Creating and Sustaining Positive Organizations

By Schon Beechler

It’s 2009, I am having a difficult time at work, and it’s all my fault. It’s my karma. Karma is the cosmic principle according to which each person is rewarded or punished in one incarnation according to that person’s deeds in the previous incarnation. Fate has me working for the boss that I was 15 years ago, and it is not going well.

Fifteen years ago, at the age of 36, I was pursuing my career with a vengeance. It was all about me – about making a name for myself, being recognized, and making an impact on the world. I had the highest standards of performance, which had served me well, and I was quick to point out any deviation from perfection. Striving to be the best by living up to the highest goals was a mantra that I used to manage myself and my team.

And we were very successful. More successful than any of had imagined would be possible, given where we started and the barriers we faced. Everyone on the team was smart, dedicated, hard working, and committed to our common goals. I was proud of our team, the work that we did, and what we had accomplished. And I was quite proud of myself for developing my own leadership skills and for all of my success.

Uncovering the Dark Side of Success

With this backdrop, I went to an intense leadership development program where I took a battery of personality tests and a leadership 360 where I solicited feedback from peers, direct reports, my boss and my clients. Upon receiving the feedback at the course, I was pleased – until I saw the results from my boss. On a scale from minus 10 to plus ten, he rated me in the minus range on a large number of people-related behaviors. I immediately rejected his feedback – everyone else had given me excellent scores – and chalked it up to his own weaknesses. However, I soon decided that I needed to meet with him to understand why his scores were so out of line with the others’ and my own self-assessment. I was convinced he was just plain wrong.

A week later, we sat down together and I pulled out my feedback report, proudly showing my boss the ratings from my peers, clients and direct reports. And then I showed him his ratings, asking him why he had given me such low scores. I was shocked by what I heard: “Schon, you have amazing skill, drive and talent and you have been extremely successful. We are all grateful for what you have been able to accomplish. But to get that success, you are beating up your team. You make them feel like they are never good enough. You constantly look for someone to blame when things don’t go right. You intimidate them into working long, grueling hours – and they are afraid to tell you any of this.”

I was stunned. When I finally recovered from the shock, I didn’t want to believe him and so I went and talked to my team members one-on-one and they confirmed what my boss had told me was true. The feedback came as an affront to my own identity and my conception of myself as generous, caring, and nurturing of others. I was, quite simply, embarrassed to be me. I was mortified and told my team members so. I then pledged to change my approach, with my boss and my team’s coaching and support, so that I could help generate positive, rather than negative relationships with each person on my team. Part of it was purely personal, so I could feel good about myself again. The second reason was performance-related: leaders who form positive relationships enable higher levels of collective performance (Dutton, 2003).

Moving from Destructive to Positive Relationships

1. Talking with my boss and my team members about the situation was the first step in a long journey to turn my negative, overly-critical style into a leadership approach that would continue to pursue the highest standards of performance – without beating up my team.
2. I quickly realized that I couldn’t change what I didn’t notice, and my critical, negative approach was something that was so ingrained in me that I didn’t even know it was there. The humbling experience of asking others for help, to let me know when I was engaging in destructive behavior, was the second step.
3. Third, at the urging of a junior team member, I began to express appreciation in ways that I had never done before. Rather than pointing out the one thing that wasn’t perfect, I found the many things that my team members were doing well and let them know how much I appreciated their hard work and their levels of excellence.
4. Fourth, I stopped talking in terms of “me” and started talking in terms of “we” when it came to success. And when analyzing our failures, I started by identifying what I had done wrong before pointing the finger at anyone else. It wasn’t an easy journey but with my boss’ and my team’s support, I was eventually able to create truly positive and generative relationships with my team.

The Benefits of Positive Relationships

The impact on everyone, including me, was remarkable. We were all happier and most satisfied, we had more fun, and we radiated energy that everyone who worked with us picked up on. I didn’t know it at the time, but positive relationships, like the ones my team and I built together, are not only satisfying but also provide numerous other positive effects. These include career mobility, power, social capital, longevity, immunity to and recovery from illness, lower heart rate and blood pressure, and protection against stress. Positive relationships also enhance individuals’ resiliency, ability to adapt and bounce back from different experiences, create stronger self-identity and more accurate self-assessments, greater degrees of creativity, trust, and openness to new ideas, higher levels of commitment to the organization, higher levels of energy, learning, cooperation, resource utilization, cost reduction, time savings and human capital development, as well as higher levels of project performance in organizations (Cameron, 2008).

Karma

Recently I was working for someone who is smart, dedicated, hard-working, and who didn’t  see the negative impact of her judgments and criticisms on me. She didn’t understand the quiet desperation with which I waited for a word of praise or the disappointment I felt when only the flaws in my work were highlighted. While I tried to explain how I felt, my words did not seem to be heard, and while I tried to coach her, she didn’t seem to see the need. It is karma that in 2009 I am working for her, experiencing at a gut level what it feels like to be managed by the me of 15 years ago. I now appreciate, in every fiber of my being, the damage that I did to others, without any awareness at all, until my boss had the courage to tell me the truth that everyone knew – everyone, that is, except for me. And so, despite the feeling in the pit of my stomach as I go to work each day, I try to do my best, I try to stay positive, and I go out of my way to express my appreciation to those around me in the hope that the next time around, karma will be a little kinder to me.

Leadership and Positivity

Even if leaders are highly critical and judgmental, they can create and nurture positive relationships by mindfully engaging in generative practices to create and sustain positive relationships with those around them. Here are a few simple suggestions:

• Unleash the strengths and the positive energy of others around you by emphasizing and building on employees’ strengths
• Use deliberate communications to help connect day to day work with a higher purpose that has meaning for your employees
• Praise your employees for specific positive things that they have done
• Take time to encourage your employees and support them when times are stressful
• Offer to help out to ease the load when someone is struggling
• Keep a gratitude log of all of the positive things you are grateful for
• Call or send personalized notes of gratitude on Thanksgiving, New Year’s and employees’ birthdays
• Be compassionate
• Practice forgiveness with yourself and others
• And, most importantly, take care of yourself, manage your own stress and energy, so that you can be a positive force each and every day no matter what happens around you

References

Cameron, K. S. (2008). Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Dutton, J.E. (2003) Energizing Your Workplace: Building and Sustaining High Quality Relationship at Work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Dutton, J.E. and Ragins, B.R. (2007). Exploring Positive Relationships at Work. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 29th, 2010 at 9:15 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.