The Leader Who Loved Like Santa Claus – How I learned to protect team culture without burning out

There was a time when appreciation was my default operating system.

I would wrap a Christmas present for every single person on my team.
Handwritten cards. Personal words. Small details that said: I see you. I know what you carried this year.

And I meant every word.

Then my career grew.

Suddenly it wasn’t 8 people. It was 20. Then 50.
And alongside my team, there were clients. Stakeholders. Leadership peers. Family. Friends.

At some point I looked at my December and realized: I had turned into a full-time Santa Claus.

And what crushed my heart wasn’t the workload.
It was the fear of losing what I knew was a success factor:

A team culture where people genuinely feel seen.
Not as “resources.” Not as “delivery capacity.”
But as humans – with effort, stress, courage, humor, and stories.

I knew I couldn’t keep doing everything with the same intensity.

But I also refused to let appreciation become a nice-to-have.

The leadership trap nobody warns you about

Here’s the quiet trap that comes with progression:

The more senior you get, the more your calendar gets colonized by numbers.

KPIs. Headcount. Forecasts. Decisions. Performance. Risk. Steering.
All necessary. All important.

And yet – if you let those things eat the entire calendar, something subtle happens:

You still deliver.
But your culture starts to erode.

Not dramatically. Not overnight.

Just… slowly.

Because culture doesn’t survive on good intentions.
Culture survives on scheduled moments.

The question that changed everything

I asked myself a brutally honest question:

“What part of this do I actually need to personally do?”

I thought the answer was: all of it.
Because if I didn’t do it, the heart would be gone.

But that was my ego disguised as love.

The heart doesn’t disappear when you delegate.
The heart disappears when you stop making it structurally possible.

That’s when I created a role that changed my leadership:
Chief Happiness Officer (CHO).

The Chief Happiness Officer principle

In every larger team I lead, I appoint someone with the same heartbeat:

A person who genuinely wants to bring people together.
Someone who loves connection, celebration, shared memories.

And I give them three things:

1. The mandate (“This matters. This is leadership work.”)
2. The budget (because culture without resources becomes charity)
3. The timing (because culture without calendar space becomes a wish)

Then I ask them to build a small “culture crew” around them.

Not a big bureaucracy. Just a few people who care.

And together they plan three to four months ahead:

• dinner dates
• adventures
• small rituals
• postcards
• celebrations
• “we made it” moments

Not because we want to over-organize joy.
But because in adult life – if it’s not in the calendar, it doesn’t exist.

What my team taught me

I once asked team members:

“What did you like most about the last years together?”

They didn’t list the deliverables.
They didn’t talk about the tool rollout.

They said:

• “We had dinners.”
• “We went on adventures.”
• “It was memorable.”
• “I made friends. Real friends.”
• “Even if this project ends, those people stay in my life.”

And then I asked the deeper question:

“When did that happen?”

Their answer was almost annoyingly simple:

“It happened when we had those moments.”

Exactly.

And you only have those moments when someone put them in the calendar early enough.

The real mindset shift: time horizon

Most leaders plan culture in the wrong time frame.

They wait until the calendar is full, the pressure is high, and then they think:
“I can’t do a team dinner right now.”

But team moments don’t get planned in the week you need them.
They get planned three months before you need them.

That’s the trick.

When leaders tell me, “My calendar is too full,” I often think:

You’re not too busy.
You’re too late.

Culture doesn’t ask for intensity.
Culture asks for lead time.

Planning ahead is not controlling—it’s protecting

Some leaders resist planning because they want moments to be spontaneous.

I get it.

But here’s what I learned:

You don’t schedule connection.
You schedule the room in which connection can happen.

You provide:

• the idea
• the budget
• the timing

Then you let go.

You trust that when people sit together, connection will do what connection does.

A concrete example: the memory book

At the end of a program, we created a book with photos from the past 2.5 years.

It took a full year to collect the pictures, curate them, design it, coordinate it.

No single leader can “do that quickly in December.”

But a small culture crew, working on it here and there – one spare hour at a time – can.

And by the time the final party came, we didn’t scramble.

We celebrated.

We handed over something that said:
This mattered. You mattered. We remember.

What I believe now

If you want a culture where people feel seen, you have to treat it like a deliverable.

Not in the cold, mechanical sense.

But in the structural sense:

What gets scheduled gets lived.
What gets planned gets protected.
What gets delegated gets sustained.

And the most beautiful part?

When you plan ahead, you stop being stressed about appreciation—
and you start being present in it.

You don’t arrive as a tired organizer.

You arrive as a leader who can actually enjoy her team.

The takeaway

If you want to shape a culture of connection, do this:

Put the moment in the calendar first.
At least three months ahead.
Then trust your people to bring it to life.

Because leadership isn’t only what you decide.
It’s what you make possible.