What good are positive emotions in the workplace?

As scientists study the brain and learn more about how we achieve optimal functioning, the term positivity has finally captured business leaders’ interests.

One study of CEOs showed that training to be more positive could boost their productivity by 15 percent, and managers improved customer satisfaction by 42 percent. Despite such training’s amazing results, many leaders remain completely unfamiliar with the concept.

Being positive isn’t simply about being nice and giving in, nor does it mean suppressing negative information and emotions. Both are critical for optimal performance. Apparently, however, a 3:1 positivity-to-negativity ratio is the tipping point for individuals and business teams to go from average to flourishing.

In business, positive emotions yield:

• Better decisions. Researchers at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business studied how positive moods affect managers. Managers who were more positive were more accurate and careful in making decisions, and were more effective interpersonally.

• Better team work. Managers with positive emotions infect their work groups with similar feelings and show improved team coordination, while reporting less effort to accomplish more.

• Better negotiating. At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, researchers learned that when people negotiate complex bargains, being positive surfaces as a contributing factor for success. Negotiators who strategically display positivity are more likely to gain concessions, close deals and incorporate future business relationships into the contracts they seal.

This article examines how positivity benefits business and how you can raise your positivity-to-negativity ratio and flourish.

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• Emotions’ Role in Business
• The Broaden-and-Build Model of Positive Emotions
• Positivity and High Performance
• The Tipping Point: 3:1 Positivity Ratio
• Improve Your Ratio
• Raise Your Positivity

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Someone in your company may have recently been promoted to a leadership position. This person successfully competed against other qualified candidates, some of whom were probably just as experienced and smart.

As often happens in judging one candidate over another, the decision most likely came down to degrees of “executive presence.”

Presence: Often referred to as “bearing,” presence incorporates a range of verbal and nonverbal patterns (one’s appearance, posture, vocal quality, subtle movements)—a whole collection of signals that others process into an evaluative impression of a person. ~ Karl Albrecht, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Success

In this day and age, executive presence comes in all shapes and sizes, including some you wouldn’t normally recognize. Who would have thought, 30 years ago, that Bill Gates would command it?

Would Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old founder of Facebook, have stood out as a high-potential CEO? But as one of the youngest men ever to be named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, he certainly has presence—albeit a “Gen Y” version of it.

An Internet search on executive presence reveals definitions and advice on everything from dressing for success and patterns of speech to more fundamental issues of emotional and social intelligence.

As it turns out, everyone’s definition of the term seems to differ. But planning your career and determining your leadership development needs shouldn’t be left to guesswork.

11 Aspects of Executive Presence

Most people aren’t born with executive presence. They develop the requisite skills with experience, maturity and a great deal of effort.

This article examines eleven qualities that contribute to executive presence and how you can cultivate your own presence and so that others perceive you as a high-potential leader.

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•    Searching for Executive Presence
•    11 Aspects of Executive Presence
•    Storytelling for Professional Success
•    What Really Matters
•    6 Steps for Building Executive Presence

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Without empathy and focus, you’ll never be able to communicate effectively and relate well to others. People who lack empathy are sure to face interpersonal difficulties that lead to inferior performance, negative outcomes, and poor relationships with coworkers and customers.

As a competency skill, empathy is poorly understood by those who need it the most. Some hard-driving managers eschew the need to develop it because they assume it’s for “touchy-feely” types. Other tone-deaf leaders blindly walk around, relying solely on logic and wondering why others fail to see things their way.

Research by the Center for Creative Leadership reveals that executive “derailment” is primarily caused by deficits in emotional competence:

1. Difficulty in handling change
2. Inability to work well in teams
3. Poor interpersonal relations

The inability to understand matters from others’ points of view means some people lack the flexibility required for change. These individuals simply cannot work well with, or relate to, others, which makes them workplace liabilities.

Successful leaders score high marks in five areas of social competencies in the workplace, for which empathy is the foundation. Understanding others leads to goal completion—not to mention opportunities for promotion. When combined with focus, perseverance and concentration, empathy breeds achievement.

This article suggests 10 steps to practice and improve our ability to experience empathy.
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• Defining Empathy
• 5 Social Competencies
• The Trickle-Down Theory
• Fundamental Interactions
• Nonverbal Cues
• 10 Steps to Improving Empathy

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Competition for top leadership positions is tough. Intelligence and good social skills are the price of admission, but they’re not enough.

A high-potential candidate must master the intricacies of reading people, predicting behaviors and influencing perceptions — advanced communication skills that can be learned.

The effective CEO’s presence and essence have changed tremendously over the last two decades. There’s no hiding behind a title. What propels most executives to the top won’t keep them there for long.

Today’s effective leaders have more than presence, charisma and charm. They are strategic about managing their communication skills and adroit at reading others’ perceptions and values.

Perceptive leaders craft messages that meet their target audiences’ needs. They understand which information will be filtered out, how messages become distorted and disregarded, and how information is assigned meaning.

Psychological Icebergs

The stimuli we hear and see are merely the tip of a complex psychological iceberg. Preconceptions about body language may cause us to miss more important signals. Leaders must learn to identify how people’s values become filters for their perceptions.

Research shows that people are only 20 percent successful at reading body language. Determining the true meaning of visual, verbal and nonverbal cues requires a more complex analysis of other variables.

This article examines situational awareness as one component of social intelligence and suggests five steps to improve one’s ability to read people, influence perceptions and gain executive presence.
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This is a brief synopsis of a 2000 & 1000-word article suitable for consultants’ newsletters for executives and leaders in organizations. It is available for purchase with full reprint rights, which means you may put your name on it and use it in your newsletters, blogs or other marketing materials.

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The complete 2,000 word article includes these important concepts:

• Social Intelligence:

o    Situational Awareness
o    Presence
o    Authenticity
o    Clarity
o    Empathy

• Body language
• People-reading
• Flight-plan for Your Career
• The invisible Iceberg
• The Bias Trap
• Optimizing Outcomes
• The Influence of Context
• 3 Context Dynamics to Observe:
  

o    The Proxemic Context
o    The Behavioral Context
o    The Semantic Context

• 5 Steps for Better People-Reading Skills

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“Leadership isn’t something you do writing memos; you’ve got to appeal to people’s emotions. They’ve got to buy in with their hearts and bellies, not just their minds.” ~ Lou Gerstner, IBM’s former CEO

Emotions are critical to business success because they drive behaviors. Companies that achieve an emotional buy-in from consumers and employees will have a competitive advantage in a world of increasing commoditization.

Business has a long tradition of ignoring emotions in favor of rationality. But a growing body of scientific evidence reveals that subconscious feelings drive decisions, up to 95% of which are made through the brain’s emotion centers and only then filtered into its cognitive parts.

Psychologists, neuroscientists and behavioral economists now agree that leaders who fail to understand how emotions drive actions will ultimately fail.

Emotionally astute leaders leverage feelings to gain employee commitment, engagement and performance, according to Dan Hill, CEO of Sensory Logic and author of Emotionomics: Leveraging Emotions for Business Success (Kogan Page, 2008).

However, there are two barriers that create a trust gap between leaders and their staffs:

1. The financial chasm that results from large pay disparities
2. A disconnect between verbal and nonverbal communication

While there is an inherent desire to identify and bond with one’s leader, people exercise caution before committing their careers and livelihoods to anyone. No one wants to commit to the wrong cause or person, thus the importance of leaders’ honesty and authenticity.

Evolution gave us feeling before thinking. Leaders must quell fears before expecting employees to embrace the cold, hard facts. Facts are malleable, but our gut instincts are unyielding.

• The human side of business consumes most of a company’s operating costs. Failure to be emotionally adept is counterproductive—perhaps even suicidal.
• Employees are the players who turn their CEO’s dreams of progress from a nuts-and-bolts strategic plan into reality—an outcome that requires emotional commitment.

This article examines several important factors to consider for any leader who wants to achieve emotional buy-in and commitment.

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• 3 Keys to Leadership Success
• The Greater Good: Character Matters
• The Leadership Trust Gap
• Pay Disparities
• Nonverbal Communications
• Clear Vision
• Cohesive Culture
• Emotions Matter: An Action Plan

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Why are some people happy, and others not?

Is happiness associated with a better life, greater luck or fewer worries and upsets?

Or, is it a question of character?

People who are highly satisfied with their lives are less likely to have psychological or social problems, less likely to get sick or be stressed out, and more likely to do well at work.

Luck and problems happen to everyone, so is it possible that some individuals are genetically wired to be happy?

Hardwired for Happiness

Current research reveals that mood and temperament do have a large genetic component. In a 1996 study, University of Minnesota psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen surveyed 732 pairs of identical twins and found them closely matched for adult happiness, regardless of whether they’d grown up together or apart.

Such findings suggest that while we all experience ups and downs, our moods revolve around the emotional baselines, or “set points,” with which we’re born.

Even if we have an inherited range of happiness, tools are available to help us become happier and more satisfied with life. And while some research indicates 40% of our capacity for happiness may be genetically predisposed, more than 60% depends on our own motivations, goals and behaviors.

This article examines the research that suggests 3 steps will improve our levels of happiness.

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• Hardwired for Happiness
• The Little Things That Count
• The Control Factor
• Intervention 1: The Gratitude Visit
• Intervention 2: Three Good Things
• Intervention 3: Top Strengths
• Coaching for Happiness
• Resources on Happiness

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What can we learn about inspirational leadership from successful start-up companies? Conversely, what can failed corporations teach us?

Think about the inspirational leaders of Apple, Amazon and Southwest Airlines. You can probably name them: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Jeff Bezos, and Herb Kelleher.

Next, try to name the leaders of General Motors, TiVo and AOL during the same period. Some were good, but very few left a leadership legacy that was strong enough to ensure future success.

Hundreds of newly published business books attempt to define the qualities of great business leaders, while claiming that leadership can be learned. But can it? Why do CEOs at top-notch companies fail to provide truly inspirational leadership?

Apparently, leadership is not easily learned or practiced, even though myriad resources—from leadership development programs to executive coaches—exist.

The situation is truly puzzling: We know competition is fierce, and most candidates for senior leadership positions are highly qualified, experienced and deeply engaged in their work. Lousy bosses are commonly weeded out in the long run, and competent bosses are usually promoted. Why, then, do so many good managers lack the requisite leadership skills?

There are as many different formulas for leadership development as there are brands of cereals at your local supermarket.

One consultant suggests it is rare for leaders to start with “why,” but when they do, they inspire people to follow them with unprecedented loyalty and passion.

Here’s how leaders should start with why they believe in what they do.

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• Leading with Why
• The Why of Apple
• Creating Loyalty
• Creating Dream Jobs
• The Brain Science of Inspiration
• The Shift from Why to How and What

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