Foreword
In one of my earliest attempts to bring leadership research into companies, I was invited to Zurich by a large Swiss bank during the economic crisis to give a lecture on Positive Leadership in Uncertain Times. Instead of reading my short bio, a disgruntled senior leader, who had been forced by the Human Resources (HR) Department to introduce my session, came to the front of the room and said, "Hello. As you know, we don’t have bonuses for everyone, but here is a talk on happiness … from a guy from America.”
You can imagine the response. There was immediate nonverbal stonewalling from these cool, reserved Swiss bankers. Honestly, I was already nervous for this talk. I was a green, thirty-year-old researcher with massive educational debts about to lecture on leadership to ultra-wealthy, battle-hardened, fifty-year-old managing directors at one of the world’s largest banks. But what happened next was a significant learning moment for me.
About ten minutes into the talk, as I transitioned to explaining the scientific research that had been done on how to create rational optimism and to deepen social support in the midst of crisis, the senior leaders imperceptibly began leaning forward. Slowly, many began quietly picking up pens and inconspicuously looking for notepads. By the break, ninety minutes into the session, I could not even get to the coffee machine to try one of their fancy espressos because the leaders were flooding me with questions about research that could apply to their team’s specific problems. When I finished the three-hour session, I was told by the global head of HR that I would be visiting all of their banking centers in Asia, Europe, and the United States during the banking crisis.
What happened? This book is what happened. The engaged response in Zurich was not about me, it was about the power of positive organizational scholarship. Those Swiss bankers were willing to listen because they respected the rigor with which those researched findings were sought, and they could see the leadership value of those conclusions. Scientifically validated research and focused study of thriving leaders and organizations are the keys to opening minds to real and quantifiable positive change. Without them, we are left with vague motivational statements and a risky reliance on faith in the lecturer rather than in the concepts.
If we want to change the way that organizations work, we need to learn deeply, embrace fully, and communicate effectively this positive research.
Research, of course, is not without error; it is intentionally organic, responding to new findings and rejecting mistaken ones. You will see in this book that these brilliant scholars wrestle with the ideas of their predecessors and contemporaries. But with research comes the ability to extend beyond a single person’s ideas to an entire latticework of intrepid scholars seeking to cancel the noise and to find the signal.
It is my belief that there are two major impediments to change. Either we do not know how to change, or we do not believe change is possible. In this book, we attempt to remove these obstacles by helping individuals overcome both mental and physical barriers to change.
Warning: this is not a normal book. Most books do not need instructions; this one does. Most books neatly lay out one or two ideas, all with the same style and structure, and then pound it home. This book is different. The academic scholars who have contributed to this book hail from various universities throughout the nation, and they focus on their own individual topics. If the goal is to get the best information all at once, in truth, no one person could write this book. The collected nature of this book allows you to go directly to the sources of the research to learn how best to use the findings. Perhaps this approach is comparable to the difference between eating boiled, buttered vegetables—where some of the nutrition is cooked out to make it easy to swallow—and eating raw vegetables. This book is more raw than the average reader might be used to, but perhaps the ideas have a greater potential to create positive change.
So I would suggest reading this book as if you were going through an incredible semester of classes taught by rock-star professors. Note well that they all have different styles, just like your favorite professors did in college. Remember that in some classes, you needed to take diligent notes. In others, you needed to scan quickly for the answers you knew would be asked later. In some, you just need to let the information flow over you and hope to absorb genius by osmosis. The key is to take what you can and to apply it immediately. This research is useless unless it is lived. Do not let this book languish on your shelf. Pull the things you need from this text and champion its overarching conclusions: your behavior matters, and the more positively you lead, the more successful and happy your organization, family, and community will become.
I am excited by this book, as you can probably tell; these scholars are at the vanguard of their field. Just think about a leader you know at an organization right now who is faced with a challenge. Maybe they want to know how to respond positively to a disengaged team at a call center, or how to help a hospital deal with changes to regulations, or how to overcome culture chasms between two newly merged airlines. It would be incredible for that person to have an entire brain trust of whip-smart individuals who would spend every waking hour for a decade thinking, discussing, writing, and researching about that very question. You are holding that brain trust. And after reading and digesting this book fully, you will become that brain trust for your organization. For you are what you read.
Since that learning moment in Zurich, I have had the privilege of lecturing in fifty countries and at over a third of the Fortune 100, and I have noticed something interesting. Every company explains to me how they are going through unheard-of change, stress, and workload that differentiates them from every other company or industry. The uniqueness of their situation cannot be the case. And change, stress, and workload are integral parts of work in the modern world; we should not be surprised to find them there.
What I believe is different is this: we have reached a unique time where we can no longer increase working hours and workloads expecting to maximize productivity. We have tripped over the top of the time-management curve and now find the old way of leading, that is, "work harder, longer, and faster,” is causing us to work slower, shorter, and more unhappily. We are seeing some of the greatest rates of job dissatisfaction in the history of polling, and younger generations are demanding a change. By immersing yourself in the research in this book, you can help your organization to navigate to a different place by using a different leadership formula. As I wrote in Before Happiness, "the greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy is a positive and engaged brain.” This book is the research basis for how we can get our brains and organizations to move toward both "positive” and "engaged.”
Many of the things that fill the pages of this book could be derived from common sense. But common sense is not common action. Companies and leaders that heed this information will be leading flourishing businesses of the future. A tectonic plate shift is occurring in the nature of how we conceive of work, and those that attempt to reinvent the wheel or do business as usual without a focused, research-based approach to leadership will suffer the fate of the quite fearsome but also quite extinct T. rex.
In conclusion, we need you. You are the final ingredient. We need more people finding ways to make this research come alive and to take it beyond the walls of academia into a world that could desperately use it. Information alone will not cause transformation. Sometimes in life, we just do things and they manage to work out. But if you want to truly sustain positive change, you have to understand how to create it well enough to replicate it and to teach it to others.
We hope this book fuels you as you bring this research to life.