The Secret to being a Powerful Leader

“Hi, I’m Paul Charisma with the Happiness Experts Company. Do you want to be a kick-ass leader? This video will explain exactly how you can have an oversized role in any organization that you belong to. We think that influence is the key character trait that defines a great leader. So, the guy or gal who influences the most people must be the one who gets the corner office and eventually becomes a CEO. Turns out that this is simply wrong. The fact is that the character trait that most frequently elevates individuals to senior management roles is positive energy.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So, stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, the work I’m sharing with you today is based on many years of dedicated research by Kim Cameron and others. His area of expertise is organizational effectiveness. Now, at the end of today’s video, I’ll give you a simple evaluation tool for you to measure your own leadership traits.

Now, what do we mean by the term positive leadership? Quite literally, we’re talking about the behaviors to give other people motivation, hope, where they share their happy emotions, and contribute to good social relations. Now, we rarely consciously work on the energy of our businesses, right? I mean, it’s not something that makes an agenda item for a typical meeting. But when asked about it, almost everyone can comment on the energy in their workplace. As well, we all know and can informatively talk about the good or bad energy of our colleagues.

When I was still in a big bureaucratic organization, I always saw my role, at least in part, was to save my team members from the poison of the worst of the negative people. In the unionized environments where I work, it sometimes was exceptionally difficult to fire someone. So, I made it my mission to either fix them, which was rarely successful, or build a wall around them, sometimes literally and sometimes by giving them narrow assignments where they had little engagement with other members of the team.

But the opposite consideration was equally, if not more important, was I maximizing the good that the positive leaders were capable of? Research shows that you can actually accurately assess the positive leaders in your organization. Really, it can be as simple as asking the workforce, ‘Can you name the two to three most energizing people that you work with?’ Now, the people who get named consistently and often are your positive leaders, and they are not necessary leaders in the traditional hierarchical sense, at least not yet.

These energy leaders show some or all of these typical behavior patterns: They smile, they are proactive problem solvers, they volunteer to help people with no ex of payback, they have very high standards, they instill confidence in others, and they see opportunities. Contrast this with people who take away from the quality of energy in a workplace: They seek credit for themselves, they see problems and have lots of complaints, they’re somber and seldom smile, they gossip, they’re inflexible, and they reject feedback.

Now, we all know someone who’s Adi energizer. Consider yourself: Are you adding or subtracting from the constructive energy of the groups you work with? Dr. Cameron’s research makes clear that organizations that consciously invest in creating positive leadership get big, big results. Not goofy feel-good stuff, but concrete, bottom-line improvements: More innovation, higher quality, improved customer satisfaction, more productivity and profitability, and no surprise, much better employee retention. We all want to be around people who generate optimism and momentum.

Your boss, unconsciously, is looking for the key people who naturally change the tone and character of the workplace. Dr. Cameron nicely sums up the science with the famous quote from John Quincy Adams, he says, ‘If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are a leader.’ Now, being a positive leader is equally applicable in workplaces as it is in families, sports teams, and any group that regularly works and plays together.

As promised, I have a great resource for you so that you can effectively measure your own positive leadership traits. It’s at the link just below. Now, it’s my life’s mission to help the world be a bit happier. So please, like and share this video and comment, and then you’ll make the world happier too. And if you’d like to see more of this kind of video content, please subscribe to my channel. That’s it for now. I’m Paul Crisper, your happiness expert. Thanks for watching.”