'Rebecca came into my office smiling and bouncy. She chuckled to herself as she sat down. I asked her how she was doing.
"I am great. My business just closed out the best year ever. I’ve done three award-winning projects this year. I am finding that I don’t even really need to do any marketing anymore; people are seeking me out to do business. I think part of it is the environment, and part of it is the good job my team does."
Would it surprise you to know that Rebecca then proposed a radical redesign of her business?
I was surprised. Why redesign a business that was so obviously successful? Rebecca explained it this way:
"When things are really good, that’s a great place to make decisions from."
She is right. Consider that recent studies in brain neuroscience confirm that positive emotional and social approaches to work are correlated with creativity, open-mindedness and insight.
It is advantageous to be in a "great place" when facing business decisions. Yet creating that great place isn’t just a coincidence. A positive leadership approach maximises your opportunity for success in conducting change.
Rebecca focused on three things in an effort to create a "great place" in her organisational environment:
Strengths-focused management. Positive leaders change the nature of the conversations they have with their teams and organisations. Rebecca consistently directed her conversations to discover what strengths could be found in a situation - these can be individual strengths, team strengths or organisational strengths.
Rebecca’s goal is to always work to best align professional tasks with strength-based talent on her team.
Seek solutions. Second, positive leaders encourage solution seeking rather than problem solving. To succeed with solution seeking, Rebecca would encourage her team to envision a problem as already solved. What would be different if it were? What would people be doing differently? What processes would be changed? Once these are identified, Rebecca challenged her team to find ways to begin to act in these new ways now - jumpstarting the change to the solution.
Celebrate successes. Finally, a success orientation means recognising success wherever and whenever it occurs. It makes no difference if the success is small or large.
Leadership is not static, and team members and organisations require feedback. Rebecca’s persistent recognition of true success built a clear pathway to more success.
Rebecca credits her positively-minded leadership with helping her team sustain their vision and goals, which supported them as they weathered the challenges they faced in their radical redesign of the firm.'
You may not be able to wait until the "great place" arrives before making critical decisions about your organisation. Putting some of these positive practices in place, however, may just lead you to a better place and put you and your team in a position to seek successful solutions to your business challenges.
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