Negativity is easy (and lazy)
In my role as a leadership coach, I learn a great deal about leadership as I teach it to others.
Recently I was reminded that anger and frustration spread much more quickly in organizations than positivity, aspiration, and goodwill. In one of my recent leadership workshops, I heard a list of grievances from a number of people in the group. It’s fine to air these grievances and deal with them courageously, but only if they come from a viewpoint of vision that drives us to move towards a better place.
In our leadership workshop, we call this “leaping the gap,” which is taking actions that move us from where we are to where we want to go – even if only in gradual or small steps. But leaping the gap requires us to imagine there’s something out there for us that’s better. We can’t leap gaps if we are weighed down by hopelessness and negativity – if, in essence, we feel it’s simply not worth taking the risk to drive change.
And unfortunately, negativity is an easy mindset. It doesn’t take much courage or insight to recognize what’s wrong with our organization, and it doesn’t take much character to stand by and watch it underperform. This is why negativity is so prevalent – it doesn’t ask anything of us. It doesn’t ask us to think more deeply or to create new outcomes. It doesn’t ask us to change ourselves or take the risks associated with leadership.
I learned this month that an organization that has a largely negative culture is a lazy organization. It may work hard at building things and delivering services, but it doesn’t do the work it needs to do to build intellectual capacity and creative problem-solving. Every employee in every organization should be held to the standard of positivity and forward thinking.
