How Positive Leadership can help us to realize our strengths and achieve more

Welcome to the fourth edition of my Positive Leadership & You newsletter.

Last month, we focused on discovering our purpose and it was a pleasure to hear your reflections about why it matters to you, as well as the journeys you’ve taken climbing your own Second Mountains. I am excited by our growing community and if this inspires you, please share your thoughts.

This month, we’re looking at how Positive Leadership can help us to realize our own strengths and achieve more for ourselves, others, and the world.

I had the privilege of speaking to some wonderful guests over the past few weeks, including a close colleague and other leaders that I really admire.

Me: Focusing on our personal growth, wellbeing and being positive with ourselves.

I find this quote by the poet Rumi so powerful because it defines the journey for many of us, including myself. I know that the impulse to make a difference can be strong, but it is not possible without first finding your “why”.

Pioneering tech entrepreneur, philanthropist, public servant, university chancellor and Baroness, Martha Lane Fox embodies this vision. It was a pleasure to interview her for my podcast to learn how she evolved and found her purpose.

Martha is now focused on helping others to achieve their full potential to narrow the equality gap in digital careers.

For her, entrepreneurship is an opportunity to achieve freedom and take control of your destiny.

“Free yourself from thinking of yourself as just the employee to thinking of yourself as an entrepreneur. If you see a problem, think about how you can fix it. Tell your boss, tell someone around you, tell someone you work with and have that curiosity that defines entrepreneurs because I always think that will stand you in good stead… don’t be shy to kind of poke your nose in somewhere”

Simply put, we can all make a difference now, so why wait until tomorrow?

Listen to Martha’s episode now to hear more about her incredible journey:

Me & Others: Connecting with and empowering others to achieve more.

All of us have things going on in our lives that can drain our energy. There’s pressure, and there’s sadness, too. But if you want to have the energy to be fully in tune with the people around you and their experience of you, you need to make a choice like Martha did. It doesn’t just happen by accident.

There are lots of ways you can put yourself into a more positive entrepreneurial headspace, to connect with yourself to connect with others. Last month, I had the opportunity to catch up with my colleague, friend and fellow SLT member, Microsoft chief financial officer Amy Hood . Amy shared how she learned to think like a leader and really ground herself, to create bravery and positive energy in others.

One technique Amy uses is positive affirmations. How many of us wake up every morning like Amy and do this? Amy tells herself: “Today is going to be a good day.”

In her own words, this is how and why she does it:

“Prepare the mind to say, here is my day, here are the moments that I need to accomplish, and it needs to be good. It doesn’t mean everything that’s going to happen that day is good or positive or easy. It means you’re making a choice about how you respond. And if you start there, it’s far more empowering to make better decisions.”

From my personal experience, I know this can also create a wonderful environment for others because positivity really can be infectious. Once you start realizing this, you can build social relationships and help others to achieve more.

Communication, whether it is through the way you act or through how you speak to people, is crucial for empowering people to realize their strengths. In Season three of my podcast, I had the privilege of interviewing Kim Cameron , a pioneer in the study of Positive Leadership who first introduced me to the concept with his book: Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance.

Recommended by LinkedIn

Kim offers lots of useful advice to strengthen and deepen our ties to the people around us, so that we can energize them and help them to flourish.

He uses a technique of supportive communication to help people to deliver negative feedback in a way that builds the relationship rather than diminishes it.

To be sincere, authentic, and real, Kim recommends three steps:

1. Objectively describe what you have observed
2. Outline the consequence of what just happened and your reaction to it
3. Offer a suggested alternative that would be more acceptable and that would avoid the negative consequences

It’s so easy to make mistakes in communication, and Kim’s model is a simple but effective way of helping people to achieve more.

Listen back to my conversation with him to learn about it in more detail.

Me & the World: Having a positive impact on the world.

If there was a leader who first conceptualized the value of moral and ethical honesty in their actions and the role of business in serving the Common Good, it would be Peter Drucker, whose life spanned almost the entire twentieth century and is seen by many as “the founder of modern management”.

In November, I took part in The Global Peter Drucker Forum , where I discussed why purpose drives performance alongside Harvard Business School professor, Ranjay Gulati , Maud Bailly , Accor ’s CEO of Southern Europe, Mary Meaney of  Imperial College London , and economist Michael G. Jacobides of London Business School .

It was a pleasure sharing with the panel how Microsoft’s purpose has helped us to positively impact the world. Our conversation made me think of something that Peter once said: “whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

Another thing that Peter once said came to mind this month, he said: “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.” The super inspiring young French journalist, Hugo Travers, perfectly captures Peter’s philosophy and it was a pleasure to meet him for the first time in Paris where we recorded the latest episode of my podcast.

In a world where information is everywhere and not always accurate, it is more important than ever to be able to find reliable sources of information and through his YouTube channel, HugoDécrypte, Hugo does exactly this.

He is leading an information revolution in France and beyond, with millions of viewers, and I was energized by his desire to democratize news.

I asked Hugo what his superpowers were and he told me three things:

• Find the right balance…. Don’t give yourself something too impossible
• Detach yourself from the validation of others
• Be rigorous in your work

Courage like Hugo’s, when you say to yourself, I’m going to do this even if people tell me the opposite, is so inspiring. It really forms the start of lots of entrepreneurs’ journeys and we can all be inspired by his success.

We recorded the incredible episode with Hugo and I invite all of you who speak French to listen here!

That’s all for another month. I’ve really enjoyed sharing all my learnings with you. We all have more to learn, and I hope this newsletter is helping you to thrive and grow. Together we can change the world for the better!

One more thing… don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already!

All the best.

jp