EMBiz: The Importance of Positive Leadership

Laurel Mintz, CEO & Founder

The Importance Of Positive Leadership

Hi guys Laurel Mintz here with Elevate My Brand. Today I want to share with you a little bit about my leadership style and how you can show up in a really positive way for your team. 

The first tip I want to talk about is really focusing on the successes and not the failures. Now you guys know that I really don’t believe in failure, I believe in lessons. But I’ll be totally honest with you, historically I was not always that way. I would show up and something would go wrong and I would just lose it. We’ve all been in that situation where we just aren’t handling the pressures really well. And I’ll tell you, my team didn’t respond well to that but now what I know is that we can have really intelligent conversations and we can understand what processes and procedures we need to put in place to make sure that those fail points don’t happen again. So now I have more of a mentality of “Okay that happened what’s the lesson I can learn to help me move on”  and I’ll tell you it’s a safer space for people to fail. And again, it’s those failure points  where you have the biggest lessons in your career.

I would say the second point in showing up in positive leadership is that it’s a much more encouraging and engaging team atmosphere, which means that your team is probably going to be with you a lot longer. Nobody wants to show up to work every day and feel like they can do no right. So coming to the table with really communicative skills and making sure that you’re not focusing on the negative every day is going to also ensure that your team feels comfortable having a conversation with you and they’re going be likely to stay with you a lot longer and not have that churn that’s frankly very expensive for small businesses.

The third piece is about just encouraging a communicative workplace. I think I kind of already spoke to that but it’s about your community and lessons that we can all learn together because if one person learns a lesson and there’s no consistency across the board, then the likelihood is that someone else might have that very same failpoint. So making sure this is always a collective conversation is really critical. 

A final point is that we don’t wanna show up and be a Pollyanna. I hope that you’re not taking all of these and saying oh my God she’s so full of shit, she’s just so positive and all of that. I’m really not, I’m just realistic about who I am and who my team is and what we are capable of and I’m also really realistic that failures happen and they have to be a part of this conversation to evolve and grow as a team. But we also don’t wanna show up with what we called toxic positivity. So don’t be a Pollyanna, don’t show up and think everything is roses and sunshine and everything is perfect because that is just not the reality. So there are kind of those two extremes like, don’t be super negative, don't focus on the failures, but also don’t be unrealistic about the fact that people do fail. Nobody wants to feel like they have to be perfect all the time.

Those are some lessons that I have learned and frankly have been really hard to learn across the last 12 years of running my agency. And now I really feel like I can show up in a positive light for my team and for my clients and learn lessons we need to learn to continue elevating our own brand and I hope that you will as well.