Leaders should give their people a chance to shine
Today is the International Day of Happiness, a day established by the United Nations General Assembly to encourage people around the world to realize the importance of happiness in their lives. Work can make people happy. Unfortunately, however, it can also make them unhappy. In fact, 2022 research by job site Indeed, with support from Oxford Saïd Business School, found that more than a third of U.K. workers were unhappy in their work.
So, what can leaders do to make their people happier? And is it even their job to sprinkle a little happiness at all?
1. Find your own happiness
A happy team starts with a happy leader, but just how happy are you? “The essence of leadership involves embodying the qualities you wish to see in your team,” explains Lorena Bernal, a certified life coach and spiritual life coach and founder of events and coaching platform Live Love Better.
“Happiness, motivation, joy and hard work are not attributes that can be mandated from above but are, instead, qualities that are inspired,” Bernal notes. “A leader who arrives at work exuding happiness, motivation and a sense of purpose becomes a beacon of inspiration, influencing their team to emulate these qualities. It’s a simple truth: a team’s happiness and productivity mirror the emotional and psychological state of their leader.”
The quest for a happy team begins with the leader’s journey toward personal fulfillment and happiness. They should delve into their “whys” and make a plan for achieving their goals, finding joy in the process. “When a leader prioritizes their own emotional and psychological health, they navigate challenges effectively, lead by example and empower their team daily,” says Bernal. “This creates a work environment where employees feel valued, challenged and motivated.”
2. Be inspired
Happiness is an essential ingredient for business success. Indeed, a study from the University of Warwick has found that happiness makes people 12% more productive. So, how can you be the kind of leader who inspires happiness within your team?
“The leader’s job is not to inspire people, but to be inspired,” argues Dr Andy Cope, a happiness expert, positive psychologist and author of The Art of Being Brilliant. “Once you release the pressure valve of having to inspire your people, it allows you to work on inspiring the only person you can really take charge of – yourself. And guess what? You set in motion a ripple effect of human emotional contagion, which I call the flourishing effect, and your team will ‘catch’ the uplift.”
Cope says the process has to start with you, the leader, because, “if you wait for everyone else to be inspired, you’ll die waiting.” He says: “The first step to inspiring yourself is to change your emphasis away from your to-do list, to what I call your ‘to-be list’. Your to-be list dares to point the finger back at yourself and ask the question, who am I being while I’m doing those things on my to-do list?”
3. Understand happiness isn’t the same for everybody
“It’s not a leader’s job to make people happy,” says Nik Kinley, co-author of Changing Employee Behavior with IMD business school professor Shlomo Ben-Hur. “A leader’s job is to lead people in achieving certain objectives.”
The challenge is that when faced with deadlines and commitments, leaders tend to focus on the latter part of that sentence, the part about achieving objectives. “That’s only natural, too,” Kinley explains, “because, under stress, our brains become more task-focused, with the more social, empathetic parts of our brains temporarily shutting down. And there’s good, evolutionary reasons for that. Problem-solvers survive.”
While being task-focused is undoubtedly useful at times, it shouldn’t come at the expense of leading people. “Leading people is about more than just organizing them and solving problems,” says Kinley. “It’s about helping people to be the best they can, so that they contribute as much as possible. And that, ultimately, means making people happy.”
To be happy at work, some people need a positive, fun environment. Others want challenges that give them the opportunity to feel a sense of accomplishment. As Kinley concludes: “Understanding what it is that makes each individual happy is a critical part of what being a successful leader is all about.”
4. Give people their chance to shine
Two in five employees in the U.K. have left a job to get away from a poor manager. Meanwhile, research shows line managers impact mental health more than our doctors or therapists and as much as our spouses.
Our self-worth and happiness often depends on how we’re validated at work, in turn impacting our job satisfaction, engagement, creativity and productivity. Yet 82% of line managers in the U.K. are classified as “accidental managers”, often promoted for reasons other than their people skills and having not received any proper leadership or management training.
So, leaders need to think harder about how they can help their people to shine, according to Dominic Ashley-Timms, CEO of performance consultancy Notion, creator of the STAR Manager program and co-author of The Answer is a Question.