Should leaders take responsibility for their team's happiness, or is it up to each individual to shape their own outlook? On this episode we dive deep into the delicate balance between leadership responsibility and personal accountability. Discover how leaders can develop environments where staff can be happy, without overstepping.
How do you know that you are supporting a healthy and happy environment for your staff?
If you would like to know how you can keep your team happy without taking too much on, you should give this episode a listen!
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Should leaders take responsibility for their team's happiness, or is it up to each individual to shape their own outlook? On this episode we dive deep into the delicate balance between leadership responsibility and personal accountability. Discover how leaders can develop environments where staff can be happy, without overstepping.
How do you know that you are supporting a healthy and happy environment for your staff?
If you would like to know how you can keep your team happy without taking too much on, you should give this episode a listen!
To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story
Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST. Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/
Speaker 1:
Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.
Speaker 2:
Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today, we are going to be talking about what it looks like to have a happy staff team. It can be a bit more complicated, of course, than just simply saying everyone should be happy. Fc writes in with their question. After being in a leadership position for years, I have seen a lot of staff come and go To me. There are two categories of staff. One are the staff who seem to always have a positive outlook about their work, no matter the task, and those who seem to always have something to gripe about.
Speaker 2:
I think there's a lot that leaders can do, but I don't feel it's my responsibility to spend all my time trying to make my employees happy. Some of that is their own responsibility. You've talked a lot about responsibility of taking care of the relationship with those we lead, so what do you think? So thank you for sharing your question, fc, and I really appreciate that you've been listening to the show and thinking about some of the things that we've talked about. You're highlighting something that I feel a lot of leaders experience, because it's about more than just employee motivation and engagement, but also this sense of happiness and satisfaction in the workplace. How do you do that as a leader, and what are you really responsible for? So let's start by talking about what you mentioned, this piece of responsibility to the relationship for the people that you lead and we've spoken about this on the show before as the responsibility of the person with power, the leader. That is, someone who has more influence over what's happening, so a manager in the workplace, for example. We've discussed how being a responsible leader means being responsible for the health of the relationship between you and the people you lead, and that means that you're the first one to start developing that relationship. It means that you're focused more on their preferences and how they like to do things than your own preferences. It means that if there's maybe some damage or harm to the relationship, that you're the one to take those first steps to start working through that and, of course, that you're resourcing these people for what you're asking them to do. You're making sure they have the pieces that they need, the structure that they need, all of those pieces. That's how you can be responsible for the people that you're supporting.
Speaker 2:
Now, this responsibility can be a fine line to walk, because part of it is this concept that we're still 100% responsible for how we show up. Everyone leaders, staff members everyone is 100% responsible for how they show up, and people are going to have their own perception of life. Some people have a more positive view, some people have a more negative view and generally, this concept of how someone shows up in the world as a more positive or negative person definitely falls within that category of 100% their responsibility how they show up. And, of course, if you take too much or try to take too much responsibility for that 100%, you're actually going to be kind of disadvantaging that person that you're trying to help, even though this might come from this place of really great intentions. Have you ever met someone who really tries to take responsibility for the emotions of all the people around them? They take on this burden of I need to make everyone around me really happy and it takes a lot of their energy and focus and it doesn't always help. And I do know some leaders that have fallen to this trap because they do really care, they really want to have this positive impact, they really want to help these people. It's from a place of caring, but they often end up trying to take too much on and when you're a leader and you start doing this. This can lead to a couple traps, like not holding boundaries that are important to hold, could be focusing on harmony, even when maybe you need to be actually a little more direct, telling some of those hard truths. Maybe you're taking too much blame in a time when the employee should actually take some of that blame and do some learning from that, or even kind of abdicating power and saying, oh, I'm not responsible for this. So we want to be aware, if we're feeling that need to step in and emotionally take care of people beyond what's on us and FC. It sounds like you're conscious of this and that's great that you're starting to acknowledge what really is my role in this. How much am I responsible for Now that we've said all of that about taking too much accountability, there are two components that are important to consider in this.
Speaker 2:
There are two components that are important to consider in this, and the first is that everyone has learned throughout their lives a way that they think is best to deal with people in power positions, and so this could be from teachers and parents to different managers they have, and the strategy a lot of people use is to go along with what that leader says and try to make them happy. This is really the root of people pleasing behavior, which a lot of people identify as people pleasers. At some point you decided that the best way to get your needs met, or the best way to stay safe, potentially was to make that leader, that person in power, happy. That doesn't mean necessarily that this person is happy themselves, and agreeing with someone putting on a happy face is something all of us have used before, and some people are really skilled at it. They know that they're better perceived when they seem happy, when they're going along with things, and so they've obviously practiced a lot.
Speaker 2:
And it can be quite hard to distinguish this. And even in your personal life, you've probably had a friend who at one point was going through something really tough and you found out later and you would have never known. They seemed so happy at the time or they seemed totally fine, and then you hear about maybe something really challenging happening in their life and it was really tough to tell that. And as a leader, the likelihood of this happening increases so much because there is this vulnerability in that power differential and they are trying to potentially use the strategy that's worked for them with other people in power positions and so we might not be aware of how much someone is struggling on our team. I'm not saying this is the case necessarily, but it is something we want to be really aware of and this might just be looking for some more subtle indicators.
Speaker 2:
So some of those things might be if you think you have a really happy team but there's higher staff turnover or quicker staff turnover than you'd expect, that would be a great indicator. If you have staff engagement surveys of some sort and the numbers aren't quite as good as you would have thought with your happy team, would also be a great indicator. If you're seeing negative reviews on sites like Glassdoor, where employees leave and then post negative reviews. If you have people who are quite silent in staff meetings but then you notice a lot of whispering and side conversations after, these would all be some of those more subtle indicators that maybe the team that seems happy when they interact with you is maybe not so happy and this might indicate that flip side of taking too much responsibility for how that other person shows up, because as much as everyone has that 100% how you show up is on you, how hard do you think it is for someone who is more vulnerable because of this power differential to show up at 100% when their leader isn't showing up at 100%, let alone maybe taking on this responsibility for that health of the relationship. Not saying that negates the 100%, but it certainly makes it a lot, lot harder. So, as a leader generally, you're either making it a lot harder or a lot easier for that person to bring that 100%, that really great way that you want them to show up.
Speaker 2:
That all being said, here we're talking about that responsibility of leadership and on previous episodes we've talked more about this culture side being values driven, how we can make a healthy environment, and I wanted to talk a little bit today because we're talking more about that emotional side of happiness, as it were. Let's talk a little bit about how do we cultivate positive emotions Like what could we be responsible for in that cultivating of positive emotions in the workplace? Our emotions are based on our needs and when they are met, we generally have those positive, feel-good emotions and when they are unmet, we generally have those more negative emotions. And of course, those needs go beyond the physical Things like food and shelter. They go to our emotional needs, our psychological needs, our relational needs, our spiritual needs. There's all these different needs that we have in life, that we need to be happy, healthy humans, and I personally believe that people also have some core needs and these are the things that they personally ascribe the most value to, that they're the most important and lead to the biggest impact on happy or less happy emotions.
Speaker 2:
And when you think about needs and values together, that's really what makes up a person's personality, and so you can see you might know some people maybe that they really seem to value relationship. They seem to have a great need for acceptance, let's say, and you can see how all their actions generally focus on making sure relationships are the top and getting that need for acceptance met. You might also have staff members who prioritize learning. They really value learning and they seem to have a strong need for understanding. So the actions that they take you can then tell are trying to meet that need and support that value, and not to say either of these are good or bad, but you can really help understand an employee based on those kinds of needs and values you see coming up, and that really helps you as a leader in terms of how you motivate them in the workplace and, potentially, how you can increase happiness. So, of course, as a leader, the best thing you can do is understand each individual staff right, understanding a bit more about their needs and values, their personality, because that helps you create and structure this environment around them. That's really going to get the very best out of them and make them the happiest, as it were. So that piece of building environment around them is certainly within your responsibilities as a leader to create a healthy environment so your relationship with them can really thrive. And how they take that environment is still up to them. How they show up, in that you're not meeting their need, but you're creating an environment in which that need could be met.
Speaker 2:
Also, beyond an individual need in the workplace, I think there are a couple core pieces that we can really focus on making an environment of that supports all of our staff. First, one belonging connection. However you want to describe it, people might experience this in different ways, but this is absolutely a core need of all people. Is this an environment in your workplace where people can feel connected, like they're part of a team, like they matter to other people? It's hugely important and we're not expecting that the workplace is going to be the only way that a staff member is going to get this need met. They probably have family and friends outside of work that are also going to help with that need. But for those let's say, eight hours a day how is this person feeling like they belong in any context in the workplace? How could you support that as a leader?
Speaker 2:
Another foundational need is autonomy, and this is a particularly big one with leadership and how you support your team. People want to feel like they're capable, like they're able to make their own decisions, guide their own lives, and in a workplace, this can be very undercut by leaders who aren't aware of these pieces. So if you are micromanaging, if you are looming over someone's shoulder, if you're constantly checking their work, of course they're not going to feel that sense of autonomy. And alternatively, is there maybe not enough clarity around what they're supposed to be doing or the boundaries of what kinds of decisions that they make that they can't really feel confident in doing anything. So they have to be checking in with you all the time.
Speaker 2:
So giving this piece of clear structure and boundaries, making it clear what kind of decisions staff can make and then stepping back and trusting them to do the work, is absolutely critical to creating the sense of autonomy, meeting the need for autonomy that your staff have. And, finally, contribution people want to feel like they are making a difference by existing in the world, by contributing to their work, and so they they need to feel this piece of that. They matter and what they do matters, and this is generally met when people feel like they have meaningful work and when they're acknowledged for the efforts that are put in. So, if you've had the conversations we've mentioned before about making sure people have a strong sense of how work aligns with some of their values, how they can really live those in the workplace, and also getting regular recognition and feedback about the work that they've done and how that impacted the team in a positive way, this is a great way you, as a leader, can support this need being met in the workplace and when you have those three needs being met, when you have some of those individual needs being met, those are things that lead to those positive feelings for people and that really is how you, as a leader, can take some responsibility without overstepping for your employees and how you're going to support them in the workplace.
Speaker 2:
Fc. I hope this has given you some great things to consider. I am so excited for our conversation to continue after this. As a reminder, if you have something you would like to share with the show, we'd love to have it. And then I provide this follow up to make sure your questions answered and as a way of saying thank you so much for contributing and giving us a story that we can learn from. I want to thank you so much for listening so much, for pondering all these things, asking yourselves these questions and reflecting on your leadership, for pondering all these things, asking yourselves these questions and reflecting on your leadership and, as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples am I going to create this week?
Speaker 1:
We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.
