If your team is happy, are you doing a good job?

For those of you just catching up, Cat and I are having a dialogue about how teams are changing in the era of AI. Part 1: Where do AI norms and values come from? Where should people start?, by me.Part 2: How social identity is constructed, and how to defang the threat of identity loss, by Cat.At the end of Cat’s piece, she ended with a question for me and an observation of her own. She asked, “What gets us so stuck on believing we can’t have both high performance and good norms?”And observed: “It’s hard to get teams to open up, hard to get our companies to see the merit in this kind of practice, and hard to get people to see this as the hard cognitive science of problem-solving instead of soft, squishy feelings.”All of these, I believe, are related. If leaders think that “treating people well” means “nobody feels bad”, of course they assume it trades off against performance. If people associate learning with soft, squishy feelings instead of an uncomfortable growth process, they…