"You can’t make your people happy"

I used to think part of my job as a manager was to make people happy.
If someone seemed stressed, I’d try to fix it. If morale was low, I’d look for a quick win, an encouraging message, a team lunch, a small gesture to lift the mood.

But over time I realised something uncomfortable: you can’t make your people happy.

If happiness really does come from within — and the evidence from subjective wellbeing studies suggests it does — then no amount of leadership technique can give someone happiness.
And by the same logic, I can’t take it away either.

My role isn’t to make people happy or unhappy.
It’s to understand the nuances of happiness, what makes it more or less likely to arise, and to create the conditions for it.

That means focusing on the problems the business faces, while also seeing how we go about solving those problems feels from the inside. Because when people feel trapped, unseen, or under relentless pressure, the conditions for happiness are hard to see clearly.

This realisation didn’t make me care less about how people felt, it made me care differently.
Instead of trying to “cheer someone up,” I started sharing more of my own experience: the times I’ve felt overwhelmed, or disconnected from meaning, or stuck in dissatisfaction.

When someone tells me they’re under too much pressure on a project, I acknowledge there’s truth in that, but we also talk about how pressure feels, and how sometimes it can be reframed as a sign of growth.

These conversations don’t always change the situation, but they change how we meet it.
And that, I’ve learned, is where the real work of finding happiness begins.

Until next time,
Dermot
​The Messy Middle.

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