The Power of Positive Leadership

Leaders pave the way toward achieving short- and long-term goals and can help bring the organization to greater heights. Being a positive leader encourages, empowers, and energizes people and organizations. Here are a few tips for positive leadership: 

Clear Communication 

Great leaders communicate goals and responsibilities clearly. Positive communication can help prevent miscommunication and confusion and can reduce errors while increasing productivity and understanding. Giving clear direction by communicating the organization’s mission, vision and goals can help motivate the team to achieve top efficiency and success. 

Leaders who listen with intent to genuinely understand, rather than to advance their own agendas, are considered outstanding communicators. 

Passion in Your Leadership Role 

When you bring a positive attitude to your leadership job, you inspire your team to look for solutions rather than problems, to critique rather than criticize, and to look for the good in every scenario. Employees that are passionate embrace challenges and are open-minded to other points of view. 

Empowering Your Employees 

Employee empowerment can lead to stronger job performance, greater creativity, job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization. Setting clear expectations and providing the necessary resources will help your employees create meaningful goals which will allow them to demonstrate the initiative and creativity to achieve those goals. Leaders who highlight other's contribution goals enable important outcomes such as learning, trust, high-quality connections, and improved performance. 

Empowerment can also increase trust in leadership and reduce employee turnover, which can result in increased efficiencies that drive toward mission. 

Humility in the Workplace 

Humble leaders are considered easier to deal with, more likely to acknowledge a team member's work, which in turn motivates employees to share more innovative ideas and can lead to higher rates of employee engagement. 

In today’s evolving professional environment, people work hard just to keep up. It is not necessary for recognition to be extravagant or costly, but it must be authentic and well-deserved. Recognition is an excellent way to transition from mental exhaustion to inspiration. 

Effects of positive leadership 

Studies show that organizational leaders who are positive have employees with: 

• An increased positive mood 
• Enhanced job satisfaction 
• Greater engagement 
• Improved performance 

It’s not always easy to be a positive leader. It requires dedication, tenacity, and continual focus for a leader to be optimistic, upbeat, and encouraging around their employees. Yet it is something we all need to work on to build a better workplace for everyone.  

A positive leadership style encourages employees and team members to develop their abilities, to be resilient and optimistic in demanding situations, and to recognize each person's accomplishments. Positive leadership is the finest foundation for leading through uncertainty, which is an ever-present challenge in the nonprofit industry. 

Want to learn more about how to be an effective non-profit leader, download our whitepaper here: