Rotarian Lina Shatara introduced our speaker, Paul Boyles, a Maryville resident and longtime HR professional, who gave a presentation based on Jon Gordon’s book The Power of Positive Leadership.
“Positive leaders are actually more demanding,” said Boyles. “They set expectations and hold employees accountable. They view the world through a positive lens and always find a way forward. If you don’t have positivity, you can’t share it.”
He asked us how we nurture positivity in ourselves. The answers included Rotary, exercise, sleep, giving to others, and diet.
Paul shared the Einsteinian formula E + P = O, which he translated as Events + Perspective = Outcome. Quite a bit of a leader’s perspective comes from “self talk.” Paul gave the example on an Iron Man competitor who “talks to himself to say that he can do those demanding races. It’s all about shifting your state of mind. Leadership is a transferred belief. You want to show your team you believe in them.”
Paul mentioned an exercise in which teams take sticky notes and write encouraging words and pass them to the person to the right or left, and everyone is surprised to see the encouraging words from their co-workers.
More difficult in leadership is confronting, transforming, and removing negativity. Paul asked us what we do with complainers and energy vampires, the folks who suck the life out of us and a workplace. One method with complainers is to say, if you’re going to complain about something more than once, you have to come up with a solution. Energy vampires can be bosses, co-workers, external clients, or direct reports. How do we deal with each category? For co-workers, it was suggested to present the person about how it’s affecting others. For bosses, it was suggested to ask for feedback, then offer it in return. For direct reports, said Paul, energy-vampire behavior has to be addresses, or else it sends the wrong message to the rest of the staff.