Episode 44: Redefining Happiness at Work

Summary

In this episode, Ellen explores the realities of creating healthy workplaces, emphasizing that perfect happiness isn't achievable, but trust, support, and alignment with core values are key to a thriving environment. She discusses how leaders can navigate tough decisions, communicate transparently, and anchor themselves in their values to foster trust and respect.

Key Topics

The misconception that everyone should be happy at work

The importance of anchoring in core values for leaders

Strategies for transparent communication during change

The role of flexibility and curiosity in leadership

Building trust through consistent actions and values

Keywords

workplace health, leadership, core values, transparency, trust, organizational culture, employee well-being, change management

Takeaways

You can't make everyone happy, but you can create a healthy workplace.

Anchoring in your core values guides tough decisions.

Transparency and early communication build trust.

Flexibility and curiosity are essential leadership skills.

A healthy workplace is rooted in respect, support, and trust.

Chapters

00:00 Creating Healthy Workplaces: The Real Goal

02:30 Anchoring in Core Values as a Leader

08:33 Communicating Tough News Effectively

14:15 Building Trust Through Transparency and Flexibility

Transcript

Ellen Whitlock Baker (00:00)

I talk about how to help people set and keep boundaries so they don't burn out, how to be a whole-hearted leader without getting drained dry, how to build trust and dislodge workplace norms that are harmful. All of that could sound like I'm hoping everyone will hold hands and sing joyful songs together. Which, you know, while that could be fun for some of us, I'm definitely not saying that. Because

Here's the thing, you're never going to have a workplace where everyone is happy. But you can have a healthy workplace where people feel listened to, supported, and trusted. That should be the goal, not happiness. Because it's not possible to make everybody happy all the time.

I'm Ellen Whitlock Baker, and I help leaders who want to bring humanity and integrity back to work and still have a life left over at the end of the day. After 20 years of navigating the ups and downs of the working world, I started hard at work to help us all build healthier workplaces. I'm here to help you challenge outdated corporate norms, protect your well-being, and give you practical tools to build better work cultures.

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Hard at Work Podcast, where we tackle how to create healthier workplaces for everyone. I'm your host, Ellen Whitlock Baker. So recently I was talking to a leader that I'm facilitating a ref a retreat for, and I asked them how they thought the overall vibe was at the office. Like, did people feel overwhelmed? Did they feel stressed? Did they feel trusting, content, supported, et cetera?

Because it's really helpful to get a sense of what that overall feeling is when you're going in and working in workplaces. And their answer made me realize something. So they said that they'd just gone through a reorg, and some people weren't happy about the changes, but overall everyone was adjusting. And it just clicked for me. When people hear talk about creating healthy workplaces or human-centric workplaces or workplaces where people don't burn out. I wonder if they think that that means that everyone should be happy all the time. Which makes sense, right? Like I talk about how to help people set and keep boundaries so they don't burn out, how to be a wholehearted leader without getting drained dry, how to build trust and dislodge workplace norms that are harmful.

All of that could sound like I'm hoping everyone will hold hands and sing joyful songs together. Which, you know, while that could be fun for some of us, I'm definitely not saying that. Because here's the thing you're never going to have a workplace where everyone is happy, but you can have a healthy workplace where people feel listened to, supported, and trusted. That should be the goal.

Not happiness, because it's not possible to make everybody happy all the time. My fellow people pleasers, I know, I know, we want to, we want to make everybody happy all the time, but it's not possible. I don't care how good of a leader you are, you are never going to please everyone. And honestly, you shouldn't. As a leader, you're going to have to make hard decisions.

A lot of them. And they're going to be people who are upset by them because change is really, really hard. So there's often going to be some unhappy people, or even many. So, how do you weather this as a leader, knowing you're never gonna please everyone? Because for a lot of us, based on our lived and learned experience, our identity, on whatever.

We feel a very deep need to please everyone, especially at work. So, how do you figure it out? You anchor yourself in your values. Naming your core values is one of the most important things you can ever do as a leader, as a human, really. And for many of us, it's something we've never even thought about. Knowing your core values isn't a nice to have, it's a must-have.

So, if I asked you right now, what are your two core values? Could you answer me? Ten years ago, I certainly couldn't have told you mine, but I was lucky enough to get guided through a values exercise with my coach. And it is honestly life-changing when you truly do the work to understand what it means to be aligned and anchored in your values. And here's how it relates to what we were talking about to coming to terms with the fact that as a leader, you can't make everybody happy. Brene Brown says in Dare to Lead, which is which includes a great values exercise. There's a bunch of free resources online. She says this quote about living into your values that I love. She says, I know I'm in my values when a decision is somewhere between tough and really tough. Ugh, like that hits, right? When a decision feels easy, it can be because you're taking the easy way out. Not always, but sometimes. And it can feel really, really easy to try to make everyone happy. There's this great example of this in Aiko Bethea's excellent new book, Anchored, Aligned, and Accountable. She wrote the book, so the second half is like a choose your own adventure book, where she describes a situation and then gives you two options for what to do. And depending on what you pick, you go forward to that page number and read about what happens next.

One of Aiko’s examples is about an executive director who's approached by three staff members who take issue with the way that meetings are run at their organization. So you walk through it and then you get two options for what happens when the executive director tries to make them happy versus trying to learn more about the underlying cause of what they want and acting curious and learning. So I don't want to be a spoiler, but the trying to make them happy, yeah, that doesn't work.

And it causes more issues. In the moment, it was the easiest choice for that executive director because it got the people off her back, it moved the problem along, she felt like she was making them feel better. But in the long term, it caused a lot of problems with other people who were impacted by the way the meetings were run, not going in the way they used to. Read the book, you will totally understand it, and you'll also just learn a ton in general. So Aiko says in the book, when you're anchored in your values, you decrease confusion and ambiguity about what's acceptable to you in terms of both your actions and what you're willing to receive from others. And Aiko, by the way, was the coach who walked me through my values exercise a decade ago. And I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to learn from her. Finding those core values is the number one thing.

That all leaders should do, like I said earlier. And this is why when I work with executive teams, we make sure each member knows their core values and knows what it looks like when they're aligned or not aligned with their values. And it's not to be touchy-feely, although there's nothing wrong with that, it's a good leadership practice. And what's so interesting is that we have to be able to shine a light on ourselves.

In order to be good leaders. But in a lot of ways, we're taught to not think of ourselves and to think of our teams and our constituents and our customers and the board and everybody else first before we even think about ourselves. That's backwards. It's hard to learn that, but that is backwards. Again, we go back to the oxygen mask. You gotta put it on first. That also means you have to know you up.

And down, backwards and forwards, in order to be able to lead well. So if we're not anchored in our own values, how can we know we're making grounded and aligned choices? Or how will we even navigate conflict or ambiguity? So working on creating a healthier workplace culture starts with the individuals, and I think must start with the leaders of the workplace.

And coming to the realization that a healthy workplace isn't full of shiny, happy people holding hands. It's full of respectful people who are anchored in your values. That's really important. This is the path to creating healthy, human-centric workplaces. And here are a few things to consider if you're nervous about having to introduce a policy or a change that you know not everyone is going to like. Start with anchoring in your values.

But then there are practices that can help you work through tough news or a tough change in the most human-centric way. Because even when you're anchored in your values, you can still feel really nervous about introducing something that not everybody's gonna like, and that might actually result in big changes for some people. So here are the three practices that will help you deliver that news in the most human-centric way. First, communication.

You communicate early and often and as much as you can about any decisions you're making that will affect people. You explain why you're making that decision. You give people a chance to dissent or share what they're worried about in the transition. Is this potentially or likely going to be uncomfortable for you? Yeah, probably. It doesn't feel good to have to sit and listen to people say, wow, that decision's really gonna suck for me.

But if you're making a decision, you should probably have thought about why, looked at the potential drawbacks, interviewed people involved before deciding, especially if it's not about something you know well. So communication is really key. In an environment where you leave your door open for people to talk to you, regardless of their position in the organization, that's a healthy workplace. The second practice that's gonna help you deliver hard news without people pleasing is transparency. And it goes hand in hand with communication, but it is so important. And a lot of us came up in workplaces with, you know, super hierarchical structures. And in those structures, we didn't really get to hear much of what was going on. So this can be a hard skill to teach yourself if that's what you are used to. But tell the truth to the best of your ability with your team, with all of them.

If the budget is looking lean, tell them that and tell them why. If someone's not meeting expectations, my gosh, tell them early and keep being transparent and clear about whether they're improving or not. Someone not meeting expectations should never be a surprise at their review, but that's a topic for a whole different podcast. So does the thought of being really transparent make you cringe? That's totally okay. Again, a lot of us have learned not to be transparent at work.

And definitely some of us feel like we have to hold our cards close to the vest to protect ourselves. And some of us were just taught that what mattered were our experience and our authority, not our flexibility and our listening skills. So if this is making you uncomfortable, that's totally okay. It's hard. I want you to take some deep breaths and I want you to keep thinking about it. Notice how you're handling things at work.

Where could you be more transparent? How does your team feel about the information you share? Do they feel like you're transparent or not? Ask them. We're afraid to, but this is the best way to find out. So communication, transparency, and the third way to ensure that you're delivering tough news in a healthy way is flexibility. This one can also be hard. A lot of us learned that experience equals authority.

That the longer we've been in the seat, the more we know and the more our decisions should be weighted. So it's not that experience doesn't matter. Of course, it's incredibly helpful. And people who have a lot of experience in whatever it is you do at your workplace are often going to grow into leadership roles. But they can still be wrong. When you've been with the company for 40 years and you think you know everything, you can still be wrong.

And the thing is, is that when we're wrong, that's okay. When our experience tells us to do something a certain way, and people with less experience than us ask us to think about doing it differently, guess what? Listen. Listen. Be curious. Try to understand where they're coming from. And then stop and think about it. Don't immediately go to that will never work or I tried that back in 2005 and it was a disaster. Your job as a leader is to be flexible. Listen, adjust if needed. Go outside of the box. You came in. All work, all life really is full of hard decisions where not everyone feels like they got what they wanted. So expect that sometimes you're going to do things that might not make people happy, but you can still have a healthy workplace when you are.

Grounded in your core values, if you communicate early and often, if you're as transparent as you possibly can be, and if you're flexible and willing to change your mind. These actions will build trust. And when your team trusts you and each other, then decisions are gonna feel a little easier. There will still be conflict and debate, but it can be productive and healthy and not awful. When people feel respected and trusted, they act accordingly.

And most importantly, when you're anchored in your values, you're going to act in ways that align with those values, which sets you up for behaving respectfully and bringing curiosity into play rather than either trying to please everyone or operating a top-down, controlled, hierarchical nightmare. So I hope that helps those of you who might be going through some rocky times at the moment or see the potential for some in the future.

Keep respecting and honoring the voices of your team, and you'll get through it in the healthiest way possible. And that is what will keep people coming back to work and doing their best, even if they're not happy the whole time they're doing it. Quick caveat here: if your workplace is making people miserable, that's a totally different story. There's a difference between everyone not being happy all of the time and people being completely miserable. Don't create a miserable workplace.

We've talked about that in many episodes. We can talk about it in more. But caveat that that's a slightly different story. If you're looking for someone to help you plan or facilitate a retreat or come in and do a workshop on how to create healthier workplaces, or you want to have someone help you with that core values exercise, send me an email at Eln at ewbcoaching.com, or you can schedule a 45-minute call on my website. I would love to chat and see how I can support you. So thank you so much for listening.

I will see you on the next episode of Hard at Work.