Many of my clients approach me asking: which leadership approach is the “correct” one? What can I “use” in a new work environment – or with international teams – or in digital organisations – or when all of these factors are combined….
My usual answer is: You need to start with yourself. Tools and checklists are nice to have but will not make you a great leader. With Positive Leadership, you can work on a basic mindset that will help you in no matter which organizational setting. You know what I mean.. #VUCA #agile #newwork #findyourwhy ;)
Positive Leadership? What is this now? What does it mean in practice and, above all, how does it work?
“If leader focuses on the weaknesses of his people instead on their strengths he should not be a leader.” You think this sounds like social romanticism? This statement comes from Peter Drucker, one of the best-known US economists. He is regarded as a pioneer of modern management theory.
Back to Positive Leadership. It all startet with a very well known scientist who, shortly spoken, could be called the founder of Positive Psychology: Martin Seligman. Beeing one of the world’s most renowned university professors, he criticized the fact that academic psychology deals almost exclusively with the suffering of people. He called for research into success, strengths, life satisfaction, above-average performance, resilience, etc. to be conducted in a scientifically sound manner.
More than 10 years after the foundation of Positive Psychology, Martin Seligman presented a framework model based on the numerous results of research in this field, which defines the conditions that people need to “bloom” their strengths.
The concept, which can be remembered with the acronym “PERMA “ describes 5 basic leadership principles:
(P) Enabling positive emotions
(E) Promoting individual engagement
(R) Shaping sustainable relationships
(M) To convey meaning in work
(A) Making achievements visible
The research results show, for example, that this style of leadership reduces sick leave and stress and leads to an increase in performance. Being a very valuable basic framework, at crispy & resch we like to look at leadership from various perspectives.
That’s why in our trainings we never only focus on one concept but combine the findings from different theories. We will soon present you more concepts out of the Positive Leadership Family to give you an idea of what we focus on in our training: Positive Leadership for New Work Leaders.
Find out more in our Leadership Training: Positive Leadership for New Work Leaders
References:
Seligman, M. E. (2012). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being.
Simon and Schuster. Ebner, M. (2019). Positive leadership. Leading successfully with PERMA-Lead: the five keys to high performance. Facultas Publishers.
Ebner, M. (2019). Positive leadership – social romanticism or sound leadership style? wissen.blitz (196). https://wissensdialoge.de/positive-leadership
