Cutting-edge technologies, a more mobilized generation of employees, and the pandemic have significantly shaped various areas of our lives – including the world of working. Terms such as remote working, flexible working hours, or work-life balance are ubiquitous.
Currently, employees’ needs are paramount, but so too is the need for management to adapt to the adjusted status quo in order to dispel internal disharmony within organizations. After all, who will remain loyal to a company with a negative working atmosphere when there are a raft of bright, shiny, and new alternatives popping up daily?
In this article, we will show you how to use the concept of positive leadership to lead your company safely through difficult times, retain talent, and achieve outstanding results with your team.
What is positive leadership?
The term positive leadership was originally born from the results of various studies on brain research and positive psychology. Accordingly, purposeful, and positive actions should increase positive emotions in the team and lead to an excellent performance.
Kim Cameron is an American organizational psychologist with a PhD in management science at Yale University. Cameron revolutionized traditional patterns of thinking about leadership and is well known for his work on positive organizations. In his publication Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance, he identifies the three most important characteristics of positive leadership: First, it facilitates a performance that deviates strongly into the positive (“positively deviant performance”).
Furthermore, the method is based on an affirmative bias, i.e., a fundamentally more positive attitude, such as focusing on strengths instead of weaknesses, optimism instead of pessimism and support instead of harsh criticism (“affirmative bias”). Finally, Cameron stresses that the approach promotes goodness in human beings and values such as virtue and eudaemonism.
In their book “Zum Glück gibt’s Erfolg: Wie Positive Leadership zu Höchstleistung führt” (translation: Fortunately, there’s success: How positive leadership leads to high performance), the German authors Creusen and Eschemann state that positive leadership (among other factors) is based on the following attributes: self-efficacy, hope, goal achievement, resilience, and optimism. Self-efficacy, hope and goal achievement describe the faith in oneself, and the hope and motivation to achieve a goal. Resilient leaders guide their company and team successfully through crises and demonstrate excellent problem-solving skills.
It also focuses on authentic, values-based leadership. But these values should not only remain empty promises. Instead, they should be actively demonstrated and practiced. We are talking about values such as showing compassion, being honest, trust, inclusion, or providing a listening ear.
Mother nature as a positive role model?
Satisfied employees perform to satisfaction. Already in the 1930s, this realization was proven in the research work of Rexford B. Hersey.
In this hypothesis, he states that happy people are naturally more productive. The concept of positive leadership is based on the same principle and thus has some similarities to the biological phenomenon of the heliotropic effect. It describes the predisposition of all organisms to naturally turn in towards the light, or to say it in another way, towards the positive. Plants bend towards the sun, people recall good experiences for longer, and in any language in the world you will find more positive words than negative ones (Cameron). But where do the parallels to positive leadership lie? Managers who make use of positive energy achieve the same outcome. They operate as energizers, do not exhaust others, but rather infect with their enthusiasm. Studies show that improved well-being significantly increases the number of hormones such as dopamine and oxytocin in the human body and thus, strengthens immunity to diseases, which in turn increases productivity.
Therefore, the secret to a successful organization, with productive and motivated employees, is a high level of wellbeing for everyone.
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How to lead your team in a positive way
How can entrepreneurs create such a sense of wellbeing? There are various approaches and interpretations.
As an example, Cameron speaks of four underlying strategies in his book. According to this, the first thing to do is to create a positive atmosphere in the company by showing compassion and gratitude as well as forgiving mistakes (positive climate). In addition, team members should establish positive relationships by building a network, harmony, and integration, e.g., by having lunch together, coffee breaks, yoga, or excursions (positive relationships). Moreover, the organization needs to foster positive communication, e.g., by using best-self-feedback methods. The Best Self-Feedback method involves colleagues of an employee naming three positive impressions each, whereupon the most frequent ones are extracted from the list to form individual strengths. Finally, positive entrepreneurs need to think optimistically and find a positive meaning in everything, regardless of whether it is a setback or a mistake (positive meaning).
Other defenders of the positive leadership approach focus especially on personal development and on the resulting well-being and success of individuals. These include the elements of talent development, commitment, vision development, and the inclusion of every individual. To ensure that employees’ commitment to their tasks is at its highest, they should be in a state of workflow. This describes a situation in which the person is fully absorbed in his or her task, is maximally motivated and, at the same time, disregards time and space. But how does one reach such a state?
Csikszentmihalyi worked on this phenomenon already back in 1975: He referred to the individuality of people and explained that each task should be tailor-made for everyone. This is the only way for an individual to achieve maximum intrinsic motivation, which is necessary for optimal productivity. If the requirements of a task are too high or too low, it can easily result in over- or under-challenging and lead to a lack of motivation. It is therefore even more important to identify personal strengths and special skills of each employee. It is equally essential to establish a shared corporate vision and to clarify what extent everyone in the team can contribute to the achievement of this goal. To do this, a good leader must also be able to communicate new ideas in a transparent and effective way. It can be beneficial to divide large milestones into smaller intermediate goals: a rapid sense of achievement motivates! This will result in a more positive interaction as well as more successful results. Keep everybody’s motivation high by creating a correlation between a positive attitude and excellent performance.
What makes a positive leader?
Dolly Parton: “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a positive, energizing leader.”
Characteristics such as gratitude, humanity, empathy, or kindness are part of the basic equipment of a positive leader. In addition, it is fundamental that a leader makes themself more approachable in an appropriate context and reveals appropriate personal details about themself from time to time. This person is no longer a cold, unapproachable authority figure, but instead shows that they are a genuine and authentic personality, with both strengths and weaknesses. They have the same worries and challenges as other team members but do not allow them to influence their behavior or attitude. Rather, a positive leader actively demonstrates positivity and thus acts as a role model – which is particularly helpful in difficult times. Trust, steadiness, hope, or empathy are inspiring and attractive to others. An essential predictor for building trust in a leader is when they can be seen to be looking out for the individual’s best interests. Demonstrate personal interest and take time in your daily work routine for small gestures such as: “I’m listening to you,” “What can we do as a company to make you feel better?” Plus, “I’m pleased to take time for you,” or “We know that you’re doing your best.”
Positive leadership as a chance to grow beyond oneself
3 further particularly effective qualities of a positive leader:
- Provide trust to create a good environment for progress.
- Expect high standards of performance: help your employees to go one step beyond themselves, as this is the only way to realize their full potential.
- Activate “positive impulse generators” who can motivate other.
The key phrase is going above and beyond. This positive leadership style implies that employees are granted a certain degree of freedom and given a certain amount of trust. Although the supervisor should set framework data, such as deadlines, they should then provide the employees with the opportunity to express themselves. This does not imply abandoning the team; in fact, everything is being done to get the best out of everyone. Of course, it is important to intervene in case of a mistake and to give constructive criticism to the employees.
3 tips on how to successfully criticize
- Always remain friendly and respectful.
- Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. How would you like to be faced with criticism
- What’s done is done. Instead of insisting on what has already happened, help your employee to avoid similar mistakes in the future, work together on solutions, and transform weaknesses into strengths as a team.
It is just as important to give adequate recognition in the case of good performance. Give compliments to keep motivation high and make the team proud. Small tokens of appreciation, cheering each other on, or applauding together can work wonders. Crucially, start learning to say thank you more often.
(Un)justified criticism?
Critics oftentimes describe the positive leadership style as too soft, not goal-oriented, or naïve. But that is not true: even positive leaders must deliver negative news, dismiss employees, or face difficult or even dead-end situations. Being friendly is too often overlooked, especially in a daily rhythm of work, when everyone is stressed, busy with layoffs or new working technologies. It takes a lot of energy, concentration, stamina, and effort to lead a team successfully through highs and lows, while showing fairness and creating a feel-good atmosphere in the team. A positive leader does not turn a blind eye to pressure or to complex challenges, on the contrary, they just deal with them differently.
Conclusion
So, can one say that positive leadership outshines conventional leadership styles? One thing is for sure: this style of leadership makes companies better, more successful, and more resilient in the face of crises of all kinds. While conventional leadership methods are often designed to discover weaknesses or mistakes in employees, to take performance for granted and therefore suffer from frequent absenteeism and high turnover rates, positive leaders work with their heads and hearts – and the team feels that. Thus, organizations that maintain a value-oriented tone perform better than those that foster a profit-maximizing, authoritarian tone. The potential benefits for companies include innovation, higher productivity and quality, and greater competitiveness. And the employees also benefit from this as they feel more comfortable in their working environment, perform better, and are more committed to the team. A sustainable win-win situation for everyone.
