Barbara Fredrickson on positivity

Positive psychology guru Barbara Fredrickson has posted an interesting article on the value of positive emotions in the light of the Obama victory:
Keep Stoking the Positivity — Our Future Depends On It

…We need positivity, the complex web of causes and consequences of positive emotions, now more than ever. Not just to sugarcoat bitter news or distract us from gloom. We need positivity because we’re different people when we’re under its influence.

Pleasant emotions like hope, inspiration, joy, and well-earned pride literally open us. As the blinders of negativity fall away, we take in more of what surrounds us. We see both the forest and the trees. We appreciate the oneness that binds us instead of the barriers that divide us. Even race becomes irrelevant.

But that’s not the half of it. Positivity’s mental openness fertilizes just the sort of creative and integrative thinking that hard-to-find solutions and compromises are made of. With the throng of problems facing our nation and our new president, we sorely need this expansive thinking. In addition, when we think broadly we discover and build new skills, new alliances, and new resilience – which make us better prepared to handle future adversity. Even mild positive emotions, experienced regularly, set people on discernable trajectories of growth, making them better off next season than they are today….

Business Benefits of Strengths based Change

Appreciative  Inquiry is a great example of strengths based change, and its positive focus is one of the keys to the energy and commitment it creates. But of course, it’s not the only example of positive psychology that’s growing in popularity around the globe.

Ever since Marcus Buckingham’s book “First, Break All The Rules” highlighted the business benefits of identifying and maximising talents and strengths, increasingly organisations are thinking differently about how we recruit, manage and develop people at work. In fact, there’s lots of applications of the strengths based theory. But why are hard nosed HR Directors and Business Leaders interested in something that seems to be rather fluffy on a cursory first glance?

Well, the Centre for Positive Psychology highlights a number of things that strengths based change helps to do in organisations today. Here are a few to chew over:

• A strengths based approach often taps into the talents that people have, but don’t use at work. So in effect, we bring more of ourselves into work. How much of your natural strengths do you use every day at work?
• Helps us to attract and keep people. We all like to do the things we’re good at, and the success we achieve reinforces the good performance, so we enjoy our job. And we want to do more of it, and get more of the buzz. Happy employee, happy boss!
• As we get the reinforcement of success, so our performance improves. Why should we waste our time and energy trying to develop the skills that we haven’t got, when the positive performance and feedback  is possible through a virtuous circle via focusing on strengths?
• Employee are more engaged and deliver more discretionary effort, improved performance, customer satisfaction and ultimately business growth. A focus on strengths significantly aids personal engagement to the job and task in hand, and this delivers results.
• Drives flexibility in the workforce by harnessing a future focus on what someone can do (based on their strengths and possibilities) rather than what they have done (based on their role or task history). Asking someone to take on a new role or responsibilities - but something that they realise that they like and can excel at – is likely to ease the path along the change curve considerably.

Of course, we believe at ai-consulting.co.ukthat appreciative inquiry as a huge role to play in strengths based change as part of a package of measures. There’s a lot of sceptics out there, though, and in future blogs, we’ll look at more business benefits and how we can introduce ai and strengths based change painlessly!

Paul Nicholson

Chartered Occupational Psychologist, AI Consulting.

Therapy works better when therapists focus on client’s strengths

The invaluable BPS Research Digest reports on a study by Christoph Flückiger and Martin Grosse Holtforth which found that getting therapists to focus on a client’s strengths for just ten minutes before the first five sessions of psychotherapy (an example of resource priming) improved relationships with the client, and led to greater improvements by session 20.

So, what implications would this have for managers wanting to get the best from their teams, customer-facing staff who want to improve their interactions with customers, or sales people who want to deepen their relationships with their prospects?

The abstract of the study is here: Focusing the therapist’s attention on the patient’s strengths: a preliminary study to foster a mechanism of change in outpatient psychotherapy