The Positive Organization
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The Bottom Line

I return to my friend, the young surgeon. As we concluded our conversation, he pointed out an irony. In his hospital there was a prime emphasis on both profit and growth. Yet Hospital 1 was outpacing his hospital in both areas. Hospital 1 had a more affirmative and constructive human culture as well as superior financial outcomes. Research suggests that positive individual behaviors predict organization performance, and as positive practices increase, performance increases. Outcome measures include productivity and financial performance. From the study of nursing units, Cameron and his colleagues concluded: “Improvement in patient satisfaction, internal climate, employee participation, and quality of care occurs when organizations provide compassionate support for employees, emphasize positive and inspiring messages to employees, forgive mistakes, express gratitude to and confidence in employees, clarify the meaningfulness of the work being done, and reinforce an environment characterized by respect and integrity. No one positive practice stands out as the single most important determinant of improvement, but positive practices in combination appear to have the most powerful impact.” See Kim S. Cameron, Carlos Mora, Trevor Leutscher, and Margaret Calarco, “Effects of Positive Practices on Organizational Effectiveness,” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 47, no. 3 (2011): 266-308.

He acknowledged that his observations about the two hospitals could be attributed to many other factors beyond leadership. Even so, he said, leaders matter. If people in authority have a narrow orientation to profit, technical problem solving, and linear analysis (see the bottom half of Figure 1.1) they may lack the capacity to transform a conventional or negative culture into a positive one.

What my friend was suggesting is exactly what I have seen in organizations across the globe. People, like the first CEO, have a broader mental map that gives rise to a different kind of reality. Some people value analysis, control, efficiency, and profit, but they seem to lack the generative capacity to create cultures of trust, unity, learning, and growth. Others have the opposite problem: they are quite visionary but cannot keep the system organized. A few can do both; it is as if they can live in two different worlds at the same time—the world of stability and productivity and the world of unity and change. In the next chapter we call this the ability to be bilingual.

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