue. It's easier to keep order in an environment where bullying can thrive (and vice versa), because the very things that permit a few to control the rest also permit bullies to do their work. The bully uses the organization's desire for conformity to his own ends.

At the fabulous lab school in Manhattan, they're making huge progress at undoing this problem. A recent assembly (organized and run by students and volunteers) was created around weirdness, fear and most of all, "owning it."… When there isn't a race to fit in the most, bullying those that don't fit in loses much of its power.

This is incredibly brave and risky for those in charge. It involves trusting people to become something wonderful, as opposed to insisting that they fit in at all costs.

"We're all a lot weirder than we'd like the world to know," he concludes. Bullying, in other words, thrives in environments that value conformity and implicitly demand group members hide their true selves to make life easier for the higher ups. That sounds like high school, but remove the raging hormones and ill-advised fashion experiments, and it also sounds like plenty of businesses.

Could encouraging a little more weirdness make your business a friendlier and more productive place to work?

Trying to build a new relationship? You'll never manage it by staring at a screen. Here's what you need to do instead.

We’ve stopped seeing each other. You and me. All of us.

Our eyes may indeed be windows to our soul, but with our necks craned downward and our eyes focused on tiny handheld screens, who can tell? We hardly make an effort to look at the person we’re talking to anymore. Younger people, in general, find it challenging to maintain eye contact with adults. Video conferencing complicates things further. When is the last time you consciously looked into someone’s eyes and had a meaningful conversation?

When nearly every personal and business interaction uses a screen as an intermediary, it’s difficult to develop and maintain meaningful relationships with employees, customers and partners. But such relationships are the cornerstone of building a long-term business. So put down that smart phone, walk away from the computer, and think about these five things:

Speak with Your Eyes

We communicate so much with a simple look. Are you genuinely interested and receptive to ideas or do your eyes dart away while someone is talking? A challenging stare can thwart collaboration before a word is spoken. Even if your eyes are relaxed and attentive, your eyebrows may convey concern, surprise and other emotions. Relax your face when you’re meeting with someone and use your eyes to meet theirs for five seconds at a time, while making note of their overall body language.

Listen to Their Eyes

Without looking directly into someone’s eyes, you’ll miss millions of visual clues as to what’s going on inside their head. Can you see fear? A spark of excitement? A glazed look of boredom? Are the other person’s arms crossed or relaxed at their side? You can’t read body language if your eyes are looking past them, down at papers or at your phone. Carefully pay attention to the other person’s eyes, and you’ll learn more than you ever could from lifeless words on a screen.

Look for the “Tell”

In poker, it’s called the “tell”: the habitual signal your opponent makes that betrays whether he or she is holding a full house or a hand full of nothing. Someone is telling you something. She can’t make eye contact with you. Why? Perhaps she’s afraid to deliver bad news or wants to be somewhere else. If a customer or employee is staring at the ceiling or evading your eyes for no apparent reason at all, you need to figure out what’s really going on.

Be Shifty-Eyed

If you’re making a presentation to a group you need to look at everyone in the room. The guy over there in blue jeans? He might be the CEO. Ignoring eye contact with all the women? You’ve just alienated both the CMO and CFO. Take your time. Be deliberate. Connect while you speak by scanning and making brief eye contact with everyone in the room. That’s a great way to change your message into a truly powerful connection.

But Don’t Be Creepy

Eye contact is something most people struggle with, yet it’s a critical component of communication. Relax. Blink normally. Don’t squint or stare. Above all, eye contact should not be awkward or creepy. The goal is not to drill into the other person’s soul with an unbroken gaze for extended periods of time. Just work on being fully present when meeting with someone -- and pay attention to your eyeballs.

Too much of anything is injurious to health and this is so true of startups too.

As a startup founder/developer, you are asked to have a blog to let users know what you’re up to, to let other developers get to know you, to enable a marketing campaign that works wonders… the list is endless. Blogging, networking, “github”ing (one of the words that’ll be in vogue by the end of this year): these are productive work, mind you. And as developers, our focus is on “creating” and these productive works involve a lot of creation. This creates an impression – a false one – that we’re actually productive.

I read a post on the state of several projects that never really made it to the finish line. This reminded me of several developers who blog about their upcoming new project and after a few months, there’s no project at all. Did this ever happen to you? Like you started off on a high note – blogged about it a lot in the initial period – and then somehow, the whole thing waned away, ending kind of prematurely with an unfinished project?

Oh and it’s not just blogging that can do this to your project. There are other monsters too – monsters who are basically good but who can eventually turn into productivity-suckers.

Networking: Social networking is an amazing thing that can help your app/project like no one else can (okay, PG, Andreessen and, say, TechCrunch excluded). It can help you build amazing relationships with people who can spread the word about your work, or help you hack some stuff out of Backbone.js so your app kicks ass. But social networking can also drain away your most important asset: time.

A popular hangout for developers is HN. Or even Google+ for that matter. And then there’s Quora these days. These are places where meaningful, insightful, informational and “whatever” conversations take place. These are places I love, too and you get tons of info that is hardly found anywhere else. But developers can – and do – get carried away a lot.

GitHub is funny in a way. You start forking one interesting and relevant open-source project and then one thing leads to another and by the end of the day (or night, if you’re burning the midnight oil to code your project), you’ve seen a ton of interesting code on GitHub but none of this is actually, really going to finish your app.

Startups need to have blogs whether you are just starting out or mid-way into your project. But you should be very strict and disciplined about this aspect of entrepreneurship and marketing. The same goes with your time spent on networking and code-discovery.

A lot has been written about why blogging, networking etc. are mandatory for developers. Let’s just not over-step the line and end up spending time that should have been used to finish that module.

Image by David Precious

If you're starting your own business for these four reasons don't do it.

I recently went to a great tech event called VatorSplash. It's an event where tech entrepreneurs claw their way to center stage in hopes of getting their demo seen and receiving the coveted Vator award. The real benefit is they get in front of some impressive VCs that might love their idea enough to fund it to the next phase. The night I went I was lucky enough to get to listen to the CEO of Evernote, Phil Libin speak. And as I write this, I'm using his great tool.

Libin walked us through his beliefs on entrepreneurship; specifically who should be an entrepreneur and where they should launch. As he chatted about the "who" part, I pulled four reasons why anyone thinking they want to start a business should NOT DO IT and related it to my day-to-day and boy, was he spot on. So here's my take on his words. Don't start a biz if...

In general most boss's report to someone on some level. Yet even if you fund your company yourself you still have people to answer to. You need to understand that your No. 1 job is making sure people in your company are successful. I have a bunch of people who report to me at my online marketing company VerticalResponse. Their biggest problem? Getting s*it done. My to-do list? Removing obstacles for them so they can get stuff done, which benefits our team. I report to them and they know that.

It's such a great thought, "If I have my own company I can come and go as I please!" (LOL). For what it's worth, if you want more flexible time you should not be an entrepreneur. As I sit here on President's Day at 9 p.m. writing this, I owe this article to the person who manages content for us. (See No. 1). You live and breathe your business, you can't think of anything else and your time is your business. Get used to it.

When I started VerticalResponse, I wanted to commoditize email marketing for small business. In 2001 there wasn't a tool for small businesses to do their email marketing affordably, so I wanted to ensure there was something reasonable that would help their business grow. Do I want VR to be successful? You bet, whatever format it comes in, be it an acquisition, IPO or simply making it on its own.

If you want to start your own business, you have to be okay that you'll lose your own investment. And if you're lucky enough to have them, you'll lose your investors investment and you're still okay with that. If you've got a soul, you'll lose sleep. For me, every time I went back to my friends and family for investment money, I made sure to put my money where my mouth was and invested alongside them. I couldn't see taking friends money if I wasn't willing to put more in myself!

All in all, a great gig, thanks Phil for an awesome chat, and for bringing to the surface the realities of running your own business. What you talked about was complete reality, but I wouldn't trade if for the world!

Do you agree with who should be an entrepreneur? I'd love to hear about it!

There are a lot of myths surrounding the state of mind known as "happiness." Here's how you can break them down and start on your own path.

Two months ago a new client entered my office for her first coaching session. "All I want is to feel happy," she said. "I'm miserable and I focus on that misery all day long."

It seemed like a fairly simple request, so we went to work.

Week after week I witnessed the smile on my client's face becoming more consistent, more authentic. Soon she began talking about the laughter and pleasant activities that now fill her days. So I asked whether she thought that we had achieved her happiness goal. I was surprised when she said "no."

What I learned is that this vibrant woman believed that in order to characterize herself as happy she could never feel sad. To her, sadness and other unpleasant feelings are not allowed in the life of someone who defines themselves as a happy person. But that is not what the human experience is actually about.

Remember, life doles out the knocks. And if we don't allow a natural progression of the resulting unpleasant feelings we will never fully experience and embrace the joy in life. That's right; where there is black, there is white, it's just how nature works. There are two complementary forces that make up all aspects of life and we must allow and accept their balance.

This is the understanding that my client was missing.

And it begs the question: Happiness--what is it, really?

In simplest form, happiness is a state of being. Sure, our circumstances influence the level of happiness we can access, but happiness is within us, not around us. We all have it, but we each define it differently and have varying expectations of ourselves and our own abilities to be happy. And that is what causes the confusion.

It's perfectly OK to have moments or days of feeling bad, rather than good. Heck, it's necessary. When we resist the feelings that we categorize as unpleasant, it simply causes more resistance, leading to greater unhappiness. Let's debunk the happiness myth. These steps might just help you develop a healthy--and, dare I say, happy--life balance.

1. Build a solid foundation.

Martin Seligman is one of the leading researchers in positive psychology and author of Authentic Happiness. Seligman describes happiness as having three parts: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Pleasure is the "feel good" part of happiness. Engagement refers to living a "good life" of work, family, friends, and hobbies. Meaning refers to using our strengths to contribute to a larger purpose. Seligman says that all three are important, but that of the three, engagement and meaning make the most difference to living a happy life.

Revisit your relationships. Are they satisfactory? Do you have a good support network in place? If not, work on building it up. When you hit a bump in the road having supportive people around you will make a world of difference.

Also, review how you contribute to a larger purpose. Focusing on something bigger than you are helps to keep things in perspective.

2. Set realistic expectations.

You are human. Forcing or faking happiness leads to misery and conflict. Even if you create your happiness foundation and achieve a state of general well-being, you will have your ups and downs. It's how you deal with those fluctuations that matters. Condemnation and negativity will jeopardize your state of balance. Get real. Eliminate the pressure and you will bounce back more quickly.

3. Allow your feelings, rather than resisting them.

There are days when you will wake up feeling unhappy. Whether you fully understand it or not, it's important to accept that this happens. Be patient with yourself. Don't complain, but do indulge in a little time to examine your feelings without criticism. Rather than, "I hate when I feel like this," try "It's interesting that I have these feelings." Be OK with it and examine the feelings for a little while if they merit your attention. If not, simply turn your focus to your larger purpose to prevent yourself from dwelling on something that isn't dwell-worthy.

4. Be ready for change.

Ups and downs are normal, but if you find yourself in what feels like a constant state of unhappiness it's important to listen to what your body and mind are telling you. Life has a funny way of tapping us on the shoulder when we need to create change. If you don't pay attention to the gentle tapping, you may be surprised by a less gentle reminder--or series of them. Either way, your subconscious mind will get your attention to suggest, or force, change. So make it easy on yourself and pay attention to the gentle tap. What is the cause of your unhappiness? Find someone who can help you sort through it, and embrace the change that lies ahead. You are on your way.