Why Team Happiness Can Be the Wrong Thing to Aim for [video]

Look, try to hire emotionally intelligent people. Be honest to them about what they're getting into when they get hired (ways in which the company operates, the technology stack the company is required to support, etc.). Finally, be open to suggestion when you can be accommodating to better ways of doing things that are mutually beneficial. If you're still having problems, you might need to acknowledge that you made a bad hire and act accordingly (toxic people make your emotionally intelligent employees unhappy in ways that you are responsible for).

Obviously optimizing for "happiness" in some sort of naive, single-minded sort of way is not the way to go about things. If you have the type of employees that you have to infantilize and throw dumb perks, entitlements, and power to in order to make them happy, you need to reconsider a few things. But on the flip side, if the only inputs to your model of employee wellbeing are "bad news" and "ignorance/delusion", you're probably running an abusive workplace.

This kind of stuff shouldn't be rocket science.

Interesting topic, but the presentation makes me happy to be done with school. I don't miss sitting through 50 minute lectures that could be condensed to 10 minutes, or read even quicker.

tl;dw: Happiness is fleeting, chasing an emotion is intrinsically difficult/impossible. too often we say we want team happiness but what we really want is happiness of specific members whom we consider important, thereby creating a two class system(at which point she makes reference to the holocaust?). what we really want is equanimity on our teams, i.e. calmness. This allows for more nuanced discussion of issues, because when you optimize for happiness you and your team can hide reality from one another in order to ensure happiness.

feel free to add anything i missed, it was an hour long and I zoned out during some parts.

I think the way to get the best out of people is not to pander to them to make them the happiest people but to expect high standards from them, to expect everyone to give their best, work well and hard and be proud of what they do. Work/life balance is important so don't expect more than working hours but demand the absolute best from people.

Ask them "how do we get the best from you? When do you do your hardest and best work, how do we tap into that?". Tell them it's what you expect of them so they need to turn on their A game.

Pay people more than market rate.

Work is satisfying if you give it your best and do something worthwhile and challenging and hard.

Foosball table, pinball room, Xbox room, lego playroom bullshit not needed.

Terrible speaker basically spouting nonsense.

This presentation is far too long for such little content.

The speaker spoke in a roundabout way diluting her meaningful content with cliche after cliche. I think he point is nice though: aim for calmness and be honest with your team, not the allusion of happiness.

I think I heard her use Nazi concentration camp guards as a metaphor to describe the potential bad behavior of employees. That was a strange talk.

From my experience (I'm a coder), the best work has been done where we adhere to what Zuckerberg called "The Hacker Way". WRT the talk from "Lean Agile" conference...

Slightly OT, but Erik Meijer spoke wonderfully about it at GOTO Copenhagen[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvMuPtuvP5w

Why work where your not happy if you don't have too? Demand + skill =p opportunities. Opportunities + happy relationship = I give a shit. I know making a living is important but I don't think working under this concept is sustainable. I have been in this scenario and it's dehumanistic and unsustainable in markets where your employees have options.

Provide an environment that give workers autonomy, mastery, and purpose (see Daniel Pink's work title Drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc). You provide those three things and a sane group of people, happiness will follow.

Happiness is a state of mind and also a side-effect of a higher meaning and purpose. It's also absolutely subjective.

Optimizing for happiness is not a worthwhile or even possible endeavor. Instead focus on providing purpose and meaning and everything else will follow by the people who are best fit for it.

I saw the title and instantly clicked on it. It's a refreshing view on leadership. The best quote come right at the beginning: "We are chasing a mood and mood is not a realiable method of delivery". Very intriguing but frankly the rest of her talk is tedious and full of rambling without making more strong points. Would have preferred just a short blog post on her views. The things she said are valid and if you as a leader just rely on making the team happy you won't succeed. Still she doesn't provide any fool-proof solution except being more transparent. I didn't see the last third of the video, so maybe she provided more help then.

I think a big part of being a leader is to frame situtations always, really always in a positive way. Every event or incident can be seen in a negative, realistic but also in a positive way, eg seen as a new opportunity. Latter is much more motivating and eventually makes people happy. Also you as a leader want to be in a positive environment where people are happy, otherwise you end up just being a dull delegating robot degrading socially which is btw the biggest risk of being in executive positioms. So just ignoring this mood called happiness sounds a bit too simple for my taste. Leaderhship is way more complex. Especially in engineering where creatvity is the key you don't want people who just function you need people who can and want to go to the max--and this only works if they are motivated--or just call it--'happy'.

However, I still think she addressed an important point but I would tackle this from a different perspective: What you need as a leader are individuals which are happy by nature--or to be more precise who do not suffer of a severe depression. If you have depressive people on your team, you can't make them happy or motivated. They will always find something which doesn't work, which hinders them, which makes their entire life miserable. And not relying on making them happy, won't let them be productive neither. So, what's the point? Moreover, you risk that they infect the entire team with their negativity. How to identify or avoid having depressive people is a different question and even more challenging. And also important, you as a leader can trigger depression if you are not careful, so even if the claim 'team happiness can be the wrong thing to aim for' would be true, a leader should still aim for not making the team unhappy. And to go further the leader should aim for giving the team a perspective, a trending one. A persepctive which let them grow. Then they should be happy and again: maybe we still should aim for happiness and her talk title was just a click- or view-bait.

approx slides (has common slides, but is different from the presentation): https://qconlondon.com/london-2016/system/files/presentation...

JPMorgan is a sponsor of the event talk, no doubt team happiness does not count (FYI, worked there) Also, sarcasm.

What you should really aim for is customer/user happiness.