Positive Leadership In Practice

This book aims to help leaders become the best versions of themselves, achieve extraordinary results, and help their team accomplish the same. Packed with research and practical advice from real-life positive leaders, it offers an extensive look into both what high-performance leadership is and how it can be achieved. Positive Leadership in Practice is a resource that all leaders can tap into to be more effective. The book introduces an ALIGHT model that guides leaders through six fundamental resources that can alight their own and their team’s motivation and transform their performance to an extraordinary level. Further breaking down the six resources into 18 core components, the book expands on what constitutes the six resources to make them tangible and accessible. The book also offers leaders the opportunity to self-assess their own levels of resources and levels of positive leadership through a questionnaire, as well as opportunities to reflect on how to further develop these levels of resources and positive leadership. Finally, the book signposts practical strategies to tap into on the back of their reflections to take action to become their best possible positive leader. This book is for existing and aspiring managers, leaders, and those with people-related roles such as in human resources, coaching, leadership development, and organisational consultants, as well as anyone in more informal leadership positions. After all, we are all leaders.

A Guide to Going beyond Success Plenty of research has been done on why companies go terribly wrong, but what makes companies go spectacularly right? That's the question that Kim Cameron asked over a decade ago. Since then, Cameron and his colleagues have uncovered the principles and practices that set extraordinarily effective organizations apart from the merely successful. In his previous book Positive Leadership, Cameron identified four strategies that enable these organizations, and the individuals within them, to flourish: creating a positive climate, positive relationships, positive communication, and positive meaning. Here he lays out specific tactics for implementing them. These are not feel-good nostrums—study after study (some cited in this book) have proven positive leadership delivers breakthrough bottom-line results. Thanks to Cameron's concise how-to guide, now any organization can be “positively deviant,” achieving outcomes that far surpass the norm.

This is a guide to positive climate, positive relationships, positive communication, and positive meaning and how to apply each of them in work.

Good leaders are necessary in both the business world and everyday life, but what exactly constitutes good, effective leadership? Contrary to popular belief, effective leadership is rare and good leaders are few and far between. In Do Good to Lead Well: The Science and Practice of Positive Leadership, Craig Dowden explains the psychology and science behind positive leadership and how we all can easily improve our leadership skills. Written for executives, leaders, and aspiring leaders who want to challenge the status quo of leadership--people who want to raise their game and have a transformative impact on themselves and the people around them--Do Good to Lead Well breaks down the Six Pillars of Positive Leadership: 1. Self-Awareness 2. Civility 3. Humility Craig's goal is to convey, on the deepest level, that effective leadership is not a choice between doing the right thing or being successful. It's about setting the example and doing good to lead well.

Positive leaders are able to dramatically expand their people’s—and their own—capacity for excellence. And they accomplish this without enormous expenditures or huge heroic gestures. Here leading scholars—including Adam Grant, author of the bestselling Give and Take; positive organizational scholarship movement cofounders Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn; and thirteen more—describe how this is being done at companies such as Wells Fargo, Ford, Kelly Services, Burt’s Bees, Connecticut’s Griffin Hospital, the Michigan-based Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, and many others. They show that, like the butterfly in Brazil whose flapping wings create a typhoon in Texas, you can create profound positive change in your organization through simple actions and attitude shifts.

Nothing fully prepares one for service in a combat zone. When I was selected to command the NATO Air Training Command Afghanistan and the 438th Air Expeditionary Wing in Kabul, I had almost a quarter century of uniformed service to prepare me for this dynamic assignment. “Dynamic” because the mission would be to develop an independent, self-sustaining Afghan Air Force … in an active war zone. The book you hold in your hand is a collection of the most important lessons we learned. Lessons which anyone, be it a parent, pastor, politician, soldier, teacher, or office teammate, can use to begin transforming ordinary interactions into powerful, positive experiences. War zone not required. “I was honored to have served with General Michel in Afghanistan and observed first hand true leadership in practice under the most difficult conditions - In the Art of Positive Leadership, General Michel has captured the essence of the leadership style and skill that made him so successful in a theater of war - he has used a unique blending of axioms and stories, born from the very best leaders, in an amazingly powerful message about the techniques and impact of leaders that unselfishly focus on what can be, what should be, and the people that actually make it happen ~ John Johns, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (Maintenance)

In Positive Academic Leadership, Jeffrey Buller offers new insights and practical tools, as well as language and tactics, for fostering a more effective approach to leadership. With acumen and a dash of humor, he shows leaders how they can take the focus off the negative and change what they say, their perspectives, and their strategies. This more constructive leadership style plays to the strengths of leaders rather than to the weaknesses of their institutions. Offering time-tested and fresh ideas for becoming the type of leader who acts as a coach, counselor, and conductor for faculty, staff, and students, Buller demonstrates how positive leadership can become a day-to-day practice. With its down-to-earth style, the book draws on the most current research on positive leadership in neuroscience, psychology, management, organizational behavior, and other disciplines and translates their lessons into readable and accessible recommendations. It then makes these recommendations come to life by providing real-world examples that illustrate how to implement positive leadership strategies in all spheres of the leader’s activities and institution. Positive Academic Leadership is a wise guide for transforming any leader’s attitude about inevitable daily crises into manageable challenges that are based on a philosophy of accepting the environment and situation but working to make things better.

This practical guide, the first to show how leaders can achieve extraordinary results through the positive energy generated by virtuous interactions with employees, is written by one of the giants in the study of positive leadership. This book reveals one of the most important but frequently ignored factors that lead to spectacular performance in organizations. Kim Cameron, a true pioneer in the study of positive leadership, offers validated scientific evidence that all individuals are inherently attracted to and flourish in the presence of positive energy, a principle known in biology as heliotropism. Further, he shows that the positive relational energy generated by leaders' virtuous behaviors—such as generosity, compassion, gratitude, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and kindness—is tightly linked to extraordinary organizational outcomes like greater innovation, higher profits, and increased engagement and retention. Cameron has not written a feel-good tome about the power of positive thinking, “happiology,” or unbridled optimism. This research-based explanation shows how to achieve performance that exceeds expectations. He provides practical suggestions, assessments, and exercises showing how leaders can improve their own positive energy and increase positive relational energy in their organizations. Positively Energizing Leadership is a major contribution to the theory and practice of leadership.