It’s been said, “One bad apple spoils the bunch.” And it takes only one negative team member to severely impact the team’s ability to be successful in achieving the desired goals. On the other hand, a positive attitude — when combined with hard work and perseverance — can be the motivating force that propels your team to new heights.
Even if you’re the most talented person in the room and can outperform your peers with ease, having a poor attitude is debilitating and will limit your performance in a team environment. It’s typically the people with average talent and above-average attitudes who perform the best on teams.
For leaders, attitude is even more important. They have a much greater responsibility to be mindful of how their attitudes will affect the team’s performance. Team members ultimately take the majority of their cues from the team’s leaders, so if a leader speaks about, looks at or reacts negatively to a given situation or idea, other team members notice. And the way the group moves forward from that moment on depends on the attitude of the team’s leader. It’s important to remember the attitudes of leadership influence the attitudes of everyone else. And team goals will be impacted by the strength of that influence.
All too often leaders with negative attitudes hinder the team in accomplishing its goals, either in the form of lack of effort or resentment by team members resulting in the loss of focus. Negatively focused leaders attempt to use fear and intimidation as a tool for getting things done, but it almost never works. Because when the goals of the team are forgotten and the team is focused on reacting to the negative attitudes of leadership, goals remain unmet.
On the other hand, leaders who have positive attitudes have the ability to motivate, encourage and keep the team moving in the right direction. Through vision and support, effective leaders uplift their teams continually so nothing, especially not something as simple as attitude, prohibits them from accomplishing their goals.
In psychology there is a school of thought about first impressions that contends it takes just one-tenth of a second to make one. That means within a second of meeting someone for the first time, you’re making an immediate judgment about everything from the person’s attire to how you perceive his or her attitude. Since most people understand just how important it is to give people a positive first impression, they do everything they can to ensure the encounter is favorable. Unfortunately, most people don’t put as much work into the encounters that follow.
But if you decided to approach every encounter as if it were your first, there’s no doubt you would take time to make sure you were prepared. You’d probably take the time to make sure you had thought-out questions or comments to offer. Most importantly, you would do everything you could to make sure the encounter was positive. In short, you’d have a good attitude.
Leaders who understand the power of a positive attitude and how it increases the ability to influence people to get things done also understand influence is greatest during that initial impression. But it only grows by consistently fertilizing those relationships with positive interactions. We need to seek out positive people and be positive to them. Because, at the end of the day, positivity is contagious and helps us reach our goals. Yes, we want to make a good first impression, but we also want to make consistently good impressions from that point on.
When we think about the word “contagious,” we often associate it negatively (such as with illness), but there are positive things that can be contagious, too. Laughter can be contagious, and so can encouraging good behavior. And for organizations that are looking to position themselves for success, positive employee attitudes need to be sought out and encouraged — and ultimately replicated. After all, it’s the attitude of the team members that can ultimately mean the difference between success and failure.
Look for part two of this series in the October issue of BIC Magazine.
For more information, call Jeffrey Webber at (281) 478-6200 or email him at jwebber@altairstrickland.com.
