CHAPTER 1

WHY PRACTICEPOSITIVE LEADERSHIP?

The University of Michigan's Ross School of Business recentlyannounced a new strategic plan to guide businesseducation through the next decade and beyond.A key strategic pillar is an emphasis on the positive—positivebusiness, positive leadership, and making a positivedifference in the world.

Humana, one of the largest health insurance providersin the United States, recently changed its identityfrom being an insurance company to being a well-beingcompany. The primary objective is to create benefits foremployees and customers by implementing practicesbased on positive leadership and positive organizationalscholarship.

Toshi Harada, Director of International BusinessDevelopment at Hayes Lemmertz—the world's largestproducer of automobile wheels—equates positive leadershipwith Japanese manufacturing principles. "A signaturefeature of Japanese manufacturing philosophy is theelimination of waste. Negative leaders represent wasteand inefficiency," he suggests, "whereas positive leadershipproduces sustainable improvement."

Jim Mallozzi, former CEO of one of the PrudentialFinancial Services businesses, turned around the financialperf ormance in his organization by providing histop team "the latitude to experiment on being positivelydeviant leaders." Financial results changed in one yearfrom a $140 million loss to a $20 million profit throughapplying practices of positive leadership.

George Mason University has recently engaged in aninstitution-wide effort to become the world's first well-beinguniversity by, among other things, integrating positiveleadership practices throughout the entire system.Both top-down and bottom-up interventions are beinginitiated.

Producing extraordinarily high performance, generatingpositively deviant results, and creating remarkablevitality in the workplace are the primary objectivesof positive leadership. Positive leadership involves theimplementation of multiple positive practices that helpindividuals and organizations achieve their highestpotential, flourish at work, experience elevating energy,and reach levels of effectiveness difficult to attainotherwise. The practices included in this book can helpproduce such extraordinarily positive results.

Empirical research by recent scholars, as well as anecdotalevidence such as the examples described above,confirms that positive leadership practices produce resultsthat exceed normal or expected performance. Andwhile the evidence that positive leadership brings improvementin organizational productivity, profitability,quality, innovation, and customer loyalty might not beunexpected, many may be surprised to learn that thereis published evidence that this revolutionary approachto leading and managing produces benefits in terms ofindividual physiological health, emotional well-being,brain functioning, interpersonal relationships, and learningas well.

Lingering questions have been raised regarding positiveleadership, such as: Exactly how are these resultsachieved? What tools or techniques can managers implementto obtain positive results in their organizations?What specifically can leaders do to practice positiveleadership? This book will show you. It builds on andsupplements my previous book Positive Leadership.That earlier work provided evidence showing how fourpositive leadership strategies—t hat create a positiveclimate, positive relationships, positive communication,and positive meaning—can produce exceptionalresults.

Here I present specific practices and activities thatcan serve as guides for implementing those four positiveleadership strategies. As Figure 1 shows, each of the practices(in the box corners) interacts with more than one ofthe leadership strategies (in darker-colored ovals). Thefigure illustrates the relationships among the positiveleadership practices presented in this book and thefour strategies in the Positive Leadership book.

Throughout the book I will summarize empirical researchthat has established the validity of the practicesand discuss how real organizations have successfullyapplied them to produce positive results. Activities areprovided in each chapter so that you can immediatelyimplement the practices in your own organizations.

POSITIVE LEADERSHIP IS HELIOTROPIC

Practicing positive leadership is important because positivityis heliotropic. That is, all living systems have atendency to move toward positive energy and away fromnegative energy, or toward what is life-giving and awayfrom what is life-depleting. One form in which we experiencepositive energy in nature is sunlight. In humaninteractions, it often takes the form of interpersonalkindness and gratitude. Positive leadership practices engenderpositive energy and unlock resources in peoplebecause, like all biological systems, human beings possessinherent inclinations toward the positive.

You can see examples of the heliotropic effect inboth individuals and organizations. For instance, peopleare more accurate in processing positive information—whetherthe task involves verbal discrimination, organizationalbehavior, or judging emotion—than negativeinformation. People reported thinking about positivestatements 20 percent longer than negative statementsand almost 50 percent longer than neutralstatements, and positive information can be recalledmore easily and more accurately than negative information.People more effectively learn and remember positiveterms and events than neutral or negative ones: whenpresented with lists of positive, neutral, and negativewords, for example, people are more accurate in recallingthe positive, and the longer the delay between learningand recalling, the more positive bias is displayed. Managersare much more accurate in rating subordinates' competenciesand proficiencies when the subordinates performcorrectly than when they perform incorrectly.

We tend to seek out positive stimuli and avoid negativestimuli, as evidenced by people's judgments thatfrom two-thirds to three-quarters of the events in theirlives are...