Читать книгу The Power of Positive Leadership - Gordon Jon - Страница 5

It takes a lot of work to create a world-class organization. It's hard to develop a successful team. It's not easy to build a great culture. It's challenging to work toward a vision and create a positive future. It's difficult to change the world. As a leader, you will face all kinds of challenges, adversity, negativity, and tests. There will be times when it seems as if everything in the world is conspiring against you. There will be moments you'll want to give up. There will be days when your vision seems more like a fantasy than a reality. That's why positive leadership is so essential. When some people hear the term positive leadership they roll their eyes because they think I'm talking about Pollyanna positivity, where life is full of unicorns and rainbows. But the truth is that we are not positive because life is easy. We are positive because life can be hard. Positive leadership is not about fake positivity. It is the real stuff that makes great leaders great. Pessimists don't change the world. Critics write words but they don't write the future. Naysayers talk about problems but they don't solve them. Throughout history we see that it's the optimists, the believers, the dreamers, the doers, and the positive leaders who change the world. The future belongs to those who believe in it and have the belief, resilience, positivity, and optimism to overcome all the challenges in order to create it.

Research by Manju Puri and David Robinson, business professors at Duke University, shows that optimistic people work harder, get paid more, are elected to office more often, and win at sports more regularly.1 Research by psychologist Martin Seligman also shows that optimistic salespeople perform better than their pessimistic counterparts.2 And psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's research demonstrates that people who experience more positive emotions than negative ones are more likely to see the bigger picture, build relationships, and thrive in their work and career, whereas people who experience mostly negative emotions are more likely to have a narrower perspective and tend to focus more on problems.3 Daniel Goleman's research demonstrates that positive teams perform at higher levels than negative teams.4 John Gottman's pioneering research on relationships found that marriages are much more likely to succeed when the couple experiences a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions; when the ratio approaches a one-to-one ratio, marriages are more likely to end in divorce.5 Additional research also shows that workgroups with positive-to-negative interaction ratios greater than three to one are significantly more productive than teams that do not reach this ratio. Teams with more negative interactions are more likely to be stagnant and unproductive. The positive energy you share with your team is significant. According to Wayne Baker, the research he and Robert Cross conducted shows that “the more you energize people in your workplace, the higher your work performance.” Baker says that this occurs because people want to be around you. You attract talent and people are more likely to devote their discretionary time to your projects. They'll offer new ideas, information, and opportunities to you before others.

Baker adds that the opposite is also true. If you de-energize others, people won't go out of their way to work with or help you.6 Gallup estimates that negativity costs the economy $250–$300 billion a year and affects the morale, performance, and productivity of teams.

The research is clear. Positivity is about more than having a positive state of mind. It's also a life changer and gives people a competitive advantage in business, sports, and politics. While the pessimists are complaining about the future, the energy vampires are sabotaging it, and the realists are talking about it, the optimists are working hard with others to create it. Puri and Robinson's research shows that our attitude helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because optimists believe in a positive future, they actually delude themselves into working more to make it possible. Their belief makes them willing to take actions to achieve it. As a result, positive leaders invest their time and energy in driving a positive culture. They create and share the vision for the road ahead. They lead with optimism and belief and address and transform the negativity that too often sabotages teams and organizations. They take on the battle, overcome the negativity, face the adversity, and keep moving forward. They devote all their energy and effort to uniting and connecting their organization and invest in relationships that truly build great teams. They believe in their principles. They believe in their people. They believe in teamwork. They believe in the future. They believe in what's possible, so they act and do, connect and create, build and transform their team and organization – and change the world.

In the following chapters I'm going to take you through a simple, powerful model and framework you can utilize and implement to enhance your leadership capabilities and put your positive leadership into action.