How to Grow into a Leadership Role in Your Career

21 June 2025

Beyond Pizza Parties: The Real Secret to a Happier, More Engaged Team

As managers, we’re constantly told that employee engagement is the key to performance. We’re encouraged to focus on perks, recognition programs, and team-building events. But while these things are nice, they often fail to fix the real problem. Why? Because you can’t put a pizza party band-aid on a wound caused by daily operational chaos. Find out more in this guest post from author Greg Born.

The primary source of workplace stress, disengagement, and unhappiness isn’t a lack of perks; it’s a lack of clarity. It’s the soul-crushing frustration of working within broken processes, the anxiety of ambiguous goals, and the demoralizing effect of inconsistent leadership. When employees feel like they’re flying blind and fighting the system just to do their jobs, their happiness and motivation plummet.

The real secret to creating a happier, more motivated team is to have the leadership discipline to stop managing the symptoms and start engineering a better work environment. Drawing from my careers as both an Air Force pilot and a corporate executive, I’ve learned that the principles that ensure a safe and successful flight are the same ones that create a thriving, positive team: clarity, trust, and purpose.

The High Cost of Chaos: Why Good People Quit

Most businesses don’t set out to be confusing. They evolve through what I call “accidental design”. Processes emerge organically, roles blur as the company grows, and communication becomes a messy web of emails and assumptions. This isn’t agile; it’s chaos.

This operational chaos is toxic to team well-being. It creates:

• Constant Firefighting: Employees spend their days fixing preventable errors and dealing with recurring problems instead of doing valuable, meaningful work. This leads to exhaustion and a sense of futility.
• The Blame Game: When a process is unclear, mistakes are inevitable. In the absence of clear ownership, the focus shifts from fixing the system to blaming a person, which destroys psychological safety.
• A Feeling of Powerlessness: Nothing makes an employee unhappier than knowing a better way to do something but feeling powerless to change the clunky, inefficient system they’re forced to use.

Your best people, the ones who crave impact and progress, have the lowest tolerance for this kind of environment. They will eventually leave, not for more money, but for a workplace that respects their time and intelligence.

Engineering Clarity: The Foundation of a Happy Team

A happy team is one that can work with a sense of flow and purpose. This is impossible without a well-engineered “Business Airframe”—the underlying structure of roles, processes, and systems that allows work to get done smoothly.

As a manager, you are the primary architect of this environment for your team. You can start by focusing on two key areas:

1. Clarifying Accountability: Use a simple tool like an Accountability Chart to define the single person accountable for key results. When everyone on the team knows exactly what they own and what their colleagues own, ambiguity and turf wars decrease dramatically. People feel empowered when they have clear ownership.
2. Simplifying Core Processes: Work with your team to map out one of your most common, frustrating workflows. Ask them: “How could we make this 50% simpler?” and “Which of these steps add no real value?”. By eliminating unnecessary steps and clarifying handoffs, you reduce the daily friction that causes stress and makes work a grind. This isn’t about bureaucracy; it’s about making it easier for your team to win.

When you replace chaos with engineered clarity, you provide the stability and predictability that are essential for workplace well-being.

The Manager’s Toolkit for Building Trust and Motivation

With a clearer system in place, your leadership behaviors become the fuel that powers a happy and engaged team. Instead of juggling dozens of abstract leadership theories, focus on mastering a few simple, powerful disciplines.

• Listen to Understand, Not Just to Reply: In your one-on-ones, fight the urge to immediately solve problems. Instead, make your primary goal to truly understand your employee’s perspective. Ask clarifying questions like, “Tell me more about that,” or paraphrase what you heard: “So, if I’m hearing you right, the biggest challenge is…”. When people feel genuinely heard, it builds incredible levels of trust and psychological safety.
• Talk Straight to Build Trust: Ambiguity creates anxiety. Be clear and honest in your communication, especially when it’s hard. When setting expectations or giving feedback, use plain language and ditch the corporate jargon. Most importantly, always explain the “why” behind a task or a decision. Connecting daily work to a larger purpose is one of the most powerful motivators you have.
• Fuel Your Team by Investing in Their Growth: Ambitious people need to feel like they are progressing. Have open conversations about their career goals. Look for opportunities to give them projects that stretch their skills or delegate tasks that give them a chance to learn something new. Showing you are invested in their personal development proves you care about them as people, not just as resources to get work done.

Conclusion: The Disciplined Path to a Happier Team

Creating a happy, motivated, and high-performing team isn’t about personality or perks. It’s a deliberate act of leadership engineering. It requires having the discipline to simplify the systems your team works within and consistently demonstrating the behaviors that foster trust and purpose.

When you, the manager, commit to clearing away the fog of chaos and leading with clarity, you do more than improve performance—you create an environment where people can feel genuinely good about their work and their contribution. And that is the foundation of a truly happy team.

Author Bio: Greg Born is a leadership expert and business strategist dedicated to engineering operational excellence. A former U.S. Air Force C-5 Galaxy instructor pilot, he translates the discipline and high-stakes principles of aviation process management into practical, actionable frameworks for business leaders.

Over a multi-decade career, he has held executive roles at startups and Fortune 500 giants like Amazon, GE, and Oracle. He is the author of Built to Soar and Be A Better Leader. He can be reached at GregoryBorn.com.

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