BUILDING POSITIVE LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONS

Building Positive Leadership and OrganizationsNew Mind Executives introduces new and highly practical tools that enable organizations and leaders to cultivate a cul-ture of Positivity and strengths’ based management. Those tools have been developed by the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business. Our aim is to inspire and facilitate leaders to build high-performing organizations that bring out the best in people.

Positive Organizations: What they are

“A positive organization is a place where people are flourishing as they work and as a result they are able to exceed per-formance expectations,” Prof. Robert Quinn.

A positive organization is filled with people who are empowered, fulfilled and engaged at work. People who embrace and live the positive mental map:

• Embrace the common good

• Seek growth

• Expand their roles

• See and seize new opportunities

• Nurture high-quality connections

• Exceed expectations

• Feel confident

• Overcome constraints

• Express their authentic voice

• Build social networks

• Embrace feedback

• Learn and flourish

Positive Leadership: The meaning

A positive leader creates an esprit de corps with his troops. Positive leaders deliberately increase the flow of positive emo-tions within their organization. They choose to do this not just because it is a “nice” thing to do for the sake of improving morale, but because it leads to a measurable increase in performance. Studies show that organizational leaders who share positive emotions have workgroups with:

What differentiates positive leaders from the rest? Instead of being concerned with what they can get out of their employ-ees, positive leaders search for opportunities to invest in everyone who works for them. They view each interaction with another person as an opportunity to increase his or her positive emotions.What is the essence of being a positive leader? Focusing on the best in others while working on becoming the best of ourselves.

By using our powerful and highly performance oriented tools:

• You can become a Positive Leader and build a Positive Organization.

• You can permanently transform the culture of your organization towards a positive, strengths’ based culture, where people can flourish.

• You experience immediate financial and time saving results

A MORE POSITIVE

MOOD

ENHANCED JOB

SATISFACTION

BETTER RESULTS

GREATER ENGAGEMENT

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

Our tools have been applied to hundreds of Fortune 1000 companies, Small and Medium Size Enterprises and Universities such as

Our tools are used around the globe: United States, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Great Britain Hong Kong, France, Israel, Korea, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, etc.

1.Reciprocity Ring®

Reciprocity Ring® is a guided collaboration exercise that generates High Quali-ty Connections, strengthens networks and builds social capital. Participants are trained to make SMART requests and contribute to a “pay it forward” culture.

“A positive organization is a place where people are flourishing as they work and as a result they are able to exceed per-formance expectations,” Prof. Robert Quinn.

A positive organization is filled with people who are empowered, fulfilled and engaged at work. People who embrace and live the positive mental map:

PROVEN PERFROMANCE

• >30,000 from +15 years used globally

• Single session typically generates $150,000 - $480,000 in value realized

• Time saved > 1,600 per session

• Measured increase in positive sentiment, decrease in negative sentiment among users

• Initiates generalized reciprocity and strengthens networks

Case Study of Price Waterhouse Coopers©

ENGAGEMENT BEFOREReciprocity Ring®

ENGAGEMENT AFTERReciprocity Ring®

How it works? A group is gathered for the purpose of members asking for something important for them in their personal or professional lives. It typically takes about two and a half hours and the results can be very powerful. The request is put out to the group and participants make connections, offer introductions, contacts or more tangible help with achieving member’s goals.

LogisticsAllow 1.5 hours to complete one round of the Reciprocity Ring® activity, 2.5 hours for two rounds. A typical session in-cludes introduction, one or two rounds, and a debrief. A group of 15-24 people learn the depth of resource available all around them. For larger groups multiple Reciprocity Rings® are run at the same time.

Delivery FormatThe Reciprocity Ring® activity can be delivered by the licensee’s leaders, trainers, and/or facilitators after training with the Humax® training pack. Supporting materials include Power Point presentations, written instructions, training videos, and more.

“Key to the effectiveness of our Global Project Team Leaders is their ability to work effectively in our highly matrixed organization. Behavior learned in the Reciprocity Ring® continues to be practiced.” –Carol S. Maskin, M.D., Vice President Product Realization/Drug Innovation.

“Reciprocity Ring – a remarkable experience that changes the way we see helping,

problem-solving, & social networks”. – Adam Grant, Wharton Professor, author of Give & Take and Originals.

2. Reflected Best Self Exercise

Born from empirical research at the Center for Positive Or-ganizations, uses stories collected from people in all con-texts of their life to help them un¬derstand and articulate who they are and how they contribute when they are at their best. With this new insight, the employee will feel im-mediately strengthened and connected to others, experi-ence clarity about who he/she is at his/her best, and refine personal development goals to be their best self more of-ten. The RBSE guides the employees step-by-step through the process of identifying potential respondents, making the request for feedback, creating their a priori best-self portrait, analyzing their reflected best-self stories, creating a new, reflected best-self portrait, and translating that por-trait into proactive steps for living at their best.

Their reflected best self is anchored in their strengths, rath-er than their weaknesses. We define strengths broadly to include:

• Their talents, or naturally endowed features and abilities;

• Their core competencies, or personal skills and resources that enable them to add unique value to any situation;

• Their principles, or deeply held personal values about the appropriate way to accomplish their goals; and,

• Their identity, or the aspects of their personal background (e.g., culture, gender, education, profession, socio-econom-ic class) that enable them to provide a distinct perspective on organizational and societal issues.

The Reflected Best Self Exercise seeks to help the employee identify her best. Her best self is what makes her unique, rare, and difficult to imitate. It is her source of sustained competitive advantage. Becoming familiar with these qualities helps her see where she has the potential to add unique value in the world.

Used correctly, the RBS exercise can help you tap into un-recognized and unexplored areas of potential. Armed with a constructive, systematic process for gathering and ana-lyzing data about your best self, you can burnish your per-formance at work.In the end, the strength-based orientation of the RBS ex-ercise helps you get past the “good enough” bar. Once you discover who you are at the top of your game, you can use your strengths to better shape the positions you choose to play—both now and in the next phase of your career.

a British executive coach, wrote

“Reflected Best Self is easily the most powerful feedback oriented intervention I’ve used in the last few years with cli-ents… For me, it goes to the very heart of positive psycholo-gy. That is, you are already good, already unique and already accomplished. For positive change to occur, it’s a question of understanding and embodying those moments more than changing from the person you are to a different person. Like resolutions, so many personal visions are based on an ‘ought’ self (what i ought/must/should be like) when it is as simple as being at your best as often as possible.”

3. Job Crafting Exercise

What purpose does the Job Crafting Exercise serve?: Individuals often have opportunities to redesign their own jobs in ways that better align their jobs with their mo-tives (or the outcomes they want to get out of work), their strengths (or their strongest personal assets), and their passions (or the activities and topics that deeply interest them). The concept of “job crafting” captures this process of people making their jobs more engaging and fulfilling through self initiated changes to their formal job designs. The Job Crafting Exercise helps people: • Assess how their motives, strengths, and passions align with what they actually do on a day-to-day basis at work, and in response to this assessment,

• Diagnose ways to better achieve their motives, utilize and build on their strengths, and fulfill their passions.

How does the exercise work? To formulate a job crafting plan, the Job Crafting Exercise challenges participants to take a step back and think about their jobs in a new, visual way. This visual perspective en-ables participants to seek answers to a number of ques-tions at the same time, which helps them gauge how they allocate their time, energy, and attention between their day-to-day tasks and link these tasks with their motives, strengths, and passions in a fairly clear, concise, and sim-ple manner. The visual nature of the exercise—combined with the creativity that is fostered through the experience of playing with the tasks that compose one’s job as a flexi-ble set of building blocks—helps people generate positive attitudes with respect to their jobs, innovative insights and ideas on how to improve their lives at work, and resourceful solutions to problems that they did not see before doing the exercise.

How can people utilize job crafting?Using the Job Crafting Exercise Workbook, you first build a “before sketch,” breaking up your job into “task blocks” and grouping them by how much time and energy you spend on them. Then you create an “after diagram,” which is a more ideal but still realistic version of your job, a vision

of something to work toward. To build your after diagram, you revise the set of task blocks from your before sketch to better match your values, strengths, and passions, which are three key traits that are helpful drivers of job crafting. Going through this process can be really eye-opening for people — they often see opportunities for job crafting they never thought about before.

How can companies best use the Job Crafting Exercise?It’s very difficult for a company to stay innovative if every-one’s job stays the same. We’ve found that it’s most effective when an entire workgroup or team is doing the exercise to-gether with the manager’s support and a facilitator. While you’re constructing your job crafting plan, you can talk with others who will be involved and might be able to help you execute it, and you can see how you may be able to help others implement their plans. You might see, for instance, that you’d like to spend less time on a particular task and learn that a co-worker is actually seeking to spend more time on it, so you could arrange a task swap that would be a win-win.

What’s in it for the employer?The effects of the Job Crafting Exercise were tested in an experiment at Google. Participating in a job crafting work-shop led employees to be significantly happier and more effective in their jobs six weeks later, based on ratings from their peers and managers. Although some job crafting may be good for the employee but not his or her company, our research suggests that, on average, it’s good for both.

Testimonials• “The Job Crafting™ Exercise has enabled team members to more clearly define how their values, strengths, and pas-sions connect to what they do on a day-to-day basis. This

insight has really helped people identify who they are and tap into what is most important to them at work, which has made a tremendous difference for us.” -Brian Welle (People Analytics Director, Google)

• “The Job Crafting™ Exercise has become a key compo-nent of our leadership training program. It gives leaders a powerful, creative, and clear method for reshaping their roles in ways that are not only inspiring and productive for them, but also for their teams. This innovative tool never fails to earn high ratings in our program evaluations.” -Gin-ny Vanderslice, Ph.D. (President & Founding Partner, Praxis Consulting)

STRENGTH PASSION MOTIVE

4. Positive Leadership™ The Game

OverviewPositive Leadership The Game™ is an interactive card game designed for leaders at all levels that helps you generate innovative solutions to business problems through struc-tured brainstorming. Played in groups of 3-10 people, this game uses the underlying principles of positive organi-zations to spark multiple strategies for leading positive change and development. Furthermore, it helps you create a more flourishing workforce that greatly exceeds perfor-mance expectations. This game is an exercise in structured brainstorming on behalf of others to help discover possible paths to flourishing and high performance.

Why use a game format? The game format helps people to engage more deeply in the structured brainstorming exercise. The competition inherent in the game creates fo-cus and engagement. The game also engenders a sense of playfulness. Play is a central force for social life and is a key mechanism for creating high quality connections between people. Help seeking unlocks latent resources embedded within the group of likely invisible. And helping behavior generates positive emotions.

ApplicationsPositive Leadership The Game ™ is a card deck equipped with 88 positive stategies derived from scientific claims in Positive Organizational Scholarship. Possible uses of the card deck include:

• Group Workshops: Groups of approximately five people can play the game in its intended form to share positive leadership strategies and solutions with each other.

• Business Discussion Topics: Organizations can use the positive strategy cards to generate strategic discussions and spur innovative thinking.

• Inspirational Leadership Quotes: Individuals can use the positive strategy cards as inspirational quotes or advice in a business setting.

5. Task Enabling™ Exercise

The Task-Enabling™ Exercise (TEE™) improves how you help others and how they help you. By focusing on a specific task, project, or goal, you reflect on all the people who as-sist you, as well as what they do that is effective and in-effective. The TEE™ then guides you step-by-step through the process to assess who you help, analyze and identify task-enabling patterns with peers/subordinates and lead-ers/managers, devise action steps, and commit to making task enabling a habit. This process makes task enabling, or helping, more visible, intentional, thoughtful, and impactful for you and for others.

OverviewLeaders and coaches at work (and in life!) can be more effective and health-ier if they better understand how to encourage and facilitate better task enabling. Effective task enabling be-tween two people, or members of a team, builds higher-quality connec-tions. Higher-quality connections foster greater trust, respect, improve coordination and collaboration, and enhance creativity, resilience, and en-gagement.

Four key principles underlie the pow-er of task enabling and are represent-ed in the infinity loop diagram below.

• When people are mindful of how they help others in tasks, and are mindful of how they receive help, they increase their chances of devel-oping stronger task-enabling habits.

• If people are mindful of who task enables them, it calls forth gratitude, which improves emotional and phys-ical health, and can increase the qual-ity of relationships with individuals,

teams, or whole organizations. • If people are mindful of whom they task enable, it fosters generosity, which increases the desire to further help, as well as cultivates happiness and well-being.

• When people seek feedback on how they task enable others, and how they accept help as well, they open them-selves to infinite ways to enhance their task-enabling effec-tiveness.

Basis in ResearchThe Task-Enabling™ Exercise (TEE™) is the product of a collaboration of faculty, staff, and students at the Center for Posi-tive Organizations at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. The TEE™ is based on research published by Jane E. Dutton in Energize Your Workplace: How to Create and Sustain High-Quality Connections at Work (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), as well as research that documents the value of effective interpersonal helping at work (and beyond).

“The methods and reflections in the Task-Enabling™ Exercise have helped me to get a better understanding of which tasks should be shared with others that would benefit not only the individual but the team as a whole. I would recommend this training to leaders and team members like who are looking to foster an environment with more effective communication and overall healthier work collaborations.” Kela Green McClure, Director of Human Resources

Others’ TaskEnabling of Me

My TaskEnablingof OthersMe

Learning

Gratitude Generosity

Learning

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