Why Leaders Need To Be Optimists
While I am certainly not advocating leaders adopt a ‘Pollyanna’ approach that ignores reality, the research shows there is a strong connection between optimism and performance. Optimistic leaders not only experience improved performance themselves, but their own optimism also positively influences the optimism of those they lead.
Optimism and pessimism refer to the way you choose to think about and explain events in your life.
A pessimistic mindset views events as personal, pervasive and permanent whereas an optimistic mindset views events as non-personal, specific and temporary. For example, imagine you missed out on an important promotion you felt you had a solid chance of winning. A pessimistic might explain it by saying, ‘The selection panel didn’t like me. I always do really badly in interviews. I am never going to be able to crack a job at the next level’.
On the other hand an optimist might say, ‘The selection panel preferred another applicant. I didn’t perform well at this interview and I can research some strategies and get some coaching so I can perform better next time’.
It’s easy to see that the first response will keep you stuck, powerless and feeling sorry for yourself. The second one, however, will help you to process the disappointment of missing out and keep you learning and taking action, which will give you a much better chance of achieving the outcome you want.
This example highlights the reasons that optimists are more successful. When they experience success they attribute the reasons to themselves, making them more likely to apply effort to create additional successes. Also, when they experience failure they don’t take it personally or see it as a permanent state so they are much more willing to reflect on ways to improve and to repeat their attempts to be successful. As a result, they are much more likely to find a way to experience success.
Dr Martin Seligman, one of the early leaders in positive psychology, studied the impact of optimism on the work performance of 200 experienced insurance agents. Half of the agents were considered to be ‘very productive’, and half were considered to be ‘unproductive’. The study found that the very productive scored much higher on the optimism scale and sold 37% more insurance on average in their first two years of work and that agents who scored in the top 10% sold 88% more than the most pessimistic tenth.
Encouragingly, researchers have also found that you can retrain your brain to respond more optimistically by developing the habit of reframing negative events in ways that are non personal, specific and temporary.
So, tune in to your language and that of your team, and you will soon find optimism improving performance.