“Where is the Happiest Place on Earth (Hint: You will find Positive Leadership)?”.

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTIONER

Title: Positive Leadership

Competencies: leadership, self-development

Who benefits: project leads, team leaders, supervisors, managers, executives

Consultant Usage: general education, coaching education, referrals, training materials

What’s it about? I have been coming across the term “positive leadership” in my never ending search for material for my postings.  I decided to delve a bit deeper.

My ramblings seemed to pick up a trail blazed a few weeks ago by my colleague Ken Nowack in his posting of “Where is the Happiest Place on Earth (Hint: It Isn’t Disneyland)?”.  Happier work places tend to be healthier and more productive work places. 

There already exist a branch of psychology call positive psychology.  I realize that this not new to some of you dear readers; but it is new to me and it is kind of fun to report on my research journey.  I found the Journal of Positive Psychology.  That lead to an interesting looking book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want (2008) by Sonja Lyubomirsky and her equally interesting website (although, in fairness and hopefully this doesn’t make anyone unhappy, the website could use some serious editing). 

That led to an Amazon Best Seller, Stumbling on Happiness (2007 paperback edition), by Harvard Professor of Psychology Daniel Gilbert.  Wow!  All this stuff is starting to make me feel good all over!!

Jumping forward a bit, this led to new stuff on organizational happiness and the title of this week’s posting.  There is Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance by Kim Cameron (2007).  The book claims “a new leadership field of the same name, Positive Leadership presents a concise, accessible and practical guide to strategies that can help leaders reach beyond ordinary success to achieve extraordinary effectiveness, spectacular results, and positively deviant performance.”  Positive deviant behavior!  You gotta love that!

Her leadership book is based upon Positive Organizational Scholarship: Foundations of a New Discipline (2003), which she coauthored.  The book description says POS establishes a new field of study in the organizational sciences and which examines a variety of positive dynamics in businesses and organizations that give rise to extraordinary outcomes.

From this beginning come new courses, such as Positive Leadership: Creating Spectacular Organizational Success and Positive Leadership: Building Extraordinary Personal Leadership Capabilities  from the University of Michigan and Positive Leadership: Leveraging Strengths to Optimize Performance from the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

Or if one course isn’t enough, you can go positively giddy and and pursue a Master of Science in Positive Organizational Development from Case Western Reserve University.

So if you are in the pursuit of happiness, click on some of the above links and see where they take you.  I did and loved the journey. 

Hope it makes you happy!  Catch you later.

 

[tags]positive psychology, positive leadership, Journal of Positive Psychology, happiness, creating success, leveraging strengths, positive organizational development, positive organizational scholarship, bill bradley, william bradley,  bradley[/tags]

 

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.