Team happiness is an important and oft-mentioned DesignOps metric, but we need to reframe how we think about it. No human* can “”make”” their team happy, and it’s folly to measure ourselves by that impossible standard. But what we _can_ do is create opportunities for our teams—opportunities to get weird, share freely, give feedback, encourage each other, and create their own team culture. And they get to choose whether and how they take advantage of those opportunities.
*If you are a literal kitten, you may indeed be able to *make* people happy just by existing.