Success Impulse: How happy are you as a leader?
What does happiness have to do with leadership? The author of the latest Success Impulse asks the same question. He presents three ideas on how to make both yourself and your team happy or even happier.
How happy are you as a leader? Admittedly: This question may seem strange to you. Very few people associate "happiness" with leadership. And wrongly so. After all, if you're going to put in all the hard work and overtime that usually comes with leadership positions, you don't want to be unhappy in the process, do you?
Why not be happy as a leader?
Quite a few don't let this consideration get to them. I love to ask my clients at the beginning of our work together, "Are you happy doing what you do?" Or on another note, if you ask parents what they want most for their children, the number one answer you'll hear is, "That they're happy!"
So if it's most important to us for our neighbors to be happy, why not in leadership? And especially at this time of year, I think it's an obvious thought.
Three ideas to increase the feeling of happiness
So: Are you happy doing what you do at work? And are the people in your team? Because if you and your people are, everyone will enjoy performing better and having more fun doing it.
So how do you manage to increase the feeling of happiness for yourself and others? Here are three things you can do right away.
- One of the simplest levers to make others happy is to make them feel important. Or the other way around: when people are unhappy, it's often because they see themselves as unimportant and don't get recognition. If you yourself are in an environment where you don't get recognition and can't change that, it's time to leave that environment. So, tell and show your people how important they are often.
- Personal growth. People are often unhappy because they hardly grow at all. Personal growth is a very powerful lever for more fulfillment and a greater sense of happiness. So: set yourself and your team concrete goals for personal development, and not just for technical topics.
- Doing good. Happiness research repeatedly shows that hardly anything makes people as happy in the long term as doing good for others. These can be intangible things such as trust, support, recognition, compliments and so on.
Here are three ideas to make yourself and your team happier. Not a bad thought for the new year, is it?
To the author:
Volkmar Völzke is a success maximizer. Book author. Consultant. Coach. Speaker. www.volkmarvoelzke.ch
