BE POSITIVE

by Dr. Cecil Clements (13th March 2012)

I was reading an article by Jay Schliefer, writing for ‘Society for Human Resource Management’ entitled ‘Workplace Negativity: Ways to Beat it’. The author started off by talking about Thomas Edison saying, “As Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he went through hundreds of designs that didn’t work. At one point, a reporter asked him, ‘Mr. Edison, aren’t you tired of failing?’ Edison wrote back, ‘Failing? Why! I’ve succeeded. I’ve discovered hundreds of ways how not to make a light bulb.’”


The author goes on to say, “The difference between a positive and negative outlook to life is what helped Edison keep going through repeated failures to finally invent the light bulb. If Edison had replied, ‘Yeah, you’re right. This will never work’, we would then have an example of negativity in the workplace. We would also all be sitting in the dark.”

How true! Sometimes negativity creeps up on us; sometimes it’s so prevalent in the workplace. But it saps us of energy, removes focus and doesn’t help us to work to our potential.

What causes negativity in the workplace? I don’t know whether any of you on this call deal with negativity in your places of work. International consultant, Towers Perrin did a study and HR columnist Susan M. Heathfield; found that these 5 reasons are key to negativity in the workplace.

1. Excessive workload
2. Concerns about management ability
3. Worry about job and retirement security
4. Lack of challenge or outright boredom on the job
5. Perceived lack of recognition, both in pay and other forms

Now, when you look at this list, it can either concern you or it could concern management and how you operate with the people who work with you, around you or under you, or the kind of people that you work with. But the bottom line is that negativity in the workplace can throttle good work.
 

Harvard Business Review came out with an article by Shawn Achor entitled ‘Positive Intelligence’ and the author talks about a company, Burt’s Bees, which was into personal care products, that was going global. It was expanding into 19 new countries. The then-CEO, John Replogle, took an entirely different outlook. Instead of sending mails and asking how employees were doing and whether they were on track, he would send out an email praising the team member for work related to the global rollout. Replogle’s emphasis on fostering positive leadership, kept his managers engaged and cohesive as they successfully made the transition to a global company.
 

Achor says, “When people work with a positive mindset, performance on nearly every level – productivity, creativity, engagement – improves.”
 

We often think that we’ll be able to have a positive outlook when we are successful. But what a myth that is! Success is like the proverbial pot at the end of the rainbow or the mirage in the desert; we never get there. Every time we say, “Once I get a promotion, I’ll be happy, I’ll be positive,” or “Once I hit my sales target, I’ll feel great.” But success is a moving target – as soon as you hit your target, you raise it again and the happiness that results from success is often fleeting – says Achor.

So how do we handle negativity? There is a definite causality between right satisfaction and successful business outcome. And we need successful business outcomes to be successful in the things that we are doing. Yet the hard fact is that negativity is very prevalent in our places of work.

Maybe you cannot change some of the things that go on in your workplace; but maybe you can change some of the things that go on within you. Maybe you can check and see whether there is negativity within you, within me, this morning.

Can we change that negativity? Yes, we can. But we first need to be able to identify the places from where negativity comes.

Shirzad Chamine wrote a book called ‘Positive Intelligence: Why Only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve their True Potential and How You can Achieve Yours’. In it he says that there are 10 saboteurs to happiness, to being positive.

1. Judge: fault finding with self, others or circumstances.
2. Being a victim: to focus on painful feelings as a way of earning empathy and attention.
3. Pleaser: pleasing, flattering, rescuing others, to gain acceptance.
4. Avoider: procrastinate or avoid difficult tasks or conflicts, focus on the pleasant.
5. Stickler: need for perfection, order and organization taken too far.
6. Restless: never at rest or content with what is, needing perpetual busyness.
7. Controller: anxiety-based need to control situations and bend others to own will.
8. Hyper-Achiever: dependent on achievement for self acceptance and self love.
9. Hyper-Rational: rational processing of everything including relationships.
10. Hyper-Vigilant: vigilance that can never rest, seeing danger in every corner.

If you see, all of them are good things actually, taken to the extreme. It’s good to look at yourself critically at times; it’s good to be able to have feelings of empathy and attention. But when you take it to the extreme, it can cause problems.

I still remember in school, we learnt this poem by Alfred Tennyson ‘Idylls of the King’ and it had this line,

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”

I never understood that line when I was in school – ‘one good custom should corrupt the world’, but over the years I have come to see how good can also corrupt when it is taken to an extreme.

So how do we change these things that infringe into our positive outlook? Achor’s article ‘Positive Intelligence’ says that he used these 5 things in a research that he did and it helped to bring about positive change. He said that recent research on neuroplasticity – the ability of the brain to change, even in adulthood, reveals that you can rewire your brain to think differently.

These are the 5 things that he told people:

1. Jot down 3 things that you are grateful for.
2. Write a positive message to someone in their social support network.
3. Exercise for 10 minutes.
4. Take 2 minutes to describe in a journal, the most meaningful experience of the past 24 hours.
5. Meditate at the desk for 2 minutes.
6. Pray, ask God to come into your situation to give you wisdom, to help you change neural patterns that have made you into a negative person. I believe that when we can have a positive attitude, we would be able to do well in the things that companies invest in us.

Think about this. All of us like to gravitate towards people who are positive in their outlook. We rarely like to hang out with people who are negative. Let’s try and be positive people today.

God Bless Us All.

Resources -

1. Jay Schleifer, "Workplace Negativity: Ways to Beat it." Society for Human Resource Management
2. Susan M. Heathfield on the causes of Workplace Negativity.
3. Shawn Achor - "Positive Intelligence." on HBR.com
4. Shirzad Charmine, "Positive Intelligence: Why only 20% of Teams and Individuals Achieve their True Potential and How You can Achieve Yours."
5. What is Neuroplasticity? on Wikipedia
6. Alfred Lord Tennyson: "Idylls of the King" on Wikipedia