Why Making Employees Happy Won't Improve Performance, But Doing This Will...

It has essentially become conventional wisdom that happy people are our most productive workers. Clearly we do not want unhappy employees. But it is equally undesirable to encourage or even allow people to get too comfortable in their routines or in their environment. In our attempts to entice, reward or lubricate human activity, we find that we quash creativity, innovation and human potential. We dampen performance.

As leaders it is not our duty to entice accomplishment; we need to inspire meaningful and significant accomplishment. This requires engagement with not only the organization's mission, but also with some personal sense of purpose.

Some level of dissatisfaction is what drives us to learn, improve and grow. When we get too comfortable with who or where we are, we are disinclined to change.

As leaders, we want and need people to be conscientious, to be driven by their conscience to serve something beyond their own personal needs and interests. We also need people to have grit and discover that they have more to offer than perhaps they realize by being willing to get uncomfortable.

Conventional wisdom suggests how we should attract and retain talent. Those conventions would have us act like Mary Poppins: with a spoon full of sugar we help the medicine go down.

There are Dangers That Lurk In Conventional Wisdom

Dr. Lee Thayer, author of The Competent Organization argues that conventional thinking yields no better than conventional results. Unless we are aiming to be mediocre, we need to be wary of anything that becomes conventional - which may include trying to show that you are "unconventional" by doing things like turning workspace into arcade-like playgrounds - or coddling poor performers.

There is nothing inherently wrong with making an office welcoming and inspiring. It is more than reasonable and valuable to demonstrate respect for those who commit their time and talent in support of your company's great worthy cause by offering clean, well-equipped, fully provisioned and even well-appointed work environments.

We just need to understand that by doing so - we are not actually doing a what is needed as leaders to improve performance. We might be sending a message about what we care about, which is an essential component of what we must do - but in itself is insufficient for leading people to perform to their potential. We must demonstrate what is most important - and then we must inspire people to be conscientious and demonstrate grit in order to accomplish what is most important.

Making a Case For and Against Happiness

The Founding Fathers of the United States of America understood happiness to be an inalienable right. They went so far as to argue the need for happiness as cause for separating from English rule. It is likely that they understood that no organization or movement can legislate happiness, or even attempt to cause people to be happy. At best, we can simply recognize that happiness is a necessary function of the human condition, and preserve the opportunity for those willing to do whatever it takes to pursue their own happiness.

In other words, the Framers of the constitution did not provide for ping-pong and pool tables, free beverages or entertainment. They just made clear that pursing happiness was important; it is your absolute right - provided you understand that it is a privilege that also requires real responsibility in return.

Moreover, what we might think of as happiness might be better described as momentary experiences of joy. The more moments we string together and the more joy we experience in those moments, the happier we are. Happiness is ultimately a choice. We decide what meaning to ascribe to our experiences, and choose how we express how we feel in those moments. Some people choose never to be happy - while others deliberately mask their feelings.

Happiness is transitive. We don't feel constant happiness, but on balance judge that we are more happy than not. The underlying neutral space is more an experience of contentment - or a feeling of satisfaction. This current of contentment might be interrupted with unpleasant as well as enjoyable episodes. For the most part, this is life and the human condition.

Our greatest single source of satisfaction is found in accomplishments that are significant and meaningful. These representatives the moments of overwhelming joy we can experience in life. This is what I call MoJo.

We might experience lesser sources of joy. These tend to be distractions from our routines. We seek entertainment, amusement, adventure and new experiences as diversions that might enrich our lives, but they are clearly less meaningful or significant than satisfaction we gain from things we understand to be most important such as the things we are willing to sacrifice our comfort, even our lives to accomplish out of a sense of duty to a noble cause.

Leaders Have and Opportunity and a Duty to Cultivate Mojo

We owe our employees much more than simple distractions from routines. What they need and want can be found in truly meaningful work that yields significant, positive accomplishments. When we measure our personal value by the measurable contributions we make, we not only find great satisfaction in our work, we also develop a mild dissatisfaction in the status quo that drives us to learn, grow and find ways to perform better tomorrow than we can today.

Any level of contribution is significant - provided we help people understand that it is meaningful. There was the famous story of a maintenance worker sweeping a hallway at the NASA command center explaining to President Johnson that his job was to help put a man on the moon. That sense of purpose has to reside in the individual, but can be cultivated by exceptional leadership.

The four tasks of leadership are:

1. Me Making - becoming someone who can lead
2. Organization Making - provisioning the organization to accomplish what it was built for
3. People Making - inspiring human potential by developing competence
4. Meaning Making - making clear what is necessary and making that possible.

If we want to eliminate the dysfunction and incompetence that hinders both individual and organizational performance - we must start by becoming fully competent leaders. We must understand that our competence is measured in actual performance; the accomplishments of the organization by virtue of how we lead others to perform.

When we raise the potential of the people we lead and give them the satisfaction contributing to powerful and positive accomplishments, we transform people's potential into competence, and mediocre companies into high-performance organizations.

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Phil Liebman is the Founder and CEO at ALPS Leadership - Where we help people fully competent, truly exceptional leaders. www.ALPSLeadership.com. Phil has also been a Group Chairman with Vistage Worldwide since 2005 - where he helps leaders realize their potential by learning with and from other leaders. He is the author of the soon-to-be published book, "Cultivating MoJo: How competent leaders inspire exceptional performance."