ATTITUDE REFLECTS LEADERSHIP!!!!

Why work attitude is important?

A positive attitude in the workplace helps employees to accomplish tasks faster and in a better manner. ... A good relationship can be established only when employees demonstrate a positive attitude towards their work and colleagues.

Significance of a Positive Attitude in the Workplace

A positive attitude in the workplace helps employees to accomplish tasks faster and in a better manner. The performance of employees to a great extent depends on the good relationship they share with their colleagues. A good relationship can be established only when employees demonstrate a positive attitude towards their work and colleagues. Through positive energy, work becomes a pleasure and employees find it easier to achieve their goals.

A positive attitude has significant benefits for an individual in many aspects. Let’s look at some of them below.

1. Career success: Employees’ success in the workplace is measured through their performance. Employees with a positive attitude will always think of ways to accomplishing their task in a well defined manner instead of complaining or finding excuses for non-performance. This results in success either through promotion or increased compensation.

2. Productivity: With a positive attitude, employees tend to take more interest in what they do and deliver. Consequently, they produce better quality work with minimum errors. This improves their overall output as well as productivity.

3. Leadership: Working in an organization is all about managing a diverse workforce. Some employees earn respect easily and people often follow and listen to them. This is possible through the positive attitude demonstrated by leaders.

4. Team work: Good relationships among employees help them to build effective teams where all the members are united and work for a common cause. A positive attitude helps employees to appreciate each other’s competencies and work as a team for achieving common objectives instead of being overly perturbed by inadequacies of team members.

5. Decision making: Having a positive attitude helps employees to take better decisions, in an objective manner. It triggers a healthy thought process, enabling employees to choose wisely and logically.

6. Motivation: Having a positive attitude helps in motivating employees to overcome obstacles that they may face during the course of their job. It also determines the way they see the world around them. The moment they are successful in overcoming obstacles, they are motivated to move forward.

7. Interpersonal relations: Customers prefer to deal with someone who is positive in nature. A positive attitude enables employees to share a better rapport with customers, earning valuable customer loyalty.

8. Stress management: Stress has a detrimental effect on the health of employees. So how can employees cope with it? Stress can be reduced through positive thinking; and with reduced stress, employees will enjoy better health and take fewer sick leaves.

In conclusion, a positive attitude at work is beneficial not only to the organization, but also to the employees on an individual basis.

What is an attitude and why is it important?

“The only disability in life is a bad attitude.” Attitude is one of the most important factors in helping you get through the highs and lows of life. ... That is to say, that once a particular attitude is formed, it is highly likely that it is what often comes out of a person.

Why Attitude Is The Most Important Thing In Success

“The only disability in life is a bad attitude.”

Attitude is one of the most important factors in helping you get through the highs and lows of life. Since attitude spells how a person copes, whatever perspective you may hold will invariably have an effect in your performance and the way you handle rejection.

In one’s state of mind, it is often easy enough to generalize than to invest in careful analysis of a particular event. Thus, a person who suffers consecutive rebuffs may believe that all other potential partners will likely reject him or her again and again.

Inherently, attitudes have a basic structure and are essentially formed by us. Espousing a specific thought for a long time will inevitably make it a permanent entity in one’s mind—may it be for better or for worse. That is to say, that once a particular attitude is formed, it is highly likely that it is what often comes out of a person.

Effects Toward Your Life

Living life requires a predominantly positive attitude due to its nature of high and low cycle. Few people, if any, remain at the top their whole lives. It is unavoidable that one will undergo phase of trials and tribulations.

Even before any difficulty happens, a person’s mindset must be able to possess a certain level of positivity and realism. Although nobody can ever have absolute control in what occurs throughout their life, the attitude and approach they choose in handling life’s obstacles is fully within control.

Forming the Right Attitude

Our attitude about any state or condition in our life is always within our power to choose. Attitudes are rooted in one’s own beliefs and are unique across most individuals. They do not form overnight but rather, throughout the course of one’s life.

Moreover, certain attitudes create a negative impact to one’s life and may even cause it to fall apart. This is why it is an important task for each person to help themselves take on the proper attitude direction. Do remember that a person whose heart is not in what he or she is doing will never be half as productive as someone who has the right attitude.

It is simple really, a positive attitude produces much more favorable results while negative attitudes only serve to generate failure. We all have within us the power to respond to any given situation in any way we want regardless of the circumstances and this is why you can either choose to react positively or negatively.

According to a Stanford Research Institute study, the path to success is comprised of 88% attitude and only 12% education. This doesn’t imply that education is of little importance, but it only goes to show how vital it is to foster the proper attitude n regards to a person’s success. Once you have arrived at the right attitude, it then becomes much easier for things to just fall into place.

Learning and Unlearning Attitudes

Much like walking, writing, playing sports and acquiring any other skill, attitude can also be learned. Having already mentioned that attitude develops from one’s own personal experiences and interactions throughout life, we have already accumulated several different attitudes on different things or instances which can be both negative and positive.

It is important to recognize a negative attitude right away as it hinders growth and success. Much like how we can learn them, we are also able to unlearn them and develop new and more positive ones.

Looking at the Bigger Picture

Although one’s attitudes are initially nurtured from one’s environment, we nonetheless always have a choice on what to keep or discard in the long run. It is vital to develop a positive attitude since it will be very difficult to retain a certain kind of integrity without directing your perspective for a higher meaning or purpose. With the right effort, you will be surprised at how much great things you can actually do!

The Leadership Attitude

All employees should contribute to the success of their company, regardless of their place in the command chain. As Steve Robbins says, leadership doesn't always come by title.

Most people are not in official positions of leadership and yet we wish to do all we can to help the organization succeed. Bringing leadership skills to the table would benefit all. Since we aren't responsible for setting the "vision" for the company, where do we fit in? Should we just be extensions of the real leader or is vision something beyond our concern? Should we just focus on issues at our level and perhaps one level above? I loved your example of the fellow who found fault with his company's product and worked to change it, but I think where I've worked that kind of behavior would just get you fired. Is there something a bit more tamed down that you could offer?

You caught me. Sure, you can lead from anywhere in an organization; it's probably the most common way organizations are led. (Sadly, many CEOs aren't perceived as leaders by their own organizations.) With command-and-control leadership, it's all about giving orders, so you need the title. But in most companies, you can be a powerful leader anywhere in an organization by adapting the "pull leadership" principles of responsibility, stewardship, and values.

Pull leaders take responsibility for an organization and the people who make it up

The key to leadership at any level is writing a new job description: My job is making the company, and its people, successful.

Taking responsibility for success is first on your agenda. Don't confuse responsibility with authority! Responsibility is totally different; it's an attitude. Want proof? Just watch Ken Lay, who had absolute authority at Enron, abused it, and wholly declines to take responsibility. You can do better than that. Mentally, decide to start acting as a leader rather than waiting for permission or direction.

Believe it or not, this can be leadership's greatest challenge. The CEO of a company where I was President said (yelled, actually) that I was acting too much like a consultant. After two days in denial, I admitted it was true and asked: "What would I do differently if I owned this company?" The answer flashed up in an instant: fire an incompetent staffer and build a "quick and dirty" system to move us forward. The attitude made all the difference.

Acquire the attitude by asking what you'd do if you were in charge. Imagine yourself in the corner office, writing out paychecks and company expenditures from your personal bank account. With an attitude of responsibility, you'll be asking if you're getting your money's worth? Is the company working on the right projects? Is the culture functional? Just taking the attitude of "I can be responsible for the group's success" will start to pervade your presence.

If you're going to take responsibility for the organization, you must take responsibility for the people as well. This is super important if you're leading from below. A CEO can grind people down and no one calls her on it. She can't be fired. You can. But you won't, if you're taking responsibility for the success of the people, as well as the organization. Decide you'll start looking out for your co-workers, your boss, and yourself.

Pull leaders are stewards for their organizations and people

Here's where responsibility becomes action. Take care of your organization. Unlike a CEO or President, you can't set company direction. But you can take the direction top management sets and make it your job to turn that direction into reality.

Start figuring out how your business works. Read business books. Talk to people from other functions in your spare time. Learn what they do and why. You'll get a sense for how it needs to be nudged going forward. As the low person on the totem pole, start by making suggestions here and there and offering to help. Do a small project on your own time that benefits the company in a visible way. If people know you're genuinely curious and concerned about helping things get better, they'll be inclined to work with you. More importantly, they'll start looking to you as someone who drives success.

Become steward of your group

Every team you're on is a chance to be a steward. The teams have a charter or a goal they're supposed to reach. You can't set the goal, but you can make sure you understand it and then become the "go-to guy" for keeping things moving. If the team stalls, figure out why and offer to help the team leader restart it. Some people just attend to their own work, and they're viewed (rightly) as good technical contributors who must be managed to be valuable.

A sales team was not making sales. The more time went by, the more sales weren't happening. One member of the team finally interviewed everyone on the team and realized that half the team was stalled waiting for input from the other half, while the other half was stalled waiting for input from the first half! He got everyone in a room, had them exchange information, and three weeks later, calls were again being made and the pipeline was starting to fill.

If you attend to everyone's work, and help the entire team be successful, you're acting as a leader in a tangible way.

Become steward of your co-workers

It's not enough to care about the group. Your co-workers' success is important, even if you don't like them! What are their hot buttons? What are their strengths? When do they best shine in their jobs? Once you know, start watching out for them. Do you hear of a project perfectly suited for a teammate's career aspirations? Help them apply and become a champion for them. If they're running into problems, show concern. Share ideas for how they can overcome their obstacles.

Keep people going by helping them make their job part of a larger success. After all, group goals only matter if they further the company's overall goals. Keep the connection in mind, and help others "get" the connection. Even a janitor enables a company's success by freeing people to work without the distraction of maintaining their space. There's pride to be taken; help them take it!

When you help people find their pride and become more successful, they'll start supporting you in return. Over time, you'll find more people taking you seriously. You'll have the support to make audacious suggestions, have people nod in agreement, and get the attention of the people who can make your ideas happen.

Remember that the boss and the boss's boss are important co-workers! Know their motivations, hot buttons, and goals. Read your company's annual report. Be able to talk their language. When your ideas start making it higher in the organization, you want them to be hearing their own success in your words. Without this groundwork, you risk triggering territory wars — not a pleasant prospect.

If you keep a strong link to the company's success and the success of the people involved, you may find yourself with the authority to match your responsibility sooner than you think.

Lead by living the company's values

You'll succeed as a leader only if you're a living example of your values. What causes do you champion? How do you behave with others? What decisions do you make? Now ask yourself what values your answers demonstrate. If those values don't align with your organization, change yourself, change organizations, or tone down your leadership aspirations. Values, if clear and consistent in behavior, are a powerful glue that holds an organization together.

It may be tricky to identify your organization's true values. Values are often unstated, and when they are discussed, the "espoused values" may not match how people really behave. The important values in the workplace often cluster around people, product, and organizational health. See the sidebar for sample values to consider when matching yourself to your organization.

Ethical values are the easiest to identify, make the most powerful statement, and carry the greatest risk. At Stanford Graduate School of Business last week, incoming MBAs were discussing their experiences with ethical issues on the job. Two of the group had taken major ethical stands at their companies as junior employees. One had championed workplace safety, while the other had asked her company to forgo investing in an ethically dubious company. Fortunately, both had been successful in their causes.

That isn't always true. "Whistle-blowers" may get tremendous respect from our private selves, but they're rarely appreciated by society at large or in the organization whose secrets they reveal. There's a fine line between championing values by living them and stepping over the line and "betraying" your company. Oddly, people react more intensely to an employee "betraying" their company than a company betraying its employees (or society!). I don't know when companies became more important to us, emotionally, than our people and communities, but that's how we react.

You have to decide where your line is in stepping up with your values. Personally, I've taken several ethical stands in my career that haven't won me brownie points with management. Those stands have, however, led me to be perceived as a powerful leader by the people around me. Was it worth it? Yes. I'm proud of the person I've become. But in terms of career growth at those companies? Well… I'm not working there any more.

Leadership isn't about titles. It's about behavior. If you live your values, take care of your organization and its people, and step up to the plate with responsibility, you'll be a leader in the true sense of the word. Your title won't matter. Your influence, the respect you garner, and the success you bring will be the true proof of your leadership.

5 Attitudes That Define Great Leaders

Attitude 1 - If I disagree, I usually let others know.

Twenty years ago organizations wanted to hire “yes” men and women. They wanted people who didn’t ask questions, did what they were told and kept their opinions to themselves. Over time, most organizations and leaders have discovered the opinions of others are a valuable asset. They’ve discovered that 90% of the time, the wisdom of groups is better than the wisdom of any one individual. It takes courage to disagree with others. It takes even more courage when the person you are disagreeing with is your boss. Personally, I appreciate people who speak up (respectfully, of course) when they disagree.

Attitude 2 - I am willing to take more risks than most of my peers.

Most of the clients I have worked with are risk takers. However, there are others who are risk avoiders. My clients have a very strong desire to make a difference and to create value. However, there are many people who avoid risks at all costs. For me, the risk avoiders approach work much like people who go to the water park and ride around the lazy river all day. They go with the flow and never make the effort to walk upstream. Making a difference in an organization means taking some risks.

Attitude 3 - It’s easy for me to make friends.

Leaders are people who have the ability to influence others. It’s very difficult to influence others who don’t know who you are. Having the ability to make friends and build relationships is a critical skill for all leaders. Most people have worked for another person they had a very positive relationship with and had that person ask them to do a very difficult task. The positive relationship is often the key factor in their ability and willingness to accomplishing a difficult goal. Often people will say something like, “I did not want to let him (or her) down.” This kind of dedication only occurs when people have positive relationships.

Attitude 4 - I take the time to look at all the facts before making decisions.

Because I travel frequently I find myself in a lot of lines or waiting with nothing to do. Over the last few years I’ve found a few mind-numbingly simple games on my smart phone to entertain myself. Several of the games I play show the next object coming up in the game. Noticing the next object is incredibly beneficial in getting a good score. I have noticed, however, a tendency I have when I see an opportunity to make a good move to focus all my attention on the move instead of looking at the next object coming, which causes the good move to quickly turn to disaster. This much-repeated experience has gotten me thinking about all the poor decisions I’ve made by failing to look at all of the facts before pursuing an opportunity that appears to be great. I admire people who can pull back, examine all the facts, and weigh the consequences before making a choice.

Attitude 5 - I am strategic and future-focused.

Have you ever spent most of a day just responding to emails and attending meetings? It’s so easy to get caught up in the grind of your job that you never take the time to ask, “Why am I doing this? What’s really important?” This is a critical skill. In many companies, everyone is so focused on their product that no one is looking at the competition and discovering the cases where the competitor’s product is much better and costs less.

The Importance of Attitude for Business Success

One of the most important steps you can take toward achieving your greatest potential in business is to learn to monitor your attitude and its impact on your work performance, relationships and everyone around you.

We all have a choice. We can choose an inner dialogue of self-encouragement and self-motivation, or we can choose one of self-defeat and self-pity. It’s a power we all have.

Being in business is very similar to going on a roller coaster ride, there will be plenty of ups and downs. We will all encounter hard times, heartache, success, failure etc.

The key is to realize it’s not what happens to you that matters; it’s how you choose to respond.

Will you choose to be bitter or better?

Your attitude rubs off on your existing and potential customers, your staff, your suppliers, your investors and all those that you come into contact with.

If you maintain a positive attitude, this will be infectious and those around you will pick up on your positive energy. Everyone in your company will feel positive and customers will want to do business with you.

This in turn will lead to you maximizing the performance of your business. If you maintain a negative attitude, the opposite is likely to happen.

People will not want to be around you, your staff will feel demotivated and customers will not want to buy from you. The result will be that the performance of your business will deteriorate.

With a positive approach you will feel in control and confident and you will perform at your best, whereas a negative approach will damage confidence, harm performance, paralyze your mental skills and may also impact your health.

Ask anyone in my network and they will tell you that I’m one of the most positive people they know. But it’s not always like that, I also have moments where I feel overwhelmed, frustrated, angry or even disappointed. So how do I pick myself back up after a hard day or bad experience?

Before I start any business, I go away by myself for 3-4 days and disconnect from the rest of the world. I then spend majority of my time unwinding and doing activities that relax both my mind and body to get into a peaceful state before I work on my mission and vision for the business.

On the last day of my trip I get up very early, go to a nice lookout and ask myself one question:

What are 65 reasons why I must succeed in this business?

Why do I do this? Well, it helps me create a compelling future and connects my desires and goals as an entrepreneur to the mission of my company.

I then take a picture of these reasons and post them up on the wall at the office or save it in my phone so that any time I’m hit with a hurdle I can look back at the reasons why I started the business in the future

This usually breaks me out of my state very quickly, which allows me to take away the lessons I need to learn from that experience and get back to doing what I love: Business.

By the way, I choose 65 reasons because it’s tough, period! Most people (I included) can easily come up with 10,20 or even 30 reasons, given they are usually surface level reasons for achieving success

Things like. I want the business to succeed so I can buy a nice car, travel the world, buy a big house etc. Whilst they are all valid reasons, they won’t pull you through the tough and challenging times in business.

Your reasons for success need to be much bigger then the materialistic objects, they need to include things like: how your going to transform the industry, the millions of lives that are going to be impact by your service or product etc

When you write down and look at these reason throughout the good and tough times in business you are consistently reminded of why you got into business in the first place and be inspired to take action going forward.

Now this is one way to deal with it, to give you a few more perspectives on techniques other business owners use to maintain a winner attitude I decided to reach out to a few other entrepreneurs.

“The best leaders are the best learners. To maintain my winner’s attitude I challenge myself to learn something new every day. I seek feedback from others and use what I hear to find new opportunities to grow and improve.” — Evans Kerrigan, Integris Performance Advisors

“Each week I think about my roles; partner, father/son, friend, business developer, business leader and financial investor, and write brief notes on things I’ll focus on and do each week in all areas.

That way if an area isn’t working so well, you’re usually winning in others and this contributes to an overall positive and resilient attitude to life in general.” — Greg Evans, V8 Race

“A positive and forward-looking mindset is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day. One way I do this is by exposing myself to the thoughts and ideas of successful entrepreneurs through articles, books, and podcasts.

This inspires me to stay focused on the bigger picture and the positive aspects of my business as well as help me avoid the pitfall of negative self-talk.” — Joel Carney, CareerHMO

“I surround myself with positive, driven and like-minded people. I do this by attending networking functions, attending business events and having a mentor who I can turn to when I need help with the strategic direction of my company.” — Oksana Koriakova, Impero

I believe that success is made from a number of factors: positive thinking, passion, persistence, experiencing adversity, and good ideas that solve problems in easy ways.

I’m curious to know, what’s one strategy you use to create a winners attitude in business. And how do you typically deal and manage your mindset in your profession and life in general? reflect in the comments area..