You Can’t Make People Happy
You cannot be responsible for other people’s emotions.
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Narcissism is a great tool for managing the stresses of leadership. If you are delusional enough to believe that everything you do is perfect, you don’t need to worry about making mistakes! Even better, not caring about anyone else means you don’t carry the burden of their emotions.
Of course, working for a narcissist is a horrible experience and I don’t recommend it.
For the rest of us, we stress about our decisions and our goals. If you’re an empathic leader you also stress about the emotions on your team. We all want our teams to be motivated and happy, and we do our best to make that happen. Seeing them sad or frustrated feels like failure.
I have seen a lot of leaders burn themselves out trying to make sure their teams are always happy. It’s hard enough work making sure you hit your goals, but doing so while maintaining happiness at all times is impossible. These leaders take everyone’s emotions on their backs and try to carry everything at once, and fail.
The reality is that you cannot make someone else happy.
You cannot be responsible for someone else’s emotions. People are just too complex! There are many reasons we’re happy or sad, and only a few of those involve our jobs and the work we do. You can never assume you know everything another person is dealing with.
I once had a great employee who was always positive and made the company culture better as a result. At one point, however, he seemed down all the time and I was worried about what changed in the work. Was it his responsibility? Was it his boss? Was he looking to work somewhere else? No. It turned out that he had broken up with his partner and his mood had nothing to do about work, but I didn’t know that at the time! In trying to fix his mood I was attempting an impossible task.
The best you can do is put people in a situation where they can choose to be happy.
If you treat your team with respect, reward them for doing good work and give them chances to grow, you are doing your best. They can choose to be happy in that situation or not, that’s up to them. But at the point where you’ve created the best work environment you can, your job as a leader is done.
This makes sense, but is hard to remember when you have a team member who is clearly unhappy. It’s easy to take it personally and try to work harder to turn that person’s mood around. And it’s easy to be hard on yourself when you fail.
So the only solution is reinforcement. Remind yourself that other’s emotions are not your responsibility, and focus on what is: creating the best possible work environment. Find reward in the people who choose to be happy and respect those that do not.
Leadership is a heavy burden, don’t make it heavier by adding things you don’t control.
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