Positive cultures attract and retain talent.
Leaders who highlight wins, successes, and positive results boost morale and energize the team. Positivity creates the momentum to push past obstacles, setbacks, and adversity. By reinforcing progress, leaders can also make people feel that their work matters.
There’s a lot to be said for an organization or team that emphasizes good news.
But over time, over-prioritizing the positive can create an implicit norm that sharing bad news is pessimistic and undesirable.
Team members quickly become hesitant to report bad news, fearing it won’t be welcome or could reflect poorly on them.
When positivity is expected, real issues stay hidden or get reported late, sometimes until they become much bigger problems. Because leaders don’t get the full picture, they make poor decisions.
Once they recognize that positivity is highly rewarded, team members will manufacture it.
Positivity has its limits.
Prioritizing good news can strengthen a culture as long as it doesn’t crowd out the truth.
Unfortunately, that is a harder line to walk than most leaders realize. And discerning where the organization sits along the positive-negative continuum isn’t as easy as one might think.
Organizations that prioritize the positive are not always rah-rah workplaces where everyone appears happy and fulfilled. And organizations that amplify the negative aren’t always dreary places where everyone feels bad.
Because so much of the positive and negative information shared in any organization is diffused, filtered, and targeted, leaders don’t always get a clear signal about which way the culture leans.
They must look for clues.
Team members in cultures that are too positive bury bad news in less obvious ways: they delay negative information, suggest progress is nearly always on track, do their best to tackle issues without help or needed resources, always report positive updates, and frame issues in the positive.
Leaders should be particularly attuned to a positive spin on thorny issues: “It’s not really a problem, but…” “I have just a small matter to add…” “We’ve mostly handled an issue that arose…”
Organizations with an overemphasis on the negative tend to be risk-averse. They catch issues early and build strong problem-solving muscles, but unintentionally teach people to under-celebrate wins and each other. Criticism finds its way into almost every discussion, even when debriefing success.
The best organizations balance the positive and negative by creating a culture where celebration occurs swiftly and often, and problems are surfaced early and without blame.
The good and the bad news travel quickly throughout the organization. Everyone learns of the good news, and the bad news finds its way to the right people without delay.
Does your organization place more priority on the good news or the bad news?
A healthy organization celebrates wins loudly and surfaces problems early—never one without the other.
