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Leadership Qualities | The Best Leaders Have a Contagious Positive Energy

Leadership Qualities

The Best Leaders Have a

Contagious Positive
Energy
by Emma Seppälä and Kim Cameron
April 18, 2022

Catherine Ledner/Getty Images

Summary. The pandemic has taken a significant toll on the well-being and energy of so many.
Positively energizing leaders are more crucial than ever. Positive relational energy —the energy
exchanged between people that helps uplift, enthuse, and renew them — however, is... more

 Researchers and leaders have looked for the secret to successful

Tweet leadership for centuries. Dozens of new books each year promise to

 deliver the answer. We decided to examine this question empirically,

Post and when we did, we found that the greatest predictor of success for
leaders is not their charisma, influence, or power. It is not personality,

Share attractiveness, or innovative genius. The one thing that supersedes all
these factors is positive relational energy: the energy exchanged 100 years of

Save between people that helps uplift, enthuse, and renew them. solving business
problems
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Here’s what leaders need to know about positive relational energy,

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which we’ve found to be the most underutilized yet powerful predictor
of leadership and organizational success.

The Importance of Positive Relational Energy

In our work, including interviews with thousands of leaders and

employees, an upcoming book, and two decades of research on positive
leadership, we’ve looked at people in terms of their networks of
relationships: communities, organizations, and families. We’ve
observed that certain relationships within those networks are
extraordinarily life-enhancing and uplifting. The result is extraordinary
performance. In particular, there’s usually one person at the center of
these networks who’s responsible for most of the forward motion — not
to mention well-being — of all the rest. We call them positive energizers.

Energizers’ greatest secret is that, by uplifting others through authentic,

values-based leadership, they end up lifting up both themselves and
their organizations. Positive energizers demonstrate and cultivate
virtuous actions, including forgiveness, compassion, humility,
kindness, trust, integrity, honesty, generosity, gratitude, and
recognition in the organization. As a result, everyone flourishes.

The pandemic has taken a significant toll on the well-being and energy
of so many. Positively energizing leaders are more crucial than ever.
Positive energy, however, is not the superficial demonstration of false
positivity, like trying to think happy thoughts or turning a blind eye to
the very real stresses and pressures overloaded employees are
experiencing. Rather, it is the active demonstration of values.

You’ve met people like this. They’re like the sun. These people walk into
a room and make it glow. Everyone becomes energized, enthused,
inspired, and connected. These incandescent people are positive
energizers. Other members of these networks are depleting: the ones
who leave the others feeling de-energized, demoralized, diminished,
and uninspired. You know the ones — they sap your energy every time.
We’ve given them the name de-energizers.

In our analysis of these energizing and de-energizing individuals in the

work environment, we were especially interested in studying the
energizing effects of leaders, because leaders are the single most
important factor in accounting for an organization’s performance.
These studies gave us tremendous insight into the secrets of every
successful leader.

Numerous studies run by our group and our colleagues show that
positive energizers produce substantially higher levels of engagement,
lower turnover, and enhanced feelings of well-being among employees.
This is partly because at the cellular level of brain activity, cortical
thickness is enhanced through exposure to relational energy, hormones
such as oxytocin and dopamine are increased, and at the cellular level in
the body, inflammation is reduced and immunity to disease is
enhanced. In organizations, superior shareholder returns occur, and in
some of our studies, outcomes exceeded industry averages in
profitability and productivity by a factor of four or more.

Here’s what differentiates positive relational energy. Physical energy

diminishes with use. Running a marathon exhausts us. We need
recuperation time. The same is true with the use of mental and
emotional energy. We become fatigued and need to recover. The only
kind of energy that doesn’t diminish but actually elevates with use is
positive relational energy. We rarely get exhausted, for example, by
being around people with whom we have loving, trusting, supportive
relationships. Positive relational energy is self-enhancing. The ability of
leaders to engender relational energy is in fact so powerful that it gives
energizers an extraordinary advantage. They can turn around failing
companies, resolve seemingly doomed situations, and revitalize
disengaged and burned-out employees.

Assessing Relational Energy

Here’s how we identified energizers: We asked members of hundreds of

organizations — from mom-and-pop startups to multinational
corporations — this question: “When I interact with this person [person
X] in my organization, what happens to my energy?” In other words,
each person was asked to rate themselves on a scale from very positively
energized to very de-energized when they interacted with another
person in their enterprise. Each member of a senior team, for example,
rated their interaction with every other member of the senior team.

We were astonished by the results of this research. When leaders display

positive relational energy, it catapults performance to a new level. More
specifically, positive energizers:

Are themselves far higher performers than others

Positively impact others’ performance, so that other people tend to
flourish in their presence
Exist in greater numbers at high-performing organizations than at
average-performing organizations

When the leader is a positive energizer, the organization has greater:

Innovation (the number-one attribute that CEOs look for across

industries and countries)
Teamwork
Financial performance, including productivity and quality
Workplace cohesion

And when a leader is a positive energizer, employees have greater:

Job satisfaction
Well-being
Engagement
Performance
Relationships with family

What Makes Positively Energizing Leaders So Successful?

There is a botanical term for these results: the heliotropic effect. That’s
the phenomenon whereby plants naturally turn toward and grow in the
presence of light. In nature, light is the life-giving force; photosynthesis
occurs only in its presence. Human beings have the same inherent
attraction toward life-giving and life-supporting energy. This form of
energy is what you receive — and give — in relationships with
others.Decades of research shows that this positive relational energy
nourishes us and makes us come alive. For example, research by UC
Irvine professor Sarah Pressman shows that the need for positive social
connection is so great that the lack of it is worse for your health than
smoking, obesity, or high blood pressure and reduces longevity. In
contrast, positive social connection can not only lengthen our life, but
also strengthen our immune system and lower rates of anxiety and
depression.

In organizations, these effects are magnified through the leader. That is,
leaders’ relational energy has an outsize effect on employees, more so
than almost any other relationship at work.

Consider, for example, Ashley Bernardi, founder and CEO of media

relations firm Nardi Media. She saw her business revenue double in the
span of two years, from six to seven figures — despite the economic
upheaval of the pandemic. Bernardi had made one change in who she
was when she was leading, and it’s something anyone can learn.

A health crisis in 2016 led her to change direction on how she was
leading her company and team. After experiencing a debilitating form of
Lyme disease coupled with postpartum depression that left her
bedridden after the birth of her third child, Bernardi had a moment of
truth. Her illness led to greater compassion and understanding for
others. She realized that everyone shows up to work with the challenges
they’re facing in their personal lives. As she healed physically and
became a more compassionate leader, her business began to blossom.
She dedicated time to creating her company core values — which
include family and kindness — and made sure to set that example for
her growing team and clientele. And for the first time in her life,
Bernardi began to take excellent care of her physical well-being and
emotional health: She regularly practiced meditation, breathwork, and
yoga; took up running; prioritized good sleep; and, yes, even took work
breaks and naps. She signed up for Yale’s Coursera course on the science
of well-being.

As you can now guess, Bernardi is a positively energizing leader. As she

tells the story: “When I learned to put myself first, I saw transformation
happen in my life in the most powerful ways: I attracted like-minded
team members who lifted each other up and aligned with my core
values, one of them being kindness. Our business flourished.”

How Do Positive Energizers Do It?

There’s more to this than the need for employees to feel valued,
respected, and engaged; we already know those things are important.
When they get recognition, support, and encouragement, absenteeism is
low, productivity and profitability are high, and quality and safety
improve. But positive energizers catalyze all this and more.
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Positive relational energy then becomes reciprocal. An energizing

approach to others acts as a continual energy-boosting mechanism,
which, in turn, produces an abundance of energy in the whole network.
Energizers reproduce themselves, building networks of positive HBR Guide to Leading Teams
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energizers around them, and that heliotropic effect expands to attract
Book
still more. To paraphrase the proven leader Dolly Parton: If your actions
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inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more,
you are a positive, energizing leader. Many studies on positive
leadership demonstrate that leaders focused on contributing to others
are substantially more effective than leaders focused on personal
achievement and success. Their organizations and their employees
excel.

Can organizations flourish with leaders who deplete rather than The New Capitalist
Manifesto: Building a
generate energy? Of course — in the short term. But the empirical Disruptively Better Business
evidence is clear that positive energy is far more effective long term. Book

Over time, employees become averse to de-energizing and life-depleting Buy Now
leaders, and that’s not a chance leaders can take during the Great
Resignation (nor, we would argue, in economic boom times, either).
Read more on Leadership
That heliotropic energy will renew itself many times over, and inspire
qualities or related topics
focus, trust, and sincere investment in your goals. Your employees will Leadership, Behavioral science
turn toward the sun. and Power and influence

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