Executive coaches and leadership consultants who encourage positive thinking often encounter cynical, hard-driving executives with a close eye on the bottom line.
But positivity coaches have come a long way since author Norman Vincent Peale preached his positive philosophy of faith and miracles. Today’s positive-psychology movement is founded on empirical evidence. Social scientists have documented the benefits of optimism, emotional intelligence and happiness in multiple work settings.
Positive leadership is no longer seen as a feel-good ideal with little bearing on business results. Mounting evidence reveals that leaders who focus on their people’s positive contributions, while concomitantly achieving tough goals through measurable tasks, enjoy higher performance outcomes.
While positive leadership is gaining traction among CEOs and executive teams, it’s often poorly understood and implemented. University of Michigan management professor Kim S. Cameron, PhD, offers a cogent definition of the term in his new book, Practicing Positive Leadership: Tools and Techniques That Create Extraordinary Results (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013):

“Positive leadership refers to the implementation of multiple positive practices that help individuals and organizations achieve their highest potential, flourish at work, experience elevating energy and achieve levels of effectiveness difficult to attain otherwise.”

Finding the Right Feedback Ratio

A wave of research reveals that “soft”-sounding positive management practices – including conversations focused on dreams, strengths and possibilities – motivate people to achieve higher performance levels. In fact, the more positive the message, the better the outcome.
But managers are charged with pointing out what’s not working and solving real problems – a mandate that presents a potentially frustrating leadership dilemma: How can you focus on the positive when continually required to make corrections?
Richard Boyatzis, PhD, a professor of organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, offers a pragmatic solution: “You need the negative focus to survive, but a positive one to thrive. You need both, but in the right ratio.”
Let’s quantify this ratio. Effective leaders should provide 3-5 positive messages for every negative message they deliver. Your communication must skew heavily toward the positive, without sounding incongruent or inauthentic. If you fail to “accentuate the positive” (to borrow a World War II-era song title), you remain stuck in negative feedback patterns that demotivate your staff.
Barbara L. Frederickson, PhD, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has found that positive feelings expand our awareness of a wider range of possibilities. Instead of looking at what needs to be fixed, we learn to focus on what’s right and needs to be reinforced. When we emphasize positive deeds, using positive language, achievement builds upon itself.
Dr. Frederickson’s psychology research shows that a positive focus bestows greater attentiveness, more flexible problem-solving, enhanced creativity and improved teamwork.

Organizational Positivity

You can identify companies that have implemented positive practices throughout history and compare their mission statements with those of their less successful counterparts.
Positivity clearly appears in mission statements that value societal contributions over the desire to be “No. 1”:
o Ford Motor Company: democratize the auto (1900s)
o Boeing: bring the world into the jet age (1950s)
o Sony: obliterate the image of poor-quality Japanese goods (1960s)
o Apple: one person, one computer (1980s)
Compare those mission statements with the following:
o GE: be No. 1 or 2 in every market we serve
o Walmart: become the first trillion-dollar company
o Philip Morris: knock off R.J. Reynolds as the No. 1 tobacco company
o Nike: crush Adidas
o Honda: destroy Yamaha
Improving your leadership positivity starts with your organization’s mission statement. Ask “why” you and your organization are here; then, ask yourself and your colleagues what you/they want on a deeper level:

• Which values merit coming to work each day to give your best?
• How will you inspire staff and customers to make contributions that benefit the world?

Begin to transform your team by attaching everything you say and do to higher goals and values. Leaders, managers and staff become more positive when they pay attention to the language they use. Rephrase statements in a more positive way, without sacrificing honesty or reality.
If you’re in a management position, everything you say – or don’t say – is magnified, making it even more important to boost your positive/negative ratio. Aim for a least a 3:1 (ideally, a 5:1) ratio of positive to negative statements. When you adopt this approach, others will follow suit.

Show Frequent Appreciation

Instead of seizing on what your people do wrong, start to verbally acknowledge what they’re doing right. Track and recognize progress. Most people perform better when they know they’re appreciated, even if it’s only for small wins.
This doesn’t mean you should suppress bad news. Instead, learn to deliver it in ways that are less likely to provoke defensiveness. Your execution will improve with practice. You’ll gain respect and better performance outcomes.

In Search of Best Practices

If we want to staff our organizations with executives who can deliver results and demonstrate superior social skills, we need to start identifying them during the hiring and promotion processes.
Results-oriented executives can learn to improve their social skills by retaining an experienced executive coach. Additionally, organizations can improve their effectiveness by:

1. Hiring for both technical and social skills
2. Training equally for social skills and technical savvy
3. Rewarding goal attainment and displays of social skill
4. Promoting those who demonstrate social prowess

CEOs and upper management must realize that rewarding achievement alone has its limits. Organizations must provide incentives for behaviors, even when people take risks and “fail up.”

It can be extremely difficult to express your personal values at work, especially when confronted with questions of right vs. wrong. Issues become thornier when you’re facing a choice between degrees of right vs. right.
While research reveals universal values across cultures, not everyone agrees on what makes a worthy business decision:

• Honest
• Respectful
• Responsible
• Fair
• Compassionate

Most of us want to bring our whole selves to work: our skills, ambitions and deeply held beliefs. We will inevitably encounter values conflicts during our careers, particularly when our goals and ideals clash with clients’, peers’, bosses’ and organizational expectations.
We have witnessed egregious managerial and financial misconduct during the first two decades of the 21st century. Employees at all levels assuredly observed ethical lapses, but found it hard to speak up and stop the foreseeable train wrecks. We can list plenty of examples, but none more outrageous than 2008’s financial implosions. Employees had to have known something was amiss, but they danced as long as the music played.
Past attempts at preparing business leaders to act ethically often failed – not because they couldn’t distinguish right from wrong, but because they didn’t know how to act on their values amid opposing pressures.
Many people believe blowing the whistle won’t do any good. And how can they effectively object without assuming personal risk?
Some of us also struggle with framing objections in a rational way, without assuming the role of “morals police.” We simply lack practice in holding values-based discussions.

Giving Voice to Values

In Giving Voice to Values: How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right (Yale University Press, 2010), management expert Mary C. Gentile, PhD, asserts that being aware of ethical issues and analyzing one’s options may be insufficient in today’s complex work environment. Most of us fail to take appropriate values-based actions:

1. Developing scripts for responding to the “reasons and rationalizations” others give for questionable practices
2. Developing alternative action plans to questionable strategies
3. Practicing how to deliver said scripts and action plans without invoking others’ defensiveness

We must confidently flex our moral muscles and habitually speak up to be true to our values. But when a boss wants to alter a financial report, a sales team misrepresents a product or you witness workplace discrimination, you’ll be faced with several key challenges:

• What should you say?
• To whom should you say it?
• When you craft a viable alternative, how can you summon the courage to act on your convictions?

Developing Effective Scripts

Answer the following questions when faced with a values conflict:

• Which action/decision do I believe is right?
• Will I encounter arguments against this course of action? (List them, and cite the reasons and rationalizations you’ll need to address.)
• What’s at stake for the key parties (including those who disagree with me)? What’s at stake for me?
• What are the most powerful and persuasive responses to others’ reasons and rationalizations? To whom, when and in what context should I make these arguments?

These questions are not about ethical analysis. They’re designed to help you understand the reasons and motivations – rational, emotional, organizational, personal, ethical, unethical – that guide one’s behavior and choices.
Also consider the following when seeking alternative solutions to questionable decisions:

• Long- and short-term thinking/goals
• Your organization’s broader purpose (not just the immediate conflict)
• The assumed definition of “competitive advantage”
• How you can be an agent of continuous improvement and actionable alternatives vs. the complaint department/morality police
• Slippery slopes that can become future ethical cliffs
• How the “game metaphor” affects business culture and decision-making (“It’s just how the game is played”)
• The costs to each affected party (and how to mitigate them to make your argument more appealing)
• Whether your target audience is pragmatic (vs. idealistic or opportunistic) – and how you can help them find ways to do the right thing

As you assess the personal risks you’ll take when going against a leader or the group consensus, be sure to weigh the costs of not speaking up.

Preserve Rationality

When a situation impinges on our deepest values, we often leap to a place of righteousness and passion. While it’s tempting to appeal to morality and ethics, you’ll likely be more persuasive and constructive if your appeal is simpler and less emotional.
Develop alternative actions, and present your case calmly and rationally. Don’t remain silent when you care about an issue. Embrace the courage that comes from having a strategy grounded in reality and reason.
We have a choice to speak up when faced with questionable actions – one that becomes more easily accessible when we practice giving voice to our values.

“Many leaders point to their childhoods as the source of important ideas and values, and the time when they began to develop emotional energy and edge.”
– Noel M. Tichy, The Leadership Engine

Life is full of daily lessons. We interpret experiences; tag them as good, bad or neutral; file them into memory (or not); and create stories about ourselves.
Our stories are, in fact, quite loosely “based on a true story,” as the tagline boasts in movies and books. It’s not about what actually happened, but how we remember and form the story that joins our library of experiences. As Gail Sheehy notes in New Passages:
“The mind is formed to an astonishing degree by the act of inventing and censoring ourselves. We create our own plot line. And that plot line soon turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Psychologists have found that the way we tell our stories becomes habitual. Our perceptions of ourselves and others dictate how our stories define, defend and justify our actions and identity.
If you want to improve your self-awareness, start by examining your life stories. Deep psychoanalysis is not required! You can begin with some writing exercises or work with a trusted friend, mentor or coach.

The Past Is a Map to the Future

Each of us has values and assumptions about the way the world operates. We believe people are generous or selfish, friendly or competitive, in control of their destiny or victims of circumstance.
These views are formed in early childhood as responses to past experiences. We seldom recognize the origins of these beliefs and rarely take time to examine them.
Successful people continually explore their assumptions and beliefs. They trace their prejudices back to childhood sources. They’re willing to learn from their experiences and shift their worldviews. They know that what they remember isn’t always the truth, but the story they formed at the time.
People who want to succeed in life are willing to consciously examine and question their stories. They use their past as a prologue to their future selves. They re-frame their stories to learn from the past.

The Formative Years

If you want to harvest your life stories for the experiences and lessons that shape you today, you need to examine your childhood: the formative period, when everything was new and carried a powerful impact.
As children, our brains are only partially developed, but our early interpretations of events and people form beliefs that we carry into adulthood. We start to create a self-identity, but it’s also a time when we heavily rely on authority figures’ interpretations of events.
As an adult, you have an opportunity to explore your childhood by reexamining the lessons you learned and the stories you tell.

Writing Exercise

While reviewing the past may seem like an overwhelming task, it’s easier when you break it down into childhood memories that had the greatest impact:

• Home life
• School
• Play (sports and hobbies)
• Events (illnesses, accidents, awards, divorce)
• People (parents, siblings, friends, other family members)
• Break each of the above areas into three sections:

Facts: Write down simple descriptions of places, events and the significant people in your life.
Memories: For each fact, write down how you felt and what was important to you.
Stories: What story did you construct at the time? What did you tell yourself? Looking back, what lessons did you learn? How did these experiences shape who you are today?
Review your most powerful stories, both positive and negative. How can you retrospectively reframe a story so it becomes useful and character-enhancing?

How Personality Is Formed

One psychologist has defined personality as the “strategy people develop for getting out of childhood alive.” Rarely is our childhood a matter of life and death, but for many of us it certainly felt that way at the time.
Leaving our protective home environment for school can be frightening. There are certainly magical childhood moments, but we forget what emotional savages children can be. Children do and say cruel things to each other. As distressing as that can be, most of us manage to bury those memories – or, at least, we think we do.
School is the place where we learn to share, fit in and avoid ridicule. We begin to form opinions about our identities, intelligence and social abilities. When we enter the workplace, our stories are rekindled.

Your Childhood Revisited

We revisit our early school years as soon as we walk into the workplace. We become “the new kid.” We subconsciously play old tapes in our mind.
With each job we accept, position we hold and responsibility we fulfill, we operate from a template formed by past experiences. How you respond today is heavily influenced by prior experiences – particularly your first school days and initial workplace events.
Self-development requires examination, awareness and the ability to reframe our stories as a solid foundation for character and values.

“Teamwork remains the one sustainable competitive advantage that has been largely untapped.”

– Patrick Lencioni, Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2005)
Corporations increasingly organize workforces into teams, a practice that gained popularity in the ’90s. By 2000, roughly half of all U.S. organizations used the team approach; today, virtually all do.
A recent survey found that 91 percent of high-level managers believe teams are the key to success. But the evidence doesn’t always support this assertion. Many teamwork-related problems actually inhibit performance and go undetected.
While leadership and management styles have been evolving from autocratic to more participatory, the blurring of hierarchies and sharing of responsibilities have created other performance problems.
There are several barriers to achieving great work from teams:

• Some individuals are faster (or better) on key tasks.
• Developing and maintaining teams can prove costly and time-consuming.
• Some individuals do less work, relying on others to complete assigned tasks.

Team members aren’t always clear about roles and responsibilities, and members sometimes avoid debate and conflict in favor of consensus. Pressures to perform drive people toward safe solutions that are justifiable, rather than innovative.
Despite these potential pitfalls, effective teams benefit from combined talent and experience, more diverse resources and greater operating flexibility. Research in the last decade demonstrates the superiority of group decision-making over even the brightest individual’s singular contributions.
The exception to this rule occurs when a group lacks harmony or the ability to cooperate. Decision-making quality and speed then suffer.
Beyond perfunctory team-building training sessions, what’s needed for teams to perform optimally? How can they evolve into resourceful, high-performing units?

Defining Your Team

Consultants Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith provide a solid definition of “team” in The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (HarperBusiness, 2006):
“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and an approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”
Teams can be composed of 3 to 20+ members, but there’s often an ideal number: around 10-12, depending on the nature of the project. They can, and should, be diverse to benefit from multiple perspectives, skills and knowledge.
Management professors Vanessa Urch Druskat, PhD, and Steven B. Wolff, PhD, identify three conditions essential to group effectiveness in “Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups” (Harvard Business Review, March 2001):
1. Trust among members
2. A sense of group identity
3. A sense of group efficacy
When working well, teams have definite advantages:

• Improved information-sharing
• Better decisions, products and services
• Higher employee motivation and engagement

What separates the good from the mediocre? What makes a team great?
Building Your Team
When a team first forms, members should identify their common goals and purpose. They can formalize their mission in a meeting that identifies these basic organizational issues:

1. Core purpose
2. Core values
3. Business definition
4. Strategy
5. Goals
6. Roles and responsibilities

Team members must have a shared understanding of the business before they define their purpose. Without this foundation, group cohesiveness is more difficult to achieve.
Next, team members should list what they intend to achieve as a group. This goal should be qualitative rather than quantitative.

Thematic Goals

Lencioni advises team members to identify a ‘thematic goal’ that answers the following question:
“What is the single most important goal that we must achieve during this period if we are to consider ourselves successful?”
Examples of thematic goals include:

• Improve customer satisfaction.
• Control expenses.
• Increase market awareness.
• Launch a new product.
• Strengthen the team.
• Rebuild the infrastructure.
• Grow market share.

Choosing a thematic goal doesn’t mean that other goals are ignored. A thematic goal ensures that every team member emphasizes a core priority, thereby creating team alignment, minimizing paralysis and frustration, and avoiding a collective silo mentality (i.e., hoarding information).

Putting the ‘TEAM’ in Teams

Effective teams excel in the following functional areas:
T = Trust (shared vulnerability and empathy)
E = Engagement (shared goals, commitment and debate)
A = Accountability (personal and peer-to-peer conversations)
M = Metrics (focus on the right measurements for the right results)

Trust

Nothing is more important to team success than a solid foundation of trust. Unfortunately, this can be hard to achieve. People are dedicated to self-preservation, often at others’ expense.
“When it comes to teams, trust is all about vulnerability,” Lencioni notes. “Team members who trust one another learn to be comfortable being open, even exposed, to one another around their failures, weaknesses, even fears.”
Trusting relationships form the foundation for forgiveness and acceptance. Authenticity depends on members’ willingness to admit weaknesses and mistakes. Trust cannot exist if team members are afraid to say:

• “I could be wrong.”
• “I messed up.”
• “I’m not sure.”
• “I need some help here.”
• “I’m sorry.”

Team-building sessions are the glue that holds the group together when the going gets rough. Trust is established when one team member shows a willingness to be vulnerable and takes personal accountability.
Managers can also build trust by sharing personality assessments and profiles (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or DISC assessment). When team members learn how different personalities deal with tasks and relationships, they can be more understanding and accepting. Ask your coach, team leader or HR department to conduct one of the common assessments to shed insights into members’ personalities.

Engagement

Think of engagement along a continuum. On one end there’s complete apathy, disengagement and perhaps even sabotage (the ultimate form of negativity). On the other end there’s total engagement (unbridled enthusiasm and passion).
Engagement requires team members to be open to debate and willing to discuss the issues and tasks that matter most. Members who succumb to apathy and disengagement often don’t feel safe enough to speak up. Lencioni cites this desire to avoid conflict as one of the most pervasive team dysfunctions. Others include:

• Lack of trust
• Lack of commitment
• Avoidance of accountability
• Inattention to results

When trust has been established, team members can safely argue about issues and decisions that are critical to success. They’re comfortable disagreeing with each other, challenging perspectives and questioning premises in an effort to find the best answers. They’re willing to consider all opinions and possibilities to arrive at sound decisions.
Active debate means team members can achieve a consensus (not necessarily unanimous) and commit to action steps.
“If team members are never pushing one another outside of their emotional comfort zones, then it is extremely likely that they’re not making the best decisions for the organization,” Lencioni notes.

Accountability

Team members who commit to decisions and performance standards aren’t afraid to hold one another accountable. In fact, they invite suggestions that help each member stay on task. Peer-to-peer accountability conversations are essential to maintaining focus and monitoring progress.
Team members should agree on set phrases to remind each other of what matters most. They can help each other out by noticing distractions and steering efforts toward accomplishing thematic goals. Groups should be encouraged to ask key questions on a regular basis:

• Will (this issue) or (task) help us reach our goals?
• I notice ____ hasn’t been finished. What do you need to get it done?
• What resources are missing here?

Effective team members are quick to spot problems and are willing to speak up without assigning blame. They cooperatively seek solutions.

Metrics

Highly functional teams focus on group efforts and avoid seeking personal gains, fulfilling career aspirations and/or boosting individual egos. They use metrics to assess their achievements – be it a simple whiteboard or a sophisticated online tracking tool.
Success depends on monitoring progress and posting results for all members to see. Results should be updated regularly so any necessary adjustments can be made.
Teams should learn to provide positive feedback and recognition for progress – key motivators that renew energy and drive.

Identify Gaps

Assess your team by asking each member to answer two questions confidentially:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, how well are we working together as a team?
2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how well do we need to be working together as a team?

Calculate for each area of functioning in the TEAM acronym and discuss the results. According to research involving several hundred teams in multinational corporations, the average team member believes his/her team operates at a 5.8 level of effectiveness, but recognizes the need to be at an 8.7.
Discuss and explore performance gaps. Ask team members for ways to improve trust, engagement, accountability and metrics. After making a list, choose one behavioral change that everyone can agree to prioritize.
Set up a team score card to track and recognize progress for each element of effectiveness in the TEAM. Make team-building a regular part of your meetings.

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.” – Civil-rights activist Harriet Tubman

Over the last decade, self-help, coaching and leadership professionals have been placing greater emphasis on positivity and personal strengths. The goal is to help clients work with what they have and build on their inherent talents.
Large corporations like Wells Fargo, Intel, Best Buy, Toyota and Yahoo now require employees to take surveys that measure talents and strengths. Their CEOs recognize that company success depends on leveraging what already works instead of trying to fix what’s broken.
This approach is logical: You cannot learn how to ensure safety at a nuclear power plant by studying Russia’s Chernobyl disaster. You’re better off reviewing what a successful cleanup entails.

Measuring Your Strengths

Regardless of your job or industry, you can’t always do what you love. Your job description will include responsibilities that challenge you or try your patience.
You can, however, play to your strengths and approach tasks in ways that bring your best work to light.
First, you’ll need to identify your top three strengths, as well as your three greatest weaknesses. Several excellent books can walk you through the self-assessment process:
1. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton (Free Press, 2001)
2. StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath (Gallup Press, 2007)
3. Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to OutstandingPerformance by Marcus Buckingham (Free Press, 2007)
WorKuno.com also offers a free online strengths test:.
As the site notes: “It is hard for people to value and to know their strengths because they don’t see any value in doing an activity that is easy for them; they believe that everybody else can do it. When people realize that what they do easily is extremely hard and valuable for others, they normally will focus more deeply on improving their strengths, which ultimately affects their overall “performance”.

Gallup’s Research

“People have several times more potential for growth when they invest energy in developing their strengths instead of correcting their deficiencies.”~ Rath
The Gallup Organization identifies 34 distinct personal strengths after interviewing 1.7 million professionals over 40 years:
1. Achiever: constantly driven to accomplish tasks
2. Activator: sets things in motion
3. Adaptability: adept at accommodating changes in direction/plan
4. Analytical: requires data/proof to make sense of circumstances
5. Arranger: enjoys orchestrating many tasks/variables
6. Belief: strives to find ultimate meaning in everything he/she does
7. Command: embraces leadership positions without fearing confrontation
8. Communication: uses words to inspire action and education
9. Competition: thrives on comparison and competition
10. Connectedness: seeks to unite others through commonalities
11. Consistency: treats everyone the same to avoid unfair advantage
12. Context: reviews the past to make better decisions
13. Deliberative: proceeds with caution and a planned approach
14. Developer: sees others’ untapped potential
15. Discipline: makes sense of the world by imposing order
16. Empathy: in tune with others’ emotions
17. Focus: has a clear sense of direction
18. Futuristic: eyes the future to drive today’s success
19. Harmony: seeks to avoid conflict and achieve consensus
20. Ideation: sees underlying concepts that unite disparate ideas
21. Includer: instinctively works to include everyone
22. Individualization: draws upon individuals’ uniqueness to create successful teams
23. Input: constantly collects information/objects for future use
24. Intellection: enjoys thinking and thought-provoking conversation; can compress complex concepts into simplified models
25. Learner: constantly challenged; learns new skills/information to feel successful
26. Maximizer: takes people and projects from great to excellent
27. Positivity: injects levity into any situation
28. Relator: most comfortable with fewer, deeper relationships
29. Responsibility: always follows through on commitments
30. Restorative: thrives on solving difficult problems
31. Self-Assurance: stays true to beliefs; self-confident
32. Significance: wants others to see him/her as significant
33. Strategic: can see a clear direction in complex situations
34. Woo: can easily persuade

Four SIGNs of Strength

“Your strengths have an I-can’t-help-but quality to them. You can’t quite articulate why, but you find yourself drawn to certain activities repeatedly. Even though you may be just a little scared to do them, just a little nervous – ‘Maybe I’m not good enough, maybe I’ll fail’ – you nonetheless feel a pull toward them.”
– Buckingham, Go Put Your Strengths to Work
Buckingham identifies four key SIGNs of a strength:
o S = Success. You succeed at activities in which you’re strong.
o I = Instinct. You instinctively know how to accomplish a task.
o G = Growth. You grow each time you perform a strength.
o N = Need. You feel a need to be involved in an activity.
Clarify and confirm your strengths by examining the conditions that make an activity particularly engaging:
1. Does it matter why I’m doing this?
2. Does it matter for whom I do this?
3. Does it matter when I do this?
4. Does it matter what this activity entails?
Perhaps public speaking is one of your strengths – but only when it involves large groups, on a topic you know well, with the goal of closing a sale or entertaining your audience.
Once you clearly identify your strengths, you’ll be better equipped to design the work you love and set the stage for excellence. If, however, you’re struggling to pinpoint your strengths, work with an experienced coach to gain important insights.