Tools every senior leader needs to inspire

0
267

How to be a great leader: positive psychology tools every CEO or senior leader needs to inspire, empower and motivate their team. Great leadership is a skill that can be honed, nurtured and developed. Great positive leadership is what is going to make you, as a great leader, memorable and effective. Based in the science of Positive Psychology, I’m going to be sharing with you my 5 Steps to Flourishing Framework, that’ll not only have you inspiring, empowering and motivating your team, but also feeling fulfilled, aligned and happy doing it. Because the power of positive psychology is in the incredible ripple effect it has on those practising these simple, yet highly effective tools.

Before I delve into each of the 5 steps, here they are in summary:

Step 1 – Deeply connect with your why

Step 2 – Know your true self

Step 3 – Work with your strengths

Step 4 – Cultivate positive emotions

Step 5 – Strategise your success

These are steps that any leader, CEO or senior manager can take both individually and collectively with your team. Let’s delve into each step…

Deeply connect with your why

This is the fundamental first step that enables you to feel more aligned than ever before with your mission, values and purpose. Without these core elements, impactful leadership will be difficult to achieve. Deeply connecting with your why is essential for clarity, connection and focus and when a leader embodies these things, they filter down through your team.

My recommendation is that you start with your own personal why, before using the same tools to explore the why of your company or organisation (the two may well overlap). A great way to get started with this exploration, is to brainstorm all the things that are important to you and that make your life meaningful. Look at what and who inspires you and make a note of those qualities. Reflect on what gives you purpose when you wake up in the morning and what leads you to feeling fulfilled. Once you have a collection of words, phrases and thoughts, you can start to look inwardly to really connect with the most common themes.

If you are a visual processor, you might enjoy a positive psychology tool called ‘Values tattoo’, where you create a visual representation of all the words, thoughts and feelings that come up during this exploration – you can do this physically or online using a tool like Pinterest.

Explore company-wide values, purpose and mission with your team and encourage interpretation, thoughts and feedback. Having this conversation 2-3 times per year, restores group connection to the wider vision and encourages open communication and teamwork.

Know your true self

This step involves you really getting to know yourself and your team as individuals and seeing each person for who they truly are. Knowing more about what makes each person tick, enables you to effectively communicate, motivate and bring out the best in them. A great place to start is by drawing on the psychology of personality types, which allows you to identify things including: what energises each person, how they are likely to perceive the world around them, how they may naturally respond to situations or challenges and how they  make decisions.

The most familiar application of personality types in psychology is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which draws on the psychology of Carl Jung. But a great, informal way to begin this exploration with yourself and your team is by using this free online tool: 16  personalities.

Once you have an understanding of the individual, you can lead more effectively, adapting communication styles, working environments and even performance measuring to really get the most out of each individual. Recognising this in yourself too can lead to more effective ways of working, managing time and decision-making.

Work with your strengths

Great leadership comes from knowing your strengths and lesser strengths and leaning into doing more of what you’re great at and delegating or getting support for the things you’re not so great at. The same goes for those you manage. Not everyone is going to be good at everything but within your team, you’ll have an array of incredible natural talents and strengths that may be going unidentified, untapped and/or underutilised.

Many individuals are unaware of their natural strengths, as in childhood and education, we can often be conditioned to focus on the things we’re not so good at; our “weaknesses”. Without that awareness, you may find it difficult to truly motivate and get the most out of our team (and yourself). Using a positive psychology tool like the Gallup Clifton Strengths Finder, can help you unlock talent, skills and energy within yourself and those around you, for better performance and ultimately success.

A great positive leadership strategy is to look at the strengths within your team as a collective and explore where there may be an abundance of particular strengths and gaps in others. Empowering your team to see their own strengths and each other’s not only builds self-confidence but also confidence in communication and building relationships within the team. It’s a great positive talking-point for individuals to recognise themselves in this way.

Cultivate positive emotions

A cornerstone of the positive psychology field is the importance of instilling positive emotions in your daily life. Martin Seligman’s ‘PERMAH’ theory of flourishing, places positive emotions at the forefront of his model. A plethora of research supports that positive emotions lead to higher levels of happiness and wellbeing – and within the workplace, leads to better performance, loyalty and employee retention.

And positivity is contagious, so great positive leadership will harbour great positive results. A tool you can use personally is to list 10 things that bring you joy – it could be anything. Then highlight three of those things and challenge yourself to include them in your daily routine for a minimum of two weeks. Encourage your team to do the same and enjoy reflecting on that together and sharing the positive impact it has on their daily work-life.

Strategise Success

Positive psychology isn’t as simple as just feeling happy and expecting great things to happen. Although there are hundreds of tools to adopt and utilise that are simple and incredibly powerful, it is important to apply a level of strategy to this kind of development. The best results come from effective goal-setting, accountability and evaluation.

So in order to be the greatest leader you can be, it’s integral to strategise your own success, as well as that of your team. Think about how you can measure performance, benchmark success and clearly communicate with your team. Infuse positivity in every step; communication, feedback and reward, to boost morale and performance.

Of course this article is just an introduction to my framework and the incredible impact that infusing positive psychology can have on your leadership, but I hope it serves to give you some food for thought and motivation to explore this incredible notion further.