Showing positive leadership at work (not uniting people in negativity)

As team leaders or managers in a large organisation we can sometimes feel powerless and frustrated by (amongst other things):

  • Clunky processes and systems
  • Changes to the organisation that you don’t want, which don’t seem sensible or weren’t explained well
  • Unreasonable sort deadlines and cumbersome reporting requirements.

Even though we might feel powerless in the context of the whole organisation, a team leader or manager has a lot of power over the workplace environment.  Every day when team members come to work, it is not senior managers who have a stark impact on the work life of team members, it is the team leader who influences the quality of the work day.

Large workplaces are inherently complex, changing and unwieldy and coming to grips with managing in this environment is an important part of being a good team leader.  The challenge is to show leadership to others in a way that creates a positive and constructive workplace.

When I was first a senior manager, it was always clear to me when I went to an office led by a constructive and positive manager by the behaviour of the people towards visitors and customers.  I saw other workplaces where there was leadership but it was not constructive.  I named that style ‘uniting people in negativity’.  In those places where people were united in negativity the behaviour was that people were:

  • suspicious of outsiders and critical of all senior managers
  • reluctant to make necessary or required changes
  • generally downcast and unhappy
  • loyal to their manager who they felt was protecting them from dangerous and unhelpful outsiders (that is, the rest of the organisation).

Uniting people in negativity is easy and cheap.  Easy because it creates an ‘us and them’ mentality which is relatively easy to build, and cheap because it does not ask people to take the harder, more resilient road of facing change constructively, providing good customer service and managing their ongoing personal and professional development (self-examination and personal accountability are lost in the uniting people in negativity approach because the focus is on what is being ‘done to them’).  It is a mentality that says ‘they are out to get us so let’s hunker down and hope it goes away’.

Good leadership is the choice to take a constructive and positive approach to the inevitable challenges at work in a way that supports others and keeps the focus on customers.  Good leadership is not about the position, it is about using good skills in self-management and in managing others by being as influential as possible to ‘unite people in positivity’.  There is room for realism, empathy for others, practicality and expressing emotions in this approach.  Some key actions for team leaders:

  • Listen to team members, acknowledge reactions and move towards constructive plans
  • Announce changes positively (as far as possible), give context and discuss options
  • Reinforce the choices people have about their responses
  • Give people accountability for actions and implementation
  • Take your best self to work every day and expect your team members to do the same.
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