Still reflecting on yesterday’s engaging conversation with Christian Hunt  who invited me to record an episode of his Human Risk Podcast The Human Risk Podcast. We discussed how leaders should deal with the fact that people and their behavior are the key to an organization’s success but are also a risk factor to a its integrity and reputation. It is the ingenuity of people that lead to an organizations’ success and it’s sloppiness, dishonesty, or greed of one employee to bring disaster over an otherwise healthy firm. 

For leaders this creates a dilemma. Stanford professor Jamil Zaki gave an illustrative example of it in a recent HBR podcast. He described the story of a new Boston Fire Chief who was appointed in 2001. When looking at his department he realized that his fire fighters took a disproportionate number of sick days on Fridays and Mondays. He concluded that his fire fighters were exploiting the department’s generosity. So, he introduced a limit of 15 sick days max. per year. Where employees would go beyond that number without a doctor’s note their pay would be severely cut. This move had unintended consequences. In the year after the introduction of the policy the number of sick days across the department more than doubled, from 6’000 the year before to 13’000! The fire fighters were given the message that they were not trusted – and they retaliated. 

People are greatly affected by the way we treat them. If leaders go in with the cynical assumption that their people are selfish, greedy, and dishonest by nature, this has toxic effects on the culture and performance of a company. It leads to disengagement and stifles productivity. However, we also know that people do bad stuff and boards and regulators make sure that leaders can’t be naïve and look in the other direction.  

So, what should leaders do? They should apply a fundamentally positive leadership approach which assumes that most people want to give their best and will return trust with trustworthiness. Research shows that this works and is the key to an engaged, creative, and diligent workforce in a healthy and productive organization. However, positive leadership also needs to stay rooted in reality. While cynicism is destructive, a healthy level of skepticism protects organizations from the risks that come with blind trust. Human beings are not perfect and there will always be those who breach the rules. To catch the few, however, is much easier in a trusting culture. Trust creates psychological safety for every person in a team. Safety enables people to speak up when someone takes the wrong turn and policies and rules are being breached.  

Leaders have no choice than to make the leap of faith even if sometimes they get disappointed. Positive leadership trumps cynicism. 

Whether directly through personal interaction or indirectly through their decisions, leaders shape the quality of a workplace. Siegfried Hoenle describes how leaders can act to boost employee engagement.

Considering research results across organisations worldwide, leaders do not seem to deliver on engagement. The levels of disengagement are high, harming the productivity and creativity of the workforce. What can leaders do differently to address this alarming state?

Positive psychology – a new pair of lenses

Unfortunately, leadership cannot be “fixed” by applying a new technique. No programme, policy or project will do the trick. What leaders need is a new set of lenses through which to look at leadership – and re-wire it. Positive psychology offers that new set of lenses. The research in this field searches for the keys to human flourishing. The aim is to find out what ingredients a life requires in order to be rich and fulfilled. Martin Seligman, one of the founding fathers of positive psychology, has found two concepts central to it:

Strengths are underlying personal qualities that energise us, contribute to our growth and lead to peak performance. When we tap into these sources of energy, we can reach full immersion in our task at hand, a state Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “Flow”.

Meaning is what gives purpose to our existence and to what we do. We gain happiness from our actions when they are based on choices that make sense to us. Many definitions of employee engagement include energy and meaning. Accordingly, employees are engaged when they are energised by work and show a genuine willingness to go the extra mile.

What does this mean for leadership? To boost their employees’ engagement, leaders have to help their people play to their strengths and find purpose at work. Positive leaders drill for strengths and make meaning.

Drilling for strengths – mining for passion and energy

Positive leaders look for strengths instead of relentlessly focusing on deficits and gaps. They help employees leverage their passions and perform at their peak. In practice, they take three steps (remember these steps with the acronym ACT: Assess, Challenge & Support, Team Design):

1. Assess

Positive leaders are curious about the people they work with. They care about more than skills, knowledge and professional experience. They believe that energy trumps everything else; they want to understand what makes their followers tick. Where employees have a passion is where they have the largest potential to perform, learn and grow. Positive leaders know that positive energy unlocks human potential and, therefore, engagement at work.

2. Challenge and support

Positive leaders challenge their followers to work in their areas of energy. They do not merely fill “gaps” revealed by a competency model. They help their followers maximise the advantages of their strengths. They challenge employees in two ways: first, to use their strengths to tackle problems they have not tackled before; and second, to achieve true mastery in their areas of strengths. Along the way, in addition to the challenge, they coach them, providing support.

3. Team design

Positive leaders recognise that beyond leveraging individuals’ strengths, they need to leverage team strengths. Team strengths depend on how each team member’s strengths interact with other team members’ strengths. This interaction influences how well the team performs as a group. Positive leaders leverage the full diversity in their teams. They ask questions like:

• Do we have a critical mass of individuals in our development team who are courageous enough to go against the grain?

• Is our production team sufficiently passionate about the critical detail?

• Do the strategic thinkers in our management team hear the single voice of pragmatism?

Making meaning – if not the leader, then who?

Especially in large corporations, employees often perceive their work as “meaningless”. Opaque decision making, political agendas, a fragmented value chain, bureaucracy – all these devalue what employees perceive as the actual, often-invigorating purpose of work. Consequently, positive leaders need to offer meaning to their followers – no one else will! There are various sources of meaning; here, we focus on four that are particularly relevant to the workplace:

Personal values

At work, people want to uphold their values. Workplaces that subtly require employees to compromise their basic moral standards destroy their identification with work and employer. Often, such organisations have a dysfunctional culture that can open the door to misconduct or even criminal behaviour. Leaders who evince clear values in their words and actions help employees connect with their work and experience a sense of purpose.

Community

Since the early days of evolution, human beings have been hyper-social animals. The group we belong to gives us the safety we miss when we are on our own. The members of a cohesive community have each other’s backs; they are there when an individual needs help. The good of the group takes priority over selfish motives because it promises future benefits to the individual. Being part of a group makes sense. Research conducted by Gallup shows that people who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged. Positive leaders know this. They emphasise the team over individuals, reducing internal competition for the benefit of mutual support and collaboration.

Positive impact on others

Giving makes us happier than receiving. Seeing the positive impact we make on somebody else’s life gives our actions meaning. Adam Grant’s research at Wharton Business School in the USunderlined this impressively. He conducted a series of experiments with university call centres, which are tasked with raising scholarship funds. He looked at different ways to motivate the call centre agents. In one trial he brought in a student who personally thanked the entire group of agents for changing his life by raising the funds for his scholarship. In the following month, the call centre employees up to doubled their calls and increased their revenues by up to 400%. Positive leaders work with this powerful source of meaning. They enable their followers to feel helpful to others, be it clients, colleagues or the general public.

Leaving a mark

Meaning is about having an impact on the world that transcends our own short existence. We want to be part of something that still influences the world when we are no longer here. We want a glimpse of immortality; we care about how we will be remembered. Positive leaders know this and they help their followers to feel significant. They stress the importance of the shared mission and the criticality of every team members’ contribution.

Conclusion

Positive leadership goes beyond leveraging strengths and making meaning. But the practices suggested in this article are a start. For employees and organisations, the potential benefits of positive leadership are huge. Leaders who engage their employees help them flourish in life. And for their companies they boost productivity, creativity and financial returns.