Energizing Your Team for Success: Creating Positive Team Energy

Discover how to nurture a positive team atmosphere. Learn practical techniques to boost team morale and productivity.

Leaders decide the energy that permeates throughout their teams or organizations. It is important to ensure that you create only positive energy rather than negative energy in your team or organization.

Positive energy liberates your people to be productive and creative. It helps them unleash their full potential. Negative energy, on the other hand, zaps your people of their vitality. It shuts down their creativity and makes them less productive.

As leaders, we don't magnify our people's faults. We help them overcome it. We're not quick to find fault and we don't condemn people because they made mistakes. We criticize the behavior, not the person.

We realize that nobody is perfect and only a truly perfect person has the right to judge others.

Condemning people doesn't show that we're better or perfect, it's proof of self-righteousness. Leaders who always point out what's wrong with others end up being uncomfortable to be around.

Self-righteous leaders only see the wrong in others and magnify it. They're usually blind to their faults. It's an attitude of pride.

Effective leadership is not pointing at people who fall, it's helping them stand up. It's not condemning people for their mistakes, it's helping them overcome their shortcomings.

1. Everybody has their areas of strengths and weaknesses. Nobody is entirely bad or good. We all have areas where we're string and areas where we could improve.

2. What you see is a function of what you decide to focus on. Two people can look at the same image or situation and see different things and both can still be right. If we look closely, we'll realise that in every situation or person, there's the positive and there's the negative. It's up to you to decide which you want to focus on.

3. What you focus on is proof of your mentality - negative or positive. Some see the glass as half full, others see the same glass as half empty. It's not reality that's important, it's how we choose to interpret reality that matters.

4. Deciding to focus on the positive in a person is a deliberate choice you have to make. Effective leaders acknowledge the negative but focus in building on the positives.

We use the sandwich principle:

Praise: What qualities in them are desirable? Where do they stand out? What do they do really well? What are their strengths and how have they used them to contribute to the team/organization?

Correction/rebuke: What attitudes in them do they need to correct? Identify areas for improvement and help them identify how to work on those areas.

Praise: Conclude the session/conversation by reaffirming their worth and value.

Focus on the attitude you wish to correct, not the person. Condemn the behavior, not the person.

You cannot positively influence somebody you antagonize. If all you do is nag, complain, and criticize, they'll never change. Criticism evokes a defensive mechanism in the person being criticized.

Be respectful, affirming, and assertive. Being positive doesn't equate to being weak or tolerating mediocre or lousy attitudes or behavior.

Disclaimer: Effective leadership doesn't mean to be weak or soft. Effective leaders are tough to work with.

They set high standards for themselves and others and they hold everybody to that standard. They don't settle for less!!!