How to Be a Positive Leader

Gretchen Spreitzer: Yes. So, for about the last 12 years we've been working with a collection of scholars in this new field called positive organizational scholarship, and really what we're trying to do is understand how organizations can be generative forces for helping to develop people's full potential, so that organizations can be environments where people can thrive and grow and be their best.

And it's been, I have to say, the most exciting period of my professional life, because it's been so inspirational to be studying these topics, but also to be working with organizations to apply the ideas and bring them to fruition to improve organizations to be places people are proud to be associated with.

Rachel Salaman: And is this new field of research – and practice, I guess from the sound of things – gaining much traction throughout the business world?

Gretchen Spreitzer: Yes, that's a great question Rachel. We just had in May our first ever positive business conference, and we were really blown away by the response that we had. We had 350 people from around the world – business leaders, practitioners – join us, because there's such a hunger for trying to figure out how to do this and how to do it well, and a hunger especially from young people to say, "We want a work environment that's not just a job, we want a work environment where we feel like there's a higher purpose, where we're making a difference in the world, where we feel fulfilled by the work that we're doing."

And so with the organizations that we work with, there's a real attraction to this idea of creating something better, and so we're seeing a lot of traction, and we also have a consortium of companies that are coming together on a biannual basis to share best practices, to learn from each other, to set an agenda for research about how we can really take this to the next level.

Rachel Salaman: And what are the advantages of being a positive leader, both for the person themselves, and also their organization?

Gretchen Spreitzer: One way that we like to talk about it is in a world of scarce resources where we're competing for a limited pool of opportunities, being a positive leader allows you as an organization to do more with less. And what I mean by that is it's not about short-changing people or trying to provide fulfillment to people so you don't have to pay them as much – it's not that idea about doing more with less – but it's about enhancing what we call the "zone of possibility," and I'm an academic, we're actually trying to change the trajectory or the slope of how quickly organizations can improve, how much they can build creative and innovative solutions by fully engaging their people.

So, through positive leadership you can get more out of the organization that you're working with, because it's unlocking hidden resources that are already present, but not taken advantage of yet – they're in your system but we're not finding ways to activate them.

Rachel Salaman: And for any skeptics out there, can you explain how that kind of positivity differs from what you might call "Pollyanna-ism," or the more damaging positivity that might overlook serious problems that actually do need addressing?

Gretchen Spreitzer: I think what we have found is that in work organizations if your focus is only on fixing problems, then we miss opportunities to see possibilities that are in a system but currently hidden or ignored, so one of the things we often talk about is the notion of positive deviance.

Now, a lot of times when people hear that phrase they're a little taken aback by it, because we think of deviance as something bad, but deviance really means deviation from the mean or deviation from what's normal, and while we can think of destructive deviants or negative deviants, we can also think about deviance from the mean in a positive way, and what we've found is that in any system there are pockets of positive deviance, so there are parts of the organization that are operating in amazing ways.

This is also part of the philosophy of appreciative enquiry – that in any system if you enquire, if you ask the right questions, you can find these pockets of positive deviance.

I think the other thing that readers of this book will find is that my co-editor Jane Dutton and I are very clear that being a positive leader isn't being a nice leader per se, it's being a respectful leader, but it's also trying to help people in organizational systems develop to their full potential, and a piece of that is holding people accountable for their performance and giving feedback – both positive and negative feedback, of course, done in a respectful way – but that notion of holding people accountable so that they can grow, develop, and get better. And that's not just about being nice to people, it's about oftentimes getting them out of their comfort zone, or having the hard or difficult conversations that are necessary to help people move in a better direction.

Rachel Salaman: Do you need certain skills to be a positive leader?

Gretchen Spreitzer: Maybe behind that question, Rachel, is a question of whether positive leaders are made or born. So, some people might just say a positive leader, there are just some people who get it – some people that that's just who they are as a human being. I think that's true to a certain respect, but I think it's also something that can be developed and so the byline of our book, "Small Actions, Big Impact" is that it doesn't mean you need to be this wildly charismatic leader in order to be positive; it doesn't mean you have to have this incredibly rich skillset that say only the top 1 percent of leaders would have.

What we're really trying to do in this book is identify through research what the small acts that any one of us can do to get started on this trajectory to positive leadership. So I don't think it's something that we need to be concerned about.

Can anybody become more positive? I think the answer is yes, and I think what we're trying to do in this book is identify what are those small actions: things that don't require a certain kind of personality or a certain level of charisma or a certain amount of intellectual capital, but their behaviors, their practices that anybody can begin to implement, that can move you along a trajectory of becoming a more positive leader.

Rachel Salaman: And why did you decide to publish this book now?

Gretchen Spreitzer: Well I think a few reasons. Probably the first one is that we see levels of employee engagement in many organizations at all-time lows, so I think there is a need in the business world to say we can do better. If people are spending 44 per cent of their waking hours at work, do we really want to leave a legacy where people are not fully engaged or excited or feel alive at work?

So that's the first piece. A second piece is that I think we believe that we have reached a tipping point in our research on this topic, so I said that we'd been a center for about 12 years, we've been building a research agenda around positive leadership, but I think we've reached a tipping point where we feel like we have a pretty powerful message of how to go about doing that.

So I think the time is right in terms of the business environment needing this, but I think the time is also right in the sense that as a field, our scholarship is far enough along that we have a message that we're confident about, and that we have research evidence to back up, to say yes, this approach can really pay off.

Rachel Salaman: And how did you choose the contributors – the people who are writing these insight essays?

Gretchen Spreitzer: Yes, so again a part of our title is "Insights from Leading Thinkers on Positive Organizations," and so, as Jane and I were writing the proposal for this book to our publisher, we said, "Who are the must haves, who are the people that are really at the cutting edge of this field, that again have a strong academic reputation, that have a strong research record, but also an eye to putting those ideas into practice?"

Those were the people that we called up and we invited to be part of the book, and everybody that we asked accepted and was very excited about it, so we feel like we've got really the set of leading thinkers on positive leadership that are part of this volume.

Rachel Salaman: And the book is divided into four sections, under the headings "Foster Positive Relationships," "Unlock Resources From Within," "Tap into the Good,"and "Create Resourceful Change." Why those four topics, and was it easy to come up with those four sections?

Gretchen Spreitzer: Yes, well, we feel like these are the four key levers for breaking into positive leadership, and so as we brought together the set of thought leaders we tried to understand what were the key levers – the key mechanisms for unlocking this positive leadership – and these are the ones that came out.

So positive relationships – I think one of the core elements of our center, the core findings of our center is that relationships really matter, and how we develop high levels of respect, trust, relationships that help people grow and develop have just become a key theme.

Unlocking resources from within is another key one. I talked a little bit about it before when we talked about the Pollyanna idea: that in any system there are these inherent resources that are invisible for one reason or another, and this idea of unlocking them is crucial. Tapping into the good is this idea about virtuousness, bringing out the best of the human condition. In some ways you could think about it as kind of the outcomes of what is positive leadership trying to create. And it's certainly profits and productivity and all the normal business outcomes, but it's a broader array of outcomes that also include things like making the world a better place or making a positive difference.

And then the last piece about creating resourceful change. We know that change is a part of all organizations – in order to stay at the cutting edge we have to be going through constant change – and so in this section, this idea about again, what kind of small actions can have big impact when you're making change.

So, the four sections really fell out of what the four key levers or mechanisms are for helping you get started on the journey to becoming a positive leader.

Rachel Salaman: And you yourself make a contribution in the second section "Unlock Resources From Within" with an essay co-written with Christine Poras, and that's called "Enable Thriving at Work." Now, thriving at work is a term that has a specific meaning for you: what is that? Tell us about thriving at work.

Gretchen Spreitzer: Yes, so this research really came out of a personal mission that I and several of my colleagues had where we said, "Gosh, we are so blessed, so lucky to be at an institution like the University of Michigan, that we have jobs where we're always growing, we're developing, we're doing interesting work, we're getting to work with students and with companies."

But it's the job that never ends. It's the job where there's really potential for burnout at any time, because you want to give so much of yourself to the work that you're doing.

So that was really the genesis of our research on thriving: it's how do we create sustainable performance, how do we stay on the cutting edge of our game, always pushing the envelope, moving forward in important ways but not getting burned out? And so that was the stimulus for starting our research program on the notion of human thriving at work, because we personally wanted to know how do we do this, and so as we began this work, and we began studying people who were thriving at work and making contrasts with the people who were not thriving in many different contexts. What we learned is that when people are thriving, they're on this positive trajectory, they're growing, they're learning, they're getting better at what they're doing at the same time that they feel very energized and alive by their work.

So it's this joint experience of growing, learning, getting better at the same time as feeling vitalized, feeling alive and passionate and excited about the work that you're doing, and you can see where you could have one or the other and not be thriving.

So, for example, a lot of my students feel like they're in heavy-learning mode, but for one reason or another they're not excited about the work that they're doing – they don't feel like it's vital enough to who they want to become – and so they're not thriving, even though they've got this learning and growing piece.

And then there's other people who feel very alive and vital and excited, but it's more in the moment with less of a long term "Am I actually growing and getting better as a result of what I'm doing?" So people are thriving when they've got both of those working in tandem.

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Rachel Salaman: So how can a leader or an individual boost thriving in the workplace?

Gretchen Spreitzer: So one of the things that we try to do in each chapter, and I'll explain how we do it in this chapter in particular, is take two approaches.

One approach is as a leader, "What can I do to improve myself along this dimension? What can I do to become more of a thriving individual?" But then we also take a second perspective and that is, "What can I do as a leader to help my organization become more thriving?"

So in each chapter of the book we take both perspectives: what can I do as a leader for myself and then second, what can I do as a leader more for my organization? So when you asked that question to me about thriving, from an organizational perspective what can I do, we found four key levers.

Those levers are providing decision-making discretion, so allowing people to have a voice or a say in how their work is done, and allow them to have a voice or a say in the workings of the organization, whether that's their team or their unit, as an example. The second lever is about sharing information – sometimes people talk about this as transparency – but giving people clear information about the vision of the organization, about the industry that they're part of, about their competition, about their unit and where their unit is going.

And so you can see how these are fitting together because people can't make good decisions – it's hard to have a voice if they don't have clarity about where the organization is going or what the vision is. So the first decision-making discretion, the second sharing information, the third minimizing incivility or actually building high quality connections in the workplace, trying to get rid of rudeness or disrespectful behavior, whether intentional or not intentional: how do we really create work relationships where people are not just friendly with each other, but friends, again being willing to sometimes have those hard conversations as well.

And then the fourth and last lever for how organizations can enable more thriving at work is offering performance feedback, so the more people know how they're doing, the more they're able to grow and develop, and so you can see where even negative feedback, feedback about what's not going well, can be really important for helping people grow and develop and figure out how can I improve and get better.

Rachel Salaman: Your tip about minimizing incivility is really interesting. How common is incivility or rudeness in the workplace, have you found?

Gretchen Spreitzer: Well, unfortunately very common. In fact my co-author Chris Poras on this chapter is one of the world experts on incivility, and what they found in their work is that it is very common, and that almost everybody reports some level of incivility in their workplace. And when we talk about incivility we're not talking here about very explicit, high-impact kinds of incivility like bullying or harassment or discrimination, instead what we're referring and what Chris focuses on in her research is more of the indirect, sometimes ambiguous disrespectful, rude, everyday kind of interactions that we might face in the workplace – so somebody interrupting a point that we're trying to make in a meeting, or ignoring somebody who is trying to clarify a point that they're making, or ignoring somebody in a hallway conversation.

They are often more subtle; they are often harder to be clear about whether they're intended or not, but the findings are that they're very destructive to people's well-being; very destructive to people's self-esteem and ability to work well with each other in the workplace. So unfortunately, Rachel, it's very common and very harmful in terms of people's ability to thrive at work.

Rachel Salaman: And what can a leader do about that when they've recognized it in their organization? What are some of the practical steps you can take to minimize the incivility?

Gretchen Spreitzer: I mentioned that my co-editor of the book Jane Dutton has a whole chapter on "high-quality connections" in the book, and so if readers are interested in this topic there is a whole piece that focuses just on that. But I'll give you just a little taste of what some of the key recommendations are for minimizing incivility and creating high quality connections.

I think the first one is, and this is also consistent with offering performance feedback, and that's just calling out these behaviors when you experience them. And that doesn't have to be in a public way – in a way that makes people really uncomfortable – but in a side conversation to say, "You know in the meeting we had today I felt like you weren't hearing the point that I was trying to make, and in fact I felt like there were several times where I was interrupted" as an example.

So the first piece of it is making it known when it's experienced in the workplace, that I've experienced this feeling of incivility. But on a more positive note, Jane, in her chapter, has a number of different strategies including creating more play in the workplace – if we're having more fun in the workplace we might be developing more trust, we might be getting to know the whole person at work in a way that then minimizes uncivil behavior in the future, because now we know more clearly what people's intentions are because we trust them: we feel like we know them as a whole person.

Rachel Salaman: Another one of the chapters in the book is about job crafting, which is something you mention in your chapter as well. Could you tell us what this is?

Gretchen Spreitzer: Job crafting is one of the most potent tools that we found for positive leaders to fully engage employees. The basic idea behind it is that while we all have formal job descriptions that define what our job responsibilities are, we also know that within any job there's also opportunities to craft around the edges, to bring more purpose, meaning, fulfillment into the work that you do.

So job crafting is the idea of taking those pieces of your job that are more discretionary and bringing more of what's important to you in your work to those pieces. So, let me give you an example of what this looks like. In my job I have certain things that I have to do: I have to teach my classes, I have to do research that I can publish in academic journals, and I have to do reviews as an example.

Well, I can choose how to do different pieces of my job, including who I do certain parts of that work with, so if I find that working with my co-author Jane Dutton is really energizing, I might try to find ways to have more interactions with her on an everyday basis, so that might be gosh, let's start a research project together on thriving at work, or let's co-direct a student's dissertation together because that will give us an excuse to work together more regularly, doing the same work that we normally do but now we're finding ways to do it together.

So that's one way people can craft their job – find ways to connect with people that they find to be energizers to them.

A second piece is crafting work to add more pieces of things that give you energy and maybe delegate other pieces that don't give you as much energy. So here is an example of this. A couple of years ago I was tasked at the school with compiling some information about the experience of women at the Ross School of Business, and it involved collecting some pretty tedious data, and so there was a staff member who offered to help me to do that and she did a beautiful job with it, and she created a really nice report, and afterwards I thanked her and I said, "I so appreciate you doing that work." I said, "I realize how tedious and difficult it is," and I said, "I hope I don't have to ask for more information going forward." And she responded back, "I love doing this kind of work." She said, "If you have more opportunities please come to me because this is just the kind of stuff that gets me really jazzed up."

Well, here I was thinking I'm protecting her by taking on responsibilities I really don't enjoy at all and keeping from her something that gives her a lot of joy. So a second piece of job crafting is finding ways to do more of the things that play to your strengths or that provide a lot of fulfillment to you, and then finding ways for other pieces that maybe are really hard for you or uncomfortable for you or very routine for you that maybe would provide great growth opportunities for somebody else or fulfillment to somebody else.

Rachel Salaman: And I suppose as a side note for leaders it's also about not assuming you know what energizes your team members, because you might not be aware that they like data crunching or whatever.

Gretchen Spreitzer: That's absolutely right, and again I think going back to that notion of play: the more that we can get to know who people are as human beings, the more likely we're going to be able to understand what makes different people tick.

And again, some people might say well maybe that's dangerous, knowing what makes people tick and we can take advantage of them. That might be true, but if we're so worried about that danger we miss the full potential to not help shape people's work so that they're truly excited about it and attracted about it and want to come to work and do their best work.

So I think sometimes we avoid things because of a small potential for knowing somebody at a deeper level that could be taken advantage of, and we miss this huge opportunity to really help create a fulfilling and exciting world of work.

Rachel Salaman: So if someone listening to this wanted to become a more positive leader starting today, what do you think would be the first steps they should take?

Gretchen Spreitzer: What I'd first do is point them to our final chapter of our book, which basically lays out what the best steps are for getting started on becoming a positive leader, and so we identify what we call five core nuggets.

They are going to be the things that we talked about already, Rachel, but let me just give a quick overview. The first one is about cultivating more positive meaning in your work and in the work of others – so paying attention, so what gives you fulfillment, what gives you meaning, where you have purpose. There is one whole chapter in the book by Bob Quinn and Anjan Thakor about higher purpose, and it talks about how do you actually go about creating a higher purpose than just profits or productivity as a leader, and we found that having that strong sense of meaning is really critical.

The second core nugget is about creating a vision that inspires you and others, and so that vision of what do we want to become as an organization and how are we going to get there is very important.

The third core nugget is about those high-quality connections. How do we not just get rid of incivilities at work, but actually build stronger relationships, build more positive interactions in how we do our work?

The fourth core nugget is about being proactive and taking initiative. I think sometimes people in work organizations feel a little bit stuck; they feel like making change is outside their sphere of control, and that there's only small things that they can do, and what we talk about in this book, again the subtitle "Small Actions, Big Impact," is to talk with some small wins – to start with some small moves, some things that are within your realm of control, but getting started some place and starting to create some positive momentum.

And then the last core nugget is about making virtuous action a priority, so to not overlook basic virtues like compassion at work or humility at work or acting with the highest ethics, even when it doesn't seem like maybe it will lead to the most profitable outcomes.

Rachel Salaman: Gretchen Spreitzer, thanks very much for joining me.

Gretchen Spreitzer: It's been a pleasure Rachel.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Gretchen's book again is "How to be a Positive Leader: Insights from the Leading Thinkers on Positive Organizations," and it's co-edited with Jane E. Dutton.

You can listen to our Expert Interview with Kim Cameron about positive organizational scholarship on the Mind Tools site.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then goodbye.