The Company's Goal: Purpose and Stability Over Developer Happiness
TL;DR
A company goal is not to make people happy, but safety when they're doing something they like or break and feel improvement in the process. I wrote this several months ago and I still think these learnings are accurate for me.
What did work for me in terms of leadership?
A leader's goal is to reduce the friction at maximum so people can focus on what they have to do.
A technical leader doesn't have to impose technology, but guide the rest to a place of quality and try to avoid pitfalls due to these decissions while maintaining the value delivery for the stakeholders.
A leader leads by example, decides by consensual agreement and not because he/she said so. If a leader cannot justify why are we choosing this or that technology efficiently so he/she can convince people, then it's problematic.
Main goals, achievements, career growth, self-fulfillment
The best motivation for someone is giving him/her something challenging and giving the trust to solve it.
A leader should try no to stress, no rush, even let people have their own time to chill and test new things, having time for discovery can be amazing and repercute very positively to the team and the company.
Constant learning from within the company and in company time, people has family and life outside the company,
they might not be able to have time for it outside the company and you're gonna benefit from their new skills, they'll be more comfortable having the opportunity to learn within it.
The feedback should be soon and periodical, if people has no feedback they might think they're doing it wrong or worse, you won't have any feedback if you're doing it totally wrong!
Retrospective is always key to improve all processes. That gives a motivation to go further and reevaluate everything when it doesn't go the way we want or we believe it should be fixed.
Conclusion
People can be very happy within your team if you reduce all the friction necessary for them to do their job and we focus on the important things. It might sound obvious, but I've learned it's not based on my past experience.
Let's not talk about happiness, of course people can be happy working doing what they really like and it's very fullfiling, but happiness is a very strong word and in my opinion is pretentious to say that someone in a company work for the happiness of their employees.
Let's make work easy and satisfying, but happiness is something people search for on their own.
