3 min read
How long does a choice take?
This was a question asked at a recent workshop on Positive Leadership in Safety. We were discussing Positive Leadership strategies to help cultivate safe and thriving cultures within the site, and over the two days we came up with an impressive list of practical strategies and actions the leadership group wanted to implement. One leader expressed his concern that as much as he loved the concepts, he didn’t feel he had the time to action them. His colleague gently encouraged him by asking him and the rest of the group to think about how long a choice takes.
It was a fantastic reframe and one that really highlighted the fact that being a positive leader comes down to choice, and these choices can often be made within seconds. This might look like:
- Choosing to spend a minute checking in and assessing what mindset you are choosing before you walk into the workplace
- Choosing to increase your self-awareness by labelling the emotions you are feeling at any given moment of communication importance
- Choosing to switch the emotion or the energy you are feeling to one that is better suited for a particular interaction
- Choosing to deliberately pick words that will pull people towards the outcome you want as opposed to push them away from it
- Choosing to involve your team by updating them with what is happening so that they aren’t left in the dark, triggering the threat response from the perceived uncertainty
- Choosing to recognise great work and back it up by active constructive responding, a communication style that examines the different types of responses we give to other people’s good news or achievements. Shelly Gable, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, found that when calling out someone’s great work, we can take it one step further to savour the positive emotions by asking questions such as how they feel about it, how they did it, and what they can share about it
‘Today I’m going to show up as the worst version of myself’….said no-one! Yet showing up as the best version of ourselves does require deliberate thought and action – it doesn’t always come naturally when we are influenced by everything else going on in and around our lives. Flourishing can often be put at the bottom of our priority list – we may mistakenly believe that it takes up too much time or that there are other things more important to deal with first.
The reason why it is important is that it outweighs the effort. We do our best work when we are in a positive (Gable 2000) frame of mind.
Practicing positive leadership can be as effortless as switching on a light switch, which like the bulb that lights up the room, can amplify people’s positive mindsets and emotions, creating powerful ripple effects that make it worth spending those seconds to make the best choice.
