Positive leadership is more crucial than ever. With constant uncertainty and rapid changes—such as digital transformation, global competition, and shifting customer preferences—traditional business models are no longer sufficient. Organisations that succeed in this unpredictable environment must adapt quickly.
Leaders can no longer rely on old management methods. They must focus on developing their team’s social, emotional, and psychological skills. This approach ensures employees have the mindset, clarity, agility, freedom, and resilience needed to handle change and uncertainty.
Positive leadership is a transformative approach that extends beyond short-term profits. Specifically, it inspires teams to work together and achieve exceptional results. Moreover, it creates a lasting positive impact on stakeholders, including customers, shareholders, and local communities. This leadership style not only amplifies positive workplace behaviours but also fosters a growth mindset, optimises diverse talents and strengths, and cultivates a work culture where everyone can thrive, contribute their best, and grow.
To illustrate, positive leaders inspire with a clear and engaging purpose that goes beyond mere profit. They align people by building collaborative and connected teams. Furthermore, they empower individuals by fostering ownership and self-mastery. In addition, they enhance adaptation through a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
On the other hand, positive leadership is not about being overly optimistic or focusing solely on visible smiles at the expense of performance. These misconceptions overlook the true value of positive leadership. Instead, positive leaders are attuned to the full range of emotions within their teams. They encourage openness, candour, and mutual support, especially during stressful and challenging times. Furthermore, they act swiftly to address unhealthy conflict and underperformance issues that can undermine effective teamwork and business results.
Positive leaders aim to make a significant impact on their teams, shareholders, and society. They create future-ready organisations by:
Positive leadership is supported by a growing body of peer-reviewed research, demonstrating its significant impact on various business outcomes. Studies show it enhances engagement, reduces turnover, and improves performance. For instance:
Current leadership approaches and training programmes are falling short in preparing leaders for times of uncertainty and rapid change. In contrast, positive leadership has proven effective in creating great places to work and supporting long-term business success. Driven by a strong purpose, positive leaders create engaging environments where people can thrive and achieve their full potential. They foster empowered and future-fit workplaces, which unlock peak performance, learning, agility, and resilience.
Positive leaders aren’t short-term thinkers and players. They employ leadership practices and techniques aimed at making a lasting positive impact on employees, customers, and the planet. They accelerate transformation, innovation, and continuous learning, exhibiting remarkable stewardship by preparing the organisation to navigate both current challenges and those that lie ahead.
In summary, positive leadership is a powerful catalyst for navigating and thriving amid the rapid and unpredictable changes of today’s world. By developing positive leadership practices, leaders not only cultivate a thriving and motivated workforce but also drive their organisations toward sustainable success.
Team leaders all want their teams to perform better. Yet, in our swiftly changing work environment, traditional methods such as goal setting, feedback, and consistent employee and team check-ins often fail to meet performance improvement aspirations. Research from recent decades has shown that team leaders can dramatically improve performance, employee engagement, and wellbeing by emphasizing positive aspects and capitalizing on team members’ strengths—a finding corroborated by my own experiences with leaders across various levels, industries, and geographies. However, a significant challenge remains – determining the most effective strategies to cultivate a positive team environment. Here are five proven strategies that can fundamentally transform team performance and engagement:
Share successes
Start team meetings by inviting members to share their recent successes and the insights they’ve gained from progress toward their goals. This sets a positive tone and establishes a norm of celebrating progress and learning. When team members hear about the accomplishments of their peers and see them celebrated, it motivates them to strive harder for their own successes. Celebrating achievements can also enhance morale, confidence, and a strong sense of team unity. It creates moments of joy and pride that reinforce a sense of progress and a virtuous cycle of shared learning, motivation, and success. This enhances overall productivity, positivity and problem-solving in the workplace.
Amplify strengths
The best leaders excel at unlocking people’s potential, often helping them achieve what seemed impossible. This begins with fostering self-awareness of their natural talents and exploring ways to enhance and utilize these talents to meet their goals. Research, alongside our extensive experience, reveals that many individuals are unaware of their full potential, largely due to an emphasis on deficits and weaknesses in education, workplaces, and society. By employing a scientifically validated tool like TalentPredix, leaders can assist employees in identifying and maximizing their strengths. When leaders consistently highlight and nurture these talents, and empower individuals to leverage them, increases in productivity, retention, and motivation inevitably follow.
Promote deeper connections
Leaders can foster positive emotions such as happiness, fulfilment, fun, and a sense of belonging by promoting deeper connections and a strong team identity. This can be achieved by encouraging team members to collaborate on projects and tasks, allowing them to build trust and get to know each other better. Additionally, there are other straightforward yet impactful methods to enhance connections and foster positive emotions, including:
Acknowledge and recognize good work
Workplace recognition is one of the most underutilized performance tools among team leaders. Tailored recognition not only motivates employees and fosters positive progress, but also makes them feel appreciated for their contributions. According to Gallup, employees who feel underappreciated are twice as likely to consider quitting within the next year. Recognizing employees’ efforts and achievements doesn’t have to be expensive. Cost-effective methods include verbal praise, emails, or handwritten “thank you” cards; vouchers for meals, events, or online shopping; public acknowledgment through awards, certificates, or commendations; offering extra days off, like a long weekend; or assigning special projects that align with their interests.
Empower people and establish safe communication channels
Enabling people to make decisions about their work, ways of working and opportunities for improvement promotes a sense of ownership, creativity problem-solving and stronger morale. This leads to higher employee engagement, effort, and performance. However, to produce these positive results, empowerment must be accompanied by an open and safe environment, where people feel they can speak up, express concerns, and offer suggestions in a positive atmosphere without fear of negative repercussions or blowback.
When leaders commit to strategies that foster happiness and positive emotions, they significantly enhance commitment, collaboration, and productivity. Leaders who focus on positivity are more likely to develop highly motivated, peak-performing teams and attract and retain top talent. This creates a virtuous cycle of success, propelling teams to continually reach higher levels of performance. In today’s dynamic and challenging environment, positive leadership offers a substantial and lasting competitive advantage.
To find out more about our award-winning strengths-based leadership assessment, training, and development solutions, including our innovative Leading Strong Teams program, contact us at info@talentpredix.com.
In the fast-paced world of technology, leaders are often celebrated for their sharp intellect and business acumen. They skillfully navigate the complexities of products, markets, and emerging technologies. However, amidst this focus on technical prowess, a crucial element is often overlooked: the role of emotional and social intelligence in effective tech leadership.
We have collaborated with several forward-thinking tech companies, including Salesforce, Samsara, Xpedition, and SoftwareOne, that utilize progressive HR and talent practices. Yet, despite these efforts, many Tech businesses still face challenges in creating a genuinely human-centric work environment. Consequently, neglecting emotional and social intelligence can lead to severe consequences, such as high turnover rates, low morale, and damaged reputations. In recent years, numerous tech firms have faced allegations of toxic work cultures. This clearly underscores the urgent need for leaders to adopt emotional and social intelligence to improve workplace dynamics.
Emotional intelligence, at its core, is the ability to recognise, understand, and manage one’s own emotions. According to experts like Daniel Goleman, it includes key components such as self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, social skills, and empathy. These elements are crucial for building trust, navigating complex social dynamics, and fostering an inclusive environment. Therefore, understanding and developing emotional intelligence is essential for successful leadership.
While cognitive skills have traditionally been emphasised in talent acquisition and development, research consistently shows that emotional and social intelligence are equally vital for long-term success. Therefore, for tech leaders, integrating these dimensions into their leadership approach is not just advantageous but essential. Furthermore, effective leadership involves balancing technical expertise with emotional and social awareness.
In a landscape marked by rapid change and intense competition, true tech leadership extends beyond technical expertise. It involves cultivating emotional and social intelligence to create environments where innovation thrives, teams flourish, and businesses excel. By embracing these dimensions, tech leaders can effectively drive their organisations toward greater success.
For decades, knowledge and expertise have been revered as the cornerstone of success in business and society at large. Knowledgeable leaders and skilled knowledge workers were heralded as the architects of progress, with educational credentials and learned experience serving as badges of honour. Yet, as we navigate the landscape of the digital era, the traditional notion of knowledge as power is undergoing a seismic shift, with profound implications for leaders across industries.
While expertise remains a formidable source of influence, its dominance is being challenged by several emerging trends, each reshaping the complexion of leadership in the digital age:
Ubiquitous Access to Knowledge: The democratisation of knowledge is well underway, fuelled by the proliferation of digital platforms and the vast reservoir of information available online. Younger generations rely more on peer-to-peer networks and readily accessible online sources than on traditional authority figures for insights and information. The sharp rise in AI-enabled machines will only expedite the pace of this change.
Erosion of Trust in Established Wisdom: A growing scepticism towards established wisdom and expert opinion is pervasive, evidenced by the declining trust in expert advice and leaders in business and society. The declining influence of experts during the Brexit referendum and more recently, in the growing global climate emergency, are striking examples of this. Trust in authority figures and traditional sources of knowledge is waning, as individuals seek alternative sources of information and insight.
The Ascendancy of Insight: In the digital age, insight supplants knowledge as the currency of influence. Unlike knowledge, which is static and transactional, insight embodies a deeper understanding of dynamic contexts and the ability to extract meaning from data and collective wisdom. Powered by big data, social networks, and machine learning, insight transcends individual expertise, heralding a new era of collective intelligence.
Considering these transformative forces, leaders must adapt their approach to remain relevant and influential:
Champion Learning and Insight: Leaders often fall into the trap of overlying on their knowledge and expertise, the so-called “illusion of expertise” bias. This is very common among leaders and managers, especially those who are less experienced and have been promoted largely because of their technical expertise and skills. Rather, leaders must cultivate a culture of continuous learning and insight within and beyond their teams. By creating a “let’s figure this out together” collaborative problem-solving approach to complex challenges and problems and empowering teams to access diverse sources of information and creativity, leaders can accelerate the generation of actionable insights.
Embrace Digital Technologies: Embracing digital technologies and AI is imperative for leaders seeking to harness the power of intelligent insights. By leveraging breakthroughs in computing power and automation, organizations can unlock new avenues for collaboration, innovation, and delivery of new value to customers and society.
Cultivate Debate and Diversity of Thought: Effective decision-making hinges on diverse perspectives and open debate. Leaders must foster an environment where dissent is welcomed, and internal insights are valued as highly as established expertise. By nurturing a culture of openness and inclusivity, leaders can elevate problem-solving, innovation, and overall organizational performance.
In an era defined by rapid technological advancement and unprecedented access to information, leadership is no longer synonymous with expertise alone. By embracing human and digital insights and cultivating a culture of empowerment and continuous learning, leaders can navigate the complexities of the digital age with confidence and foresight.
Many leaders I meet have mixed feelings when they get to the top. Initially they feel excited, energized and confident about the challenges ahead. However, within weeks or months they end up feeling isolated, lonely and anxious in their new role. These feelings are sometimes compounded by what psychologists call the “impostor syndrome” which arises when people experience self-doubt and feelings of not being up to the demands of the job.
Leaders need to acknowledge and tackle these feelings before they undermine their effectiveness, but many don’t know where to start. Here are 4 steps leaders can take to combat doubts and fears arising from a move into a more senior role.
The biggest mistake leaders make is to think they’re the only ones who feel self-doubt or that it is associated with a flawed or weak character. This causes leaders to clam up and keep it a secret, hoping it will go away. However, openly discussing these feelings with others is the first step in combatting its effects on you and winning back control over these negative emotions. Although it is typically unwise to generalize behaviours across genders, my experience suggests that men are often less likely to open up easily about feelings they associate with weakness or vulnerability as this runs contrary to the “tough guy” mental model they’ve learned during their formative years.
The most effective leaders seek out assistance from a coach, mentor, trusted colleague and/or family member they can open up and be honest with. A good development partner will listen and provide non-judgemental support and advice, enabling you to boost your inner voice of possibility and silence your voices of self-doubt and criticism. It makes sense to have several of these champions and partners as they often play different and complementary roles and can contribute different insights and skills to help you.
One of the biggest pitfalls of leaders is to try to do everything themselves and to overlook the talents and ideas of their team and broader workforce. Many leaders become highly controlling and rarely delegate genuine responsibility to others. This overstretches them and results in heightened anxiety and self-doubt, creating a vicious spiral of declining mental capacity, well-being and confidence.
While leaders can often get away with using an autocratic style for a while, it is a poor choice to deal with most of today’s complex challenges as these benefit from open, honest conversations and participative problem-solving involving the full range of team members’ skills, ideas and experience.
The words that you use and beliefs you hold will influence the way you view the world and how you choose to interact with it. So, the more positive your beliefs and internal narrative, the more likely it is you will interact with people and problems more positively.
To build a more positive mindset, it is crucial you leverage your strengths, values and goals, as well as deliberately seeking out and highlighting what’s working well in your company and team.
By leveraging and accentuating these positive, enabling forces, you will be able to combat and silence some of the ‘gaps’ and negative forces, providing you with a greater sense of control and confidence over your environment. However, it is important to remember that there is no quick fix. By remaining focused and patient, you will begin to see the smaller changes snowball into bigger achievements and your feelings of confidence and strength will grow.
TalentPredix offers leadership transition and onboarding coaching solutions to help newly appointed executives adjust to the new role and responsibilities quickly so they can ramp up productivity and achieve excellent results. Contact us for more at info@talentpredix.com or visit our website.
Major changes like Covid, digital transformation and the growing environmental emergency are disrupting traditional business models and creating huge impetus for transformation and innovation. To succeed, today’s organizations need to be highly adaptive and constantly innovate to keep pace with disruptive forces and changing customer preferences.
Yet too many companies still stifle the ideas and creativity of their employees. They straitjacket people with directive leadership and rigid policies, processes, and procedures, smothering the voice and imagination of their people. The results are predictable. Motivation, teamwork, and innovation nosedive, followed by declines in customer loyalty and financial results.
To succeed and compete in this new era of disruption and innovation, organizations need to learn how to harness employees’ incredible creative potential, as innovation is a distinctly human endeavour. The world’s most innovative companies systematically devise ways to promote a culture of collaboration, creativity, and innovation. Here’s how you can do the same by putting these principles at the heart of your organization’s people strategy:
Creative and imaginative thinking involves intentionally expanding our thinking to find new and useful ideas and solutions to overcome problems, accelerate innovation and enable the organization to achieve its goals. Studies show that it is one of the most important competencies for leaders and teams to possess to be effective. In future, it is likely to become even more important because of growing rates of change and disruptive innovation. Just like emotional intelligence, it is also extremely difficult for AI and intelligent machines to perform creative problem-solving as effectively as humans.
But creative thinking is not natural for most employees, as it is not taught at school or even by most universities. Organizations seeking higher rates of innovation should therefore invest in training their staff in creative and collaborative thinking methods, ensuring people have the skills, tools, and techniques to unlock the power of cognitive diversity and people’s collective ideas. Through developing creative thinking skills like learner mindset, powerful questioning, reframing, divergent thinking and cognitive diversity, organizations will promote a culture that encourages curiosity, experimentation, and innovation.
At innovative companies like Google, LVMH, Apple, Unilever and Salesforce, employees are encouraged to express their individuality and apply their unique strengths, imagination, and know-how to achieve their own goals and those of the wider business. Employees in these companies are not expected to be well-rounded. They are empowered to optimize their strengths and work with diverse team members that complement them. By building highly inclusive and cognitively diverse teams, these companies unlock ideas, creative problem-solving and improved rates of innovation. They also become ‘talent magnets’ for the most talented people who seek organizations that provide opportunities for them to shape decisions and the future of the business.
Innovative organizations create opportunities for people from different parts of the business to connect and work together in mixed teams that span diverse functions and business areas. A growing number of innovative and dynamic businesses are organized into natural teams that assemble to deliver specific projects or products then disband once the project outcome or product is delivered. This way of organizing work is a natural evolution of the popular matrix structures found in many innovative organizations.
However, the big difference is that functional lines of reporting are looser or even non-existent. Work is organised by team leaders and highly empowered teams and people are assigned to teams based on their experience, performance track record, and strengths. Innovative organizations also promote informal and frequent connections among employees by enabling people to socialise and have fun together, both in physical and online environments. Enabling employees to spend such time together builds trust, improves collaboration, and accelerates knowledge flows. This provides more opportunities for employees to discuss and refine ideas, as well as a chance to share insights, and better practices.
Many organizations are now promoting psychological safety as a fundamental pillar or their people strategy. This is crucial as people need to feel they are in a safe and supportive environment that appreciates them and values their input and contribution.
However, there is another compelling business reason to pursue a culture where psychological safety becomes the norm. To succeed in today’s ever-changing environment, organizations are going to need to accelerate creative thinking and innovation. The only way to do this is to ensure everyone feels they can openly and honestly voice their ideas and opinions, no matter how controversial or challenging these are.
Employers often unintentionally cultivate risk averse and conservative cultures through centralising decision-making and stifling the creativity of people at lower levels in the organization. They create a fear culture by discouraging risk-taking, initiative, and direct challenge of top management. In innovative organizations like Gore, Meta and 3M, employees are actively encouraged to engage in creative problem-solving, hackathons and experiments to improve products, processes, and practices. Leaders in these companies recognise that tolerating mistakes is required to accelerate progress and achieve breakthrough innovation. They encourage and reward employees for coming up with great ideas to improve the business and its products, creating greater value for customers and other stakeholders. They also empower people to stretch themselves beyond their comfort zone and embrace curiosity, agility, and continuous learning.
Today’s organizations need to be able to adapt quickly and innovate in the face of fast-changing conditions. Leaders and teams who can anticipate, innovate, and adapt faster will enable the business to gain a clear competitive advantage over rivals. They will also be able to attract and retain the best talent, as the most talented people look for employers that value and leverage their ideas and full potential. By implementing these five principles organizations can accelerate creative thinking and unlock the extraordinary creative potential of their people.
Disengaged employees can be detrimental to productivity, employee engagement and overall output. Our previous blog covered signs managers should look out for in employees to help nip this problem in the bud.
Spot and prevent low motivation and engagement
Of course, the best way to ward off quiet quitting is for managers to check in on the motivation of their people on a regular basis. There are different ways of doing this, including careful observation of behaviour, emotions and energy shifts, engagement surveys and asking questions that uncover people’s motivation during regular check-ins and quarterly performance review meetings. Some of the questions managers can consider asking are as follows:
Once managers identify a disengaged employees they can explore the root cause of their low engagement in a one-on-one conversation.
Amplify strengths, successes and progress
Managers, like most of us, are conditioned to focus more on the negatives we see rather than the positives. This is what psychologists call the “negativity bias”. It is therefore important for managers to consciously learn to spot and magnify strengths, successes and progress, even small wins and shifts in effort.
By giving positive feedback and praise, managers will promote progress, excellence, and employee engagement. When people feel they are valued and their progress and achievements are recognized regularly by their manager, they are more likely to feel motivated and exert higher levels of discretionary effort (i.e., effort over and above the required level).
Conduct retention/stay interviews
Retention interviews are a powerful tool to improve employee experience, build trust, and nip problems in the bud. RotaCloud recommends that retention interviews should be kept relatively informal, held in private, and be consistent as much as possible across different team members. Keeping consistency might be difficult, as everyone has their own sentiments and feelings, but managers can keep a set of key questions or discussion points handy and let the conversation flow from there. This can be done in both in-person and remote or hybrid workplaces. Responses should be collated and kept on record somewhere in order to refer to eventually.
Demonstrate empathy
It is important that managers self-reflect and be empathetic above all else. Try to picture themselves in the position of their employees and see their realities to understand where they are coming from. Reflect on how they would react if they were put in their employees’ position? Additionally, consider the employees themselves and the value they have brought to the team, and their strengths and their talents and how these can be further supported to allow them to thrive.
Act on employee feedback
Taking this into consideration, it is now time for the manager to act on the feedback given from their employees. It may be revealed that employees are frustrated with a lack of progression and/or development opportunities available to them, then the manager should explore options in upskilling and/or career development for their people. In virtual teams, managers may find that some employees feel disconnected from the broader workforce. This last one might be common among the younger workforce, who are likely dealing with proportionately more “Zoom fatigue” from the pandemic. If this is the case, the leader should find more creative ways to foster connectivity or, if possible, try to organize in-person events to enable the employees to connect with each other more.
Lastly, it should be ensured that this feedback loop is not a one-off occurrence. A communication line has been opened, and it should be kept this way. The manager should devise a plan to regularly collect feedback, comments, and suggestions from their team, and be flexible enough and willing to find ways to act on suggestions being made. Data can be collected either through formal measures like sending out employee engagement surveys or more informal measures such as sitting down and having a conversation or booking regular one-on-one meetings. Gallup finds that the best practice is for managers to have meaningful 15–30-minute conversations once a week with each employee.
By actively listening to the needs and wants of their people, managers foster a work environment that is inclusive and supportive, which can help their team members feel valued, motivate them to perform at their best and thus address the issue of employee disengagement.
TalentPredix has the strengths-based tools, resources, and skills to engage employees to help you build a thriving place to work so your people can reach their full potential. Contact us today to learn more.
The attraction and retention of top senior talent have never been more important than in our current culture. Speaking at a Harvard Business Review Event, Michael D Watkins, said “Today we are in a world of transition – there is so much change going on… well-structured and delivered transition support halves the time required for leaders to become fully effective in their new roles.” This transient zeitgeist has only been reinforced by the Covid-19 global pandemic which gave many the opportunity to pause and re-assess the trajectory of their lives and careers, leading to ‘The Great Resignation’ peaking in the summer of 2021. With many people quitting their job – statistics from 2022 show that of a global sample surveyed, 40% of workers were considering leaving their jobs…[Download full version to read more]
Improve the effectiveness of your team leadership with this high-impact 12-week challenge. The challenge is designed specifically for team leaders and managers to deliver better results, motivation and teamwork.
Is it important to you to attract, retain and develop the talent in your organization? Are you spending this time and energy efficiently? This checklist will help you find out where the gaps may be for your organization in terms of talent management.
How does the checklist work?
Answer yes or no to all 24 questions divided over 2 different sections. Once you’ve checked all the boxes you can check your score by counting all “yeses” per category.
If you have a few too many “noes” you might want to pay some extra attention to our recommendations.