Practice Positive Communication
To foster team spirit, breed optimism, promote resilience, and renew faith and confidence, leaders look on the bright side. They keep hope alive. They strengthen their constituents’ belief that life’s struggles will produce a more promising future. Such faith results from an intimate and supportive relationship, a relationship based on mutual participation in the process of renewal.
Constituents look for leaders who demonstrate an enthusiastic, genuine belief in the capacity of others, who strengthen people’s will, who supply the means to achieve, and who express optimism for the future. Constituents want leaders who remain passionate despite obstacles and setbacks. In today’s uncertain times, leaders with a positive, confident, can-do approach to life and business are desperately needed. Naysayers only stop forward progress; they do not start it.
Indeed, consider how Ari Ashkenazi describes his contrasting experience with two supervisors. The first, he said, always tried to keep spirits up and to look on the bright side, regardless of the situation. Even when a certain project came out with less than desired results, Ari said, she would tell them that future projects would turn out better as long as they kept working hard as well as working smart. “This gave me a lot of faith in her,” said Ari, “and helped me to keep from getting frustrated during my work when things didn’t always go right. This also had the effect of making it easier for me to try new things as well as report negative news to her since I knew she wouldn’t ‘shoot the messenger’ when it came to giving her news.”
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G E Ari described another supervisor who would often get easily
exasperated, and when she was annoyed or angry, she’d let you know it quite plainly. All she cared about was solid numbers and results, and it felt as though she was looking down on you if things didn’t go as she planned from the start. The outcome of her negative com- munications, Ari explained, “was to make me try to avoid her as much as possible and to hold back on giving her negative informa- tion that she needed to know, just because I feared the backlash she would give me.”
Researchers working with neural networks have documented Ari’s feelings in finding that when people feel rebuffed or left out, the brain activates a site for registering physical pain.16 People actu- ally remember downbeat comments far more often, in greater detail, and with more intensity than they do encouraging words. When negative remarks become a preoccupation, an employee’s brain loses mental efficiency. This is all the more reason for leaders to be positive.
In contrast, a positive approach to life broadens people’s ideas about future possibilities, and these exciting options build on each other, according to Barbara Fredrickson, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina. Her findings indicate that being positive opens you up: “The first core truth about positive emotions is that they open our hearts and our minds, making us more receptive and more creative.”17 Her research finds that as positivity flows through people, they see more options and become more innovative. And that’s not all. People who enjoy more positiv- ity are better able to cope with adversity and are more resilient during times of high stress.18 That’s a vital capacity when dealing with challenges that people face as leaders in these uncertain and challenging times.
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