Positive Leaders position their team to be most productive, and enjoy themselves more along the way.
Here are 10 action steps to become a more positive leader of a team. They include: deciding and committing, being thankful, creating a hopeful environment, being emotionally intelligent (and having emotional fortitude), giving positive recognition, being outwardly positive, encouraging employee strengths, cultivating circular communication, sharing vision of the greater good, and using positive resources.
More details on each step are below. But first…
Is Creating a Positive Environment Really Important?
In an article published by the APA entitled, “Speaking of Psychology: The Psychological Healthy Workplace”, Dr. David Ballard states that organizations fostering a healthy, positive work environment encourage “employee involvement, growth and development opportunities, health and safety initiatives, work-life balance and flexibility, employee recognition and then good effective two-way communication in an organization.”(3) He goes on to say that these types of endeavors are supportive, and ultimately result in positives for the team members, as well as the organization because it enables employees to become their best.
Even without a doctor saying so, it just makes sense that creating a positive workplace would yield better results with happier employees. So, how do we make that happen?
10 Steps to Become a More Positive Leader
1. Decide You Want to Be More Positive
Be convicted in this decision. Push away fear and self-doubt. These often lead to negative thoughts, which can lead to negative actions or words.
Set small goals toward being more positive. Small goals are achievable, and lead to changes in the way you approach things long-term.
2. Adopt an Attitude of Gratitude
To some, gratitude is the basis for everything good. At the very least, having an attitude of gratitude can help you start the day with appreciation, which can help the tone go in a positive direction. Make a conscious effort to start each day with thankfulness. This can be as easy as committing to saying something you appreciate on the way to work every day.
3. Foster an Environment of Hope
The opposite of hope is despair.
Negative leaders often tell. They can frequently send out the unspoken (or sometimes, spoken) message that “you’re not doing it well unless you do it my way.” Negative leaders frequently manage by intimidation. That squelches creativity and doesn’t permit individuals to flourish.
Leaders who foster an environment of hope know how powerful hope can be. It enables team members to consider possibilities. It promotes team members having dreams, and we all know how important having dreams can be.
4. Tap Into Emotional Intelligence and Fortitude
Emotional Intelligence means being aware of emotions, moods and total dispositions of yourself and those on your team. (Find out more about emotional intelligence in our post on how to manage emotional employees.)
Emotions sell. No matter how much you know about marketing, you only have to watch some tv commercials to know that emotions, in combination with a timely message, sell.
Yet, there is life outside of work, and it sometimes isn’t great. Be a caretaker of the positive momentum of the group; be careful not to let your own negative emotions caused by personal circumstances affect the spirits of those on the team. Same goes for the team. Be aware of the emotional temperature of the office.
Sigal Barsade, a professor at Wharton School of Management, has made public her idea of a thing called emotional contagion, which is particularly concerning during difficult times. She believes that people within a department susceptible to picking up on others’ moods and taking them on as their own – much like one might catch a virus. An example of this might be worry about possibilities that could affect the department in some way.(5)
Ensure that your department understands that positive and encouraging behavior is what’s expected, as it provides the best environment for satisfaction and is most productive. Conversely, ensure that employees know that negativity is unproductive and isn’t acceptable. If there are individual instances of negativity, having a conversation with the individual may help. (It may even be that YOU can help them with whatever is causing the bad feelings.)
Emotional fortitude involves your stewardship of your own emotions. Negative emotions are contagious and have negative effects. Ensure your own negative reactions come only after calculated thought.
5. Praise
Being a positive leader includes finding reasons to praise. There’s an important distinction here; “praise” here means positive recognition. It does not mean to“flatter,” which is considered to be insincere. Praise is authentic, and comes across that way to the recipient. Managers who aren’t accustomed to praising their team members, can easily fall into flattering their associates, instead which can undermine the whole purpose for the praise in the first place.
And while some employees may have more need for praise than others, praise—properly-place, well-intentioned, genuine positive recognition—can never be harmful. NOT providing proper recognition can.
According to statistics stated in an article published by Gallup entitled, “In Praise of Praising Your Employees,” employees who do not feel that they’ve been appropriately recognized at work are three times more likely to quite their job within the next year. Additionally, it notes that public acknowledgement and that coming from their direct manager is most meaningful. (6)
6. Be Outwardly Positive
Just as negativity can be contagious, so can positivity. Make a conscious effort to wear positiveness, whenever you can and still be authentic.
In a study conducted by Sarah Pressman and Tara Kraft, published by the Association for Psychological Science (1), they looked at the effect of smiling by an individual on their well-being, which of course, can then affect interactions.
They found that subjects who were made to smile (whether or not they knew they were smiling through the experiment), experienced both physiological and mental benefits due to keeping a positive facial expression throughout a period of induced stress.
Another study conducted by Pressman and S. Bowlin, they state that Positive Affect, or PA, directly impacts physiology of an individual. They go on to say that being positive “is beneficial because it results in better physical, behavioral, and social functioning on a day-to-day basis.”(2)
Wearing positivity doesn’t just mean facial expressions. It also has to do with body language. This seems simple: we’ve all seen the difference between closed posture and open posture. (An example of closed is crossed arms, standing versus open posture, sitting, or at least at the same level as others.) Even though it seems obvious, in the midst working through group dynamics, it can be difficult to remember that these things all help set the office tone.
7. Let Strengths Shine
We all know that individuals are just that – individual. Everyone has things that they are better at doing, and things that are weaknesses. Leaders who are molding a positive work environment, enable team members to let their strengths shine. This allows employees to feel good at things they do well, and the organization can then capitalize on their talents.
In a book entitled “Soar with Your Strengths,” the authors discuss a common desire in schools, businesses and even families to fix weaknesses and let the strengths take care of themselves. They quote a fairly-well known cartoon of a pig with the caption, “Do not try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.” The authors suggest that we do this in business all the time, expecting great results. Instead, they suggest zeroing in on strengths and managing the weaknesses.(7)
Marcus Buckingham, best-selling author and speaker at Wharton’s People Analytics Conference, is recognized for his beliefs in strength-based management, where instead of having to mitigate weaknesses, organizations embrace talents of individuals, recognize that they are strengths and encourage them to utilize them for their benefit, and those of the company. He says this way of managing doesn’t fight against who the individual really is. (4)
8. Foster Circular Communication
Communication is so important to leadership, that it’s already been discussed in several other posts here. But it warrants bringing up here, as well.
If asked, most managers would likely say that they are pretty good at communicating with their associates. At least, they might say that they’re not bad. Yet, research published by the Journal of Emerging Issues in Economics, Finance and Banking points to just the opposite. It states that managers surveyed reported spending 60%-80% of their time in some type of organizational communication, but only 17% of those surveyed said that their managers communicate effectively.(6)
This shows that communication of direction, ideas, passion – the words, the direction behind those words and the passion behind those words – is not happening in the most productive way.
In order to establish a positive work environment, leaders must clearly transfer all of this information from themselves (and from higher management) to their team. But to cultivate the most positive work environment, the manager needs to open to response communication.
Feedback is essential to knowing the climate of the group; a manager must be open to receiving it. They must be open to hearing it, processing it, and then doing something with it. This demonstrates to the team that they are valued, which of course is a positive outcome.
9. Check Your Character and Communicate Greater Good
Character, the mental and moral attributes that makes a person who they are, is determined by what a person says and what they do.
Most people want to make a difference—at home, at work, and in the world, in general. Make sure you understand what the greater good is in what you’re working on with your team, and then communicate or demonstrate that clearly. If you’re not sure, maybe it would make sense to open up that discussion to the team. At least that way, you encourage participation, and you then know they should have at least some buy-in.
Positive leaders are frequently viewed as people who have an moral interest in something bigger than what’s obvious, demonstrating character. Make the greater good obvious to your team.
10. Find and Use Positive Resources
This pertains to both yourself as an individual, and you with your team.
For yourself: devour positive resources. Find books, Podcasts our other audios, and conferences that you can consume or attend to improve your own perspective and help you with your skills.
Seek wise counsel. Find friends, advisors, church elders, etc. who can help shape you in a positive way.
For you and your team: Outsource some resources, whether books, audios, seminars, or speaker invitees. Your team will appreciate something different, respect your effort, and see that you’re committed to a positive work environment.
Great things can come from doing small things to become a more positive leader. Over time, small changes in direction can completely change trajectory… and can make it a lot more enjoyable along the way.
Think of the possibilities…
Sources:
(1)Pressman, S.D. & Kraft, T.L. (2012). Grin and bear it: The influence of manipulated positive facial expression on the stress response. Psychological Science, 23, 1372-1378.
(2) Pressman, S.D. & *Bowlin, S. (in press). Positive Affect: A pathway to better physical health. In J. Moskowitz & J. Gruber (Eds.). The Dark & Light Sides of Positive Emotion.
(3) APA
(4) Knowledge at Wharton What Helps Employees
(6) Gallup– Praise Praising Employees
(7) Clifton, D.O. & Nelson, P. (1992). Soar with your strengths. New York, NY: Delacorte Press, pp 9-18.