Positivity and Leadership

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As a leader, the need to focus on positive interactions and encouraging an upbeat emotional state at the workplace as often as possible, will likely help you build a happy, productive and efficient team.

To start with, let’s look at how positive and negative
emotions work in our brains, and what we can learn from that.

Positive emotions generally work in an opposite way to negative emotions. So, while emotions like fear, anxiety, stress and anger narrow our focus, inhibit our concentration and decrease our cognitive abilities, positive emotions can do the opposite. When we’re feeling upbeat and happy, we’re more likely to have an inclusive focus than a self-centered outlook, and to perform better on cognitively demanding tasks.

When faced with negative events, our brains struggle to perform at their regular—and sometimes, highest—capacity. The prefrontal cortex, which is the brain’s “executive center” is pushed aside so the amygdala can take over and prepare the body for any crisis that might possibly arise.
This shift in control to the low road favors automatic habits, as the amygdala draws on knee-jerk responses to save us. 

When we’re stressed or scared, for instance, we struggle to think clearly, to coordinate well with others, to take in new information and to come up with new ideas. Even existing routines suffer, as our concentration is taken over by our negative emotions.
The more intense the pressure, the more our performance and thinking will suffer. 

In his book Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, Daniel Goleman explains that heightened prefrontal activity, which is associated with positive emotions, enhances mental abilities such as “creative thinking, cognitive flexibility, and the processing of information.” The left prefrontal area of our brains, which lights up with activity when we’re in a positive mood, is also associated with reminding us of the good feelings we’ll have when we reach a long-term goal.

Goleman’s book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence also discusses positivity and how it affects us. Goleman explains how positivity is measured at a neural level, which involves looking at the length of time we can maintain a positive outlook after something good happens. In a study of participants with depression, control subjects with no mental illness were able to hold onto positive feelings for much longer than those with symptoms of depression.

Positive encouragement and communication.

The way leaders use positivity when communicating with employees can make a huge impact on their emotional well-being and their performance. Goleman looked at several ways this can happen in Social Intelligence.

In one experiment, the emotional tone of a leader delivering news to an employee made more impact that the news itself. When negative feedback was delivered with a warm tone, the employees usually rated the interaction positively. On the other hand, good news, such as achieving a goal, delivered with a negative tone would leave employees feeling bad.

The emotional state of a leader can rub off on employees even when they’re not sharing feedback specifically. Just being more upbeat can improve the emotional state of your employees, as well as helping them to be more efficient and coordinate better.

Employees are also more likely to remember negative interactions than positive ones, and to spread the negativity among other employees.

When sharing feedback with employees, negatively-focused discussions are more likely to increase feelings of guilt, fear and anxiety. As I mentioned earlier, these emotions work against our cognitive abilities, forcing us into a spiral of being stressed about the need to improve, while our brains are too busy being stressed for us to actually improve.

In Focus, Goleman looked at how talking about positive goals and dreams can be a better way to encourage employess. Richard Boyatzis, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University explained that focusing on what someone needs to do to “fix” themselves will effectively close them down to new possibilities or ideas.

Boyatzis did an experiment on college students, scanning their brains during interviews about college life. For one group, the interviews focused on positive outlooks—where they hoped to be in ten years, and what they wanted to gain from college. The other group had a negatively-focused interview where they talked about the stresses and fears of college life, struggles in their performance and workload and troubles in making new friends.

As you might expect, the areas of the brain related to negative emotions like anxiety and sadness were more often activated during the negative interviews. During the positive interviews, more activity was seen in the brain’s reward circuitry and areas related to happy memories and positive emotions.
A conversation that starts with a person’s dreams and hopes can lead to a learning path yielding that vision. 

No doubt, we can’t avoid all negative moments, but adding enough positive ones to offset those that trouble us can make us happier and more productive.