leaders encourage

Adding to last week’s blog on Emotions at Work

If you ask subordinates what they want in a leader, they usually list three things:  direction or vision, trustworthiness, and optimism. Like effective parents, lovers, teachers, and therapists, good leaders make people hopeful.
– Warren Bennis, An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change

 

Leadership is almost all emotional intelligence, especially in distinguishing between what managers do and what leaders do…
– Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence

 

Emotions are contagious. Research shows that they determine 50% to 70% that climate, in turn, determines 20% to 30% of a company’s performance. What’s more, Emotional Intelligence accounts for 85% of what distinguishes the stars in top leadership positions from low-level performers.
– Loren Gary, “Becoming a Resonant Leader,” Harvard Management Update Special Report

 

To offer a people hope is to acquire a position of leadership in their lives.
– Winston Churchill

 

Our study of effective executives has uncovered many ways in which their decisions, words, and actions make the people they lead more hopeful. Collectively, these practices are the basis of a leadership tool kit for building and sustaining hope. But the most important change comes when a leader is simply more mindful of this vital part of her or his mission.
– Harry Hutson and Barbara Perry, authors of Putting Hope to Work: Five Principles to Activate Your Organization’s Most Powerful Resource

 

A decade of research on high and low performance teams by psychologist and business consultant Marcial Losada….based on Losada’s extensive mathematical modeling, 2.9013 is the ratio of positive to negative interactions necessary to make a corporate team successful. This means that it takes about three positive comments, experiences, or expressions to fend off the languishing effects of one negative. Dip below this tipping point, now known as the Losada Line, and workplace performance quickly suffers. Rise above it — ideally, the research shows, to a ratio of 6 to 1 — and teams produce their very best work.
– Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

 

No one wants to work for a grouch. Research has proven it: Optimistic, enthusiastic leaders more easily retain their people, compared with those bosses who tend toward negative moods.
– Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis & Annie McKee, Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

 

Recent research, however, suggests that pessimistic managers may not only plan for the worst, but invite it. Margaret Greenberg and Dana Arakawa, graduates of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania, studied the effects of optimistic managers and found that optimists may do a better job of helping employees reach goals and be more productive….Unlike many personality traits and talents, optimism is one of the few emotions that people can acquire.
– Jennifer Robison, “It Pays to Be Optimistic,” Gallup Management Journal

 

A McKinsey Quarterly survey of 1,147 executives found that the five elements of centered leadership (meaning, framing, connecting, engaging, and energizing) are mutually reinforcing. Respondents, who reported that they frequently practiced four or all five gave high ratings to their passion for their work, their effectiveness as leaders, and their satisfaction with life.
– Scott Keller and Colin Price, Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage