Positive Leadership: How executives fall into the average trap

The perspective of Positive Psychology has rapidly inspired different areas such as education, health, neuroscience, and many others. For example, in education under the leadership of American researcher Alejandro Adler there are exciting projects which show that focusing on students’ strengths can significantly improve their mathematics grade in school. This knowledge and the targeted use of one's own strengths is thus the key to unfolding one’s potential.

In leadership research, a resource and strength-oriented leadership approach was developed under the term "Positive Leadership". But in practice leadership is too often deficit-oriented. This is already clear from the feedback that executives communicate: Feedback is mostly weakness-oriented and is mainly given when something does not fit. Leadership is therefore too often misunderstood to mean that most deficits should be recognized and dealt with. Additional skills, talents or other qualities which have been better than average are given little attention. In unfavorable cases, this leads to people in a company no longer being aware of their strengths.

That the deficit-oriented view is not a phenomenon of this decade is shown by the statement of the world-famous economist Peter Drucker:

?Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer.“

Countless studies have shown that leadership has a strong influence on employees. And even beyond! Studies carried out in the field of nursing show that the style of management influences not only the directly managed persons but also their patients. This is shown, for example, by a large-scale meta-study published in 2013 by the University of Western Ontario in which correlations between management behavior in the care sector and various patient-relevant factors were surveyed. The results show significant correlations between leadership style and patient satisfaction, mortality (!) and medication errors.

Research about success

Analogous to the approaches of Positive Psychology, organizational research has begun to analyse companies or areas within organizations which perform better than average: so called high-performers.

This analysis is relatively straightforward because the outcome can be defined as "hard" metrics: fluctuation, absences, performance, etc. However banal this approach sounds, it is unusual in everyday organizational practice. Think for yourself how often you analyse a problem - why it has occurred, who was responsible for it, what incompetence was shown - and how often you analyse it with the same intensity - why something worked, who did what, and which competencies became visible? Most people tend to look closely only at failure and its ingredients, but do not include success within accurate performance analysis. However, it would be important to find out what needs to be maintained or strengthened to replicate those achievements!

The very first Positive Leadership research has already shown that high-performance areas are good not (only) because they cause fewer problems than low-performance areas. Rather, it turned out that there are additional components that lead to above-average success! To make this dynamic even more understandable, I would like to give an analogy from romantic relationships: if you observe what goes wrong in failing or bad relationships, you can avoid those mistakes in your own relationship. It does not necessarily mean that your relationship will be a particularly happy and fulfilling one, but that it is more likely not to fail. From the analysis of errors, we learn to avoid mistakes. No more and no less. And this part is important. However, to get ideas on how to make your own relationship especially fulfilling, it makes sense to closely observe other couples who are especially happy. You can learn from both observation variants. From the first, what you should avoid, and from the second, what you should additionally (more or maybe less) integrate into your own relationship.

Exactly the same logic can be found when analysing high-performance companies. So the question that comes up is: what is it that these companies or departments do which makes them successful. For example, this research showed what team members in high-performance companies or departments within an organization take for granted: tolerant error handling, targeted empowering of employees' strengths and interests, involvement in decision making, feedback skills, appreciative attitude towards different approaches (diversity!), seeing people in companies as individuals instead of replacable cogwheels and much more.

Why not only work on deficits?

One would think that managers make the most of the skills of their team members. In practice, however, it turns out that this is rarely the case and that leadership is too often deficit-oriented. Employees complain that they usually receive feedback only when things have not gone optimally. Annual appraisal interviews show only the current weakness-orientated "development fields". So from this point only weakness-orientated development is offered.

Usually "used and unused fields of competence" are not part of that conversation. That's a pity, because there lies potential that already exists and only needs to be used in the interests of the company. This assessment is underpinned by a 2011 Gallup study in which 80,000 managers were interviewed: a majority said they considered a person’s weaknesses as the biggest room for performance improvement. But exclusively deficit-oriented personnel development leads directly into the "average trap". The human geneticist Markus Hengstschl?ger uses this term to describe the trend of compensating for deficiencies without promoting strengths. Even more pointedly, employees are developed until they become invisible. Personnel development thus ends where the person concerned has reached a certain benchmark. Personnel development which follows the Positive Leadership approach, however, continues beyond this benchmark by offering additional programs to identify, develop and promote strengths.

This figure clearly shows the analogy between Positive Psychology and Positive Leadership. It is therefore not about "either - or" but rather about "and" as a supplement to typical leadership.

The effect of Positive Leadership is measurable

Leadership research clearly concludes that Positive Leadership pays off for everyone involved. Numerous studies on that topic have shown that Positive Leadership has a significant impact on the positivity, creativity and performance as well as the job satisfaction of employees. For the organization, the advantage is that the effectiveness and performance of the entire organization increases, as a study by the team around Kim Cameron at the University of Michigan has shown. Other studies also show that "more" Positive Leadership and "less" unfavorable behaviors (looking or other jobs, stress symptoms) correlate. Our own current research shows that Positive Leadership and the number of employee sick leave days correlate significantly. Another project we recently competed  clearly shows that employee burn-out exposure is nearly three times higher if their leaders show only little Positive Leadership behaviour.

And, moreover, the executives themselves are also influenced by their own Positive Leadership behaviour. For example, the higher the level of Positive Leadership, the greater the leaders’ commitment. In a survey conducted by us a few years ago, in which about 1,000 executives took part, we were able to show that Positive Leaders find their work significantly less stressful. We are currently conducting a replication study which seems to point to similar results.

What's the definition of Positive Leadership?

However, the definition of Positive Leadership is not consistent. Over the years, different models have emerged that have been developed and / or intuitively compiled mainly by management scientists. For example, some models have been designed by defining Positive Leadership as a management style that leads to positive emotions among employees. In another model a leader with an optimistic attitude is called a Positive Leader. In other studies, transformational or authentic leadership have been called Positive Leadership. Moral as well as spiritual aspects are also sometimes reflected in the description of this style of leadership. A connection between these models and Positive Psychology is not always clearly detectable. But these various Positive Leadership approaches have mostly developed in parallel to Positive Psychology. Although they have clear points in common, until recently, there has been no further development of a common Positive Psychology model adapted to Positive Leadership.

This heterogeneity of definitions may seem to be not relevant to practitioners at first glance. However, it is highly relevant! For example: Suppose you read in an article that Positive Leadership has a positive impact on staff fluctuation. If you want to know what you should do as a leader to have that positive impact, you first need to find out what the researchers in the study understood to be Positive Leadership. And who does that?

We do that! And my colleagues and I have done that in the last years. Applied organizational psychology is concerned with linking research and practice. I'll show you in the next blogs which scientifically proven tips we can give leaders in order to achieve the effects of Positive Leadership.

Read in the next episode: Positive Leadership in Practice

Many thanks to Dr. Joe Mansberger for proofreading the English version

Markus Ebner holds a PhD in economics and organization psychology, teaches at the Universities of Vienna and Klagenfurt (both in Austria) and specializes in Positive Leadership. As a coach and organizational developer, he passionately combines scientifically knowledge with practical implementation and together with his team he supports executives and many different organizations as coach, trainer and key note speaker for more than 20 years.