Four Ideas for a Positive Workforce

The employees you supervise can't win if they already feel defeated. Here's how to lift morale—and productivity

By John R. Ryan

I've been privileged to work for many great organizations over the years, so it's always been a pleasure to show up at the office early and work late. "Thank God it's Friday" isn't a phrase I've ever really used. Indeed, Friday always seems to come up too fast.

"It's easy for you to say that," my late, wise father once said. "You've had a lot of senior leadership positions. It wasn't so easy for me to stay positive when I was a young, lowly sergeant in the Army." Yet my father did manage to keep his attitude positive even though he suffered a serious leg injury during World War II that never fully healed. He raised five children with my mother and enjoyed a very successful career in the civil service. His positive outlook helped him overcome some major challenges. Some intriguing research by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson reminds us why his good attitude mattered so much.

Fredrickson, Kenan Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive (Crown, 2009). The book captures the highlights of her 20 years of pioneering research on positive emotions. The bottom line, according to Fredrickson: People who think positively are more self-aware, innovative, and strategic. They can see the big picture more clearly than others.

Those are precisely the kinds of leaders we need in our organizations, especially in today's turbulent economy. In my own experience, I've found some people are just naturally positive. Others remain so insistently negative there's almost no point in trying to talk them out of it. But most of us fall somewhere in the middle, and we could benefit immensely from cultivating positivity in ourselves and others.

Attitude Changes

For those of us who believe we're too set in our ways to change our attitudes, there's some good news. As consultant David Rock wrote in the journal Strategy + Business, recent neuroscience research has found that "the human brain is highly plastic. Neural connections can be reformed, new behaviors can be learned, and even the most entrenched behaviors can be modified at any age." This is consistent with our own research and practical experience at the Center for Creative Leadership, where we've found that leaders are in fact made, rather than born, and that they can keep improving throughout their entire careers, provided they're willing to make the effort.

So it's very possible for people to change and become more effective professionals in the process. But, as leaders, how do we encourage them to do it? We should, of course, start with ourselves. Based on her research, Fredrickson recommends we try to experience positive emotions in a 3-to-1 ratio with negative ones. That's the tipping point, she says, at which our overall ability to see new possibilities and overcome challenges starts to grow exponentially. Her research shows that only 20 percent of Americans actually achieve that ratio on a regular basis. (You can take her quick test to see if you're one of them.)

As someone who has been fortunate to lead several large organizations, I'm particularly interested in how to cultivate positivity throughout entire workforces. A few key actions stand out in advice from experts and the lessons of my own career:

1) Express appreciation. Many years ago, I was a junior U.S. Navy pilot in the Mediterranean, serving on our newest nuclear aircraft carrier with the most modern aircraft in the U.S. Navy. The other aircraft carrier in the same area was our oldest conventional carrier with our oldest aircraft. But it outperformed ours in almost every way. We had a technically competent captain who was not a good communicator and rarely offered a compliment. When I visited the older carrier for a few days, it was immediately obvious that the captain there was a great communicator.

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