You don’t need to make your employees happy!
Apologies if that caused you to spit out your coffee, beer, wine or created a bit of perturbation, but now I have your attention I wanted to share some interesting conversations I’ve had over the last few weeks.
It might sound counterintuitive, but striving to always make the whole team happy is a race that you’ll never win. Firstly, everyone’s version of happiness is different and can certainly shift depending on life’s circumstances. However, something that can remain constant is our values or as we like to call them at EBS: Your Points of Culture.
As a business owner, it’s your values and culture that lead.
Happiness is a byproduct not the goal.
Recently I had a client that had to make a tough call, by letting go of a promising employee after a confrontation with another team member. Another business owner was bending over backwards with perks, lunches, flexibility, fearing that any drop in happiness would lead to disaster. And then there’s the solo operator, debating whether to cave to a potential hire’s demands for a four-day week and a laundry list of other conditions to join the team.
In all these cases, the real compass shouldn’t have been focused on “happiness.”
It should have been focused on values and how they wanted to run their business and what they stood for.
As the business owner, the one who took all the risks to pursue your idea or passion, the one that loses sleep over your ability to make payroll, and navigates legal and customer challenges, you get the opportunity to shape and determine what’s important for your company’s culture. You get to decide: will it be high-flexibility, or sharply disciplined? A high-performance arena or a social hub? Sharing in success or just a job with a salary.
The choice is yours, and there isn’t a right or wrong answer because you get to determine the vision for your company.
But here’s the key: it’s those values, your Points of Culture, that become your guiding principles, that serve as the compass, not just for you, but for the entire business as it grows.
From time to time, I committed to sharing content that floated my boat. As I was thinking this week about the interactions my clients had encountered, I saw a link to an article about values, so well written it was encapsulating everything I wanted to share.
The following article was written by Paddy Upton.
I’ve had the good fortune of spending time with Paddy on a few occasions and also have seen his keynotes and workshops. Paddy is a world-class leadership and mental performance coach who has worked with elite sporting teams, including India’s 2011 World Cup-winning cricket team and now advises business leaders globally on culture, performance, and leadership.
Hope you enjoy the article as much as I did.
‘The Cost of Keeping Everyone Happy’ Paddy Upton
In many environments – sport, leadership and life – there’s a quiet tension around the idea of being a “good person.”
Some people interpret that as keeping everyone happy. Avoiding conflict. Adjusting their behaviour so that no one feels uncomfortable. Others move in the opposite direction, prioritising their own needs with little consideration for how their actions affect those around them.
Both sit on the same spectrum.
At one end is selfishness. At the other is people pleasing.
Most of us move somewhere between the two.
The challenge is that this balance rarely announces itself clearly. Situations change. Relationships differ. Pressures increase or decrease. The line we walk between respecting others and respecting ourselves shifts constantly.
What tends to guide that balance most reliably is clarity around values.
When someone understands what matters to them – what they stand for, what they’re prepared to protect, and where their boundaries lie – behaviour becomes steadier. They don’t need to constantly adjust themselves to suit everyone in the room, but they also don’t move through situations carelessly.
Values create a reference point.
In team environments, this becomes particularly important. Leaders who try to keep everyone happy often find themselves avoiding difficult conversations. Standards soften. Decisions become delayed. Harmony appears to exist on the surface, but performance quietly drifts.
On the other hand, leaders who push forward without regard for others can damage trust just as quickly.
The space between those two extremes requires awareness. It requires the ability to hold a boundary while still treating people with respect.
That balance is rarely perfect.
There will be moments where we lean too far toward pleasing others. Moments where we protect our own position more strongly than necessary. Most people experience both from time to time.
The aim isn’t perfection. The aim is intention.
When behaviour is guided by values rather than by the immediate desire to avoid discomfort, it becomes easier to navigate that middle space. Difficult conversations still happen. Boundaries still exist. But the intention behind them remains steady.
Over time, people around us begin to understand where we stand.
Not because we try to convince them.
But because our behaviour becomes consistent enough that the line we walk between selfishness and people pleasing becomes clearer both to them and to ourselves.
Cheers,
Darren Gloster
CEO – Australia & New Zealand
Entrepreneurial Business School
