Practicing Positive Leadership ─ Tools and Techniques That Create Extraordinary Results

Over a decade ago, Kim Cameron and some colleagues decided that rather than analyze what went terribly wrong with organizations and how to prevent it, they would look at what went extraordinarily right and how to replicate it. This was the birth of positive organizational scholarship, a new field that focused on what they called “positive deviance”—outcomes that far exceeded normal success.

In his previous book Positive Leadership, Cameron outlined four leadership strategies—Positive Climate, Positive Relationships, Positive Communications, and Positive Meaning—that characterize exceptionally high-performing organizations. Here he takes these strategies further by laying out tactics for implementing them:

‧ Creating a Culture of Abundance: five specific steps leaders can take to create an organizational culture that enables members to experience vitality, flourishing, and engagement
‧ Developing Positive Energy Networks: tools and practices for cultivating positive energy in oneself and for diffusing it throughout the organization
‧ Delivering Negative Feedback Positively: techniques for delivering difficult but necessary messages in ways that build and strengthen relationships
‧ Establishing and Achieving Everest Goals: guidelines for setting goals that have all the characteristics of SMART goals but go far beyond them
‧ Applying Positive Leadership in Organizations: a powerful tool for determining exactly how to implement positive leadership practices in the particular circumstances of your organization

Study after study (some of which are cited in the book) has shown that companies practicing positive leadership far outperform their competitors. So virtue may be its own reward, but it also delivers breakthrough results that any organization can achieve thanks to Kim Cameron’s concise, how-to guide.

Kim Cameron is professor of management and organizations at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, cofounder of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship, and professor of higher education in the School of Education, all at the University of Michigan. He is the coauthor or coeditor of fourteen books.