
Why Team Happiness Can Be the Wrong Thing to Aim for [video] - michaelfeathers
https://vimeo.com/143894732
======
knucklesandwich
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.

~~~
askafriend
It really is that simple. Empathy is key.

But this type of philosophy has to come from the top, and if a founder or
management team is even a little psychopathic, then I feel like there's really
not much you can do (but maybe I'm wrong here, and people with more experience
can chime in)

------
eknight15
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.

~~~
putlake
OT but I wish Vimeo had an option to play the video at 2x the speed. YouTube
has that option and I love it. Use it all the time for watching conference
presentations.

~~~
krebby
Most vimeo videos nowadays are sent in html5 video tags. If you're reading HN,
you're probably pretty comfortable in chrome's console. Just find the video
element and adjust the `playbackSpeed` variable (default 1).

~~~
chippy
One would expect at least a dozen browzer plugins which change these speeds.
Ive never encountered the need - i run a slow netbook and never load the
videos and I run a fast-ish laptop and occasionally am prepared to load
videos.

------
thrden
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.

~~~
hasenj
Yea. The opposite of drama and dysfunctional interactions is not happiness and
cheers and jokes all the time. It's simply calmness and emotional stability.

------
hoodoof
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.

~~~
stdbrouw
> 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.

This is an impossible demand masquerading as common sense. Nobody can be at
peak performance all the time, and a sane work environment shouldn't expect
you to.

~~~
mtreis86
I think "give their best" is an entirely relative term. The best today may far
exceed best tomorrow if you rate the effort based on work accomplished or
effort given. But if you are rating both of those days purely on 'the best you
could do given circumstances' then there is no peak performance persay.

------
penguinduck
Terrible speaker basically spouting nonsense.

------
ionforce
This presentation is far too long for such little content.

------
usloth_wandows
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.

------
tzakrajs
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.

------
hkjgkjy
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvMuPtuvP5w)

------
jaunkst
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.

~~~
shostack
Many (most?) people don't have great options, and so the choice is often
between a livable wage and unhappiness, or poverty and unhappiness.

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

------
manigandham
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.

------
greenspot
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.

~~~
kd5bjo
At least in the US, you'll want to be careful with these views as an employer
or manager. At least some cases of depression will be classified as a
disability under the ADA, leaving your company open to a discrimination
lawsuit if you make employment decisions based on it.

(I've read the ADA, but I'm not a lawyer -- this advice could be completely
wrong in practice)

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

~~~
karyon
these don't seem to be the correct slides.

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

------
xyzzy4
What you should really aim for is customer/user happiness.

~~~
st3v3r
If you're talent isn't happy, you're not gonna be able to make your customers
happy.

~~~
xyzzy4
Tell that to Amazon.

~~~
manachar
Amazon has been making me less and less happy lately. I had a customer service
interaction that left me speechlessly pissed. They were clearly not empowered
to do anything but tell me to suck it.

They don't optimize for happy customers. They optimize for being the place you
go to buy things online first and profit. Oddly, they bought Zappos which is
orientated to customer happiness.

~~~
slededit
The customer service has drastically dropped. To the point where there
customer responses have poor spelling (and don't actually solve the problem).
They allow third party sellers which sell counterfeit goods - meaning you have
to carefully look at who is actually selling the item you are about to buy. If
you buy shoes its clear Amazon isn't getting the same quality as the bigger
box stores despite selling the same brands.

Amazon is quickly becoming the walmart of the internet for me. I'll buy from
them because its easy but I don't expect them to sell me a quality product.

