I saw the title and instantly clicked on it. It's a refreshing view on leadership. The best quote come right at the beginning: "We are chasing a mood and mood is not a realiable method of delivery". Very intriguing but frankly the rest of her talk is tedious and full of rambling without making more strong points. Would have preferred just a short blog post on her views. The things she said are valid and if you as a leader just rely on making the team happy you won't succeed. Still she doesn't provide any fool-proof solution except being more transparent. I didn't see the last third of the video, so maybe she provided more help then.

I think a big part of being a leader is to frame situtations always, really always in a positive way. Every event or incident can be seen in a negative, realistic but also in a positive way, eg seen as a new opportunity. Latter is much more motivating and eventually makes people happy. Also you as a leader want to be in a positive environment where people are happy, otherwise you end up just being a dull delegating robot degrading socially which is btw the biggest risk of being in executive positioms. So just ignoring this mood called happiness sounds a bit too simple for my taste. Leaderhship is way more complex. Especially in engineering where creatvity is the key you don't want people who just function you need people who can and want to go to the max--and this only works if they are motivated--or just call it--'happy'.

However, I still think she addressed an important point but I would tackle this from a different perspective: What you need as a leader are individuals which are happy by nature--or to be more precise who do not suffer of a severe depression. If you have depressive people on your team, you can't make them happy or motivated. They will always find something which doesn't work, which hinders them, which makes their entire life miserable. And not relying on making them happy, won't let them be productive neither. So, what's the point? Moreover, you risk that they infect the entire team with their negativity. How to identify or avoid having depressive people is a different question and even more challenging. And also important, you as a leader can trigger depression if you are not careful, so even if the claim 'team happiness can be the wrong thing to aim for' would be true, a leader should still aim for not making the team unhappy. And to go further the leader should aim for giving the team a perspective, a trending one. A persepctive which let them grow. Then they should be happy and again: maybe we still should aim for happiness and her talk title was just a click- or view-bait.