The best leaders have a contagious positive energy

Article originally appeared in Harvard Business Review, 18 April 2022

By Emma Seppälä and Kim Cameron

What's the article about

Positive relational energy is the most underutilised yet powerful predictor of leadership and organisational success, according to researchers Emma Seppälä (Yale University) and Kim Cameron (University of Michigan), who have been working in this field for over two decades. Leaders who are positive energisers create a self-perpetuating light and energy that spreads to and through people around them, with benefits for individual employees and the organisation.

Dive into the details

Emma and Kim attribute the success of such leaders to the heliotropic effect. Just as in nature where plants turn towards the light, positive energisers spread light and energy to the people around them, who thrive because of it.

Interviews carried out with thousands of leaders and employees in hundreds of organisations of varying sizes identified energisers by asking: “When I interact with this person [person X] in my organisation, what happens to my energy?” This question zeroes in on positive relational energy, which is the energy exchanged between people that helps uplift, enthuse, and renew them. It is the form of energy you receive — and give — in relationships with others. It has been studied in relation to people’s networks of relationships: communities, organisations and families. In organisations, these effects are magnified through the leader.

Positive energisers’ greatest secret is authentic, values-based leadership. They demonstrate and cultivate actions including forgiveness, compassion, humility, kindness, trust, integrity, honesty, generosity, gratitude, and recognition in the organisation. As a result, everyone flourishes because the energy created by this style of leadership is self-perpetuating. Positive relational energy becomes reciprocal in organisations. In this way, energisers reproduce themselves, building networks of positive energisers around them.

The takeaways

This style of leadership has wide-ranging benefits. Positive energisers are themselves high performers and are found in greater numbers in high performing organisations. People around them tend to flourish, lifting overall performance. Organisations with positive energising leaders show greater innovation, teamwork, cohesion, and performance in terms of productivity and quality. Moreover their employees enjoy greater job satisfaction, wellbeing, and relationships with family, leading to improved engagement and performance at work.

Ashley Bernardi, founder and CEO of media relations firm Nardi Media, is cited as an example of a positively energising leader. After a health scare, she made changes that included dedicating time to creating her company core values — which include family and kindness — and setting the example for her growing team and clientele. As a result, her business revenue doubled within two years, despite the economic upheaval of the Covid pandemic. As she described, “When I learned to put myself first, I saw transformation happen in my life in the most powerful ways: I attracted like-minded team members who lifted each other up and aligned with my core values, one of them being kindness. Our business flourished.”

The authors close by restating the empirical evidence for the long-term benefits of leaders who generate rather than deplete energy, pointing out the importance of energising leaders in these times of the Great Resignation.