Create a Positive Climate Articles

Reading is essential for professional development. We encourage our credential holders to read regularly. Reading promotes reflection and critical thinking about the competency domains, leader tasks, and supporting knowledge associated with each level of certification. The articles below are relevant to the Create a Positive Climate competency domain. We add new articles here regularly.
Setting Proper Expectations: A Crucial Leadership Responsibility
Direct reports look to leaders not just for direction, but for redirection as well. When something goes awry with the original project plan, proper expectations for adapting to the new circumstances must be set before launching Plan A.
RBLP Staff in the Building Resilient Teams Newsletter
Leaders who earn the trust of their teams are far and away the most effective at achieving the financial and human goals of the workplace. But trust has to be proactively earned. People are naturally skeptical of a new leader. One way to overcome that skepticism is by being authentic. Your team will give you their trust if you trust them to accept who you really are, and that you have their best interests at heart.
RBLP Staff in the Building Resilient Teams Newsletter
Leading the Way to Reduce Workplace Stress Through Fun Activities
Allowing your team to have fun at work encourages camaraderie and builds social bonds, creating an environment conducive for collaboration. It is the responsibility of the leader to ensure that everyone supports these stress-reducing, team-building activities.
RBLP Staff in the Building Resilient Teams Newsletter
Why Effective Leaders Must Master Accountability
Accountability is one of the pillars of establishing trust in the workplace. Without trust, leadership fails to take root. Leaders who understand, practice, and ‘enforce’ accountability for themselves and their team members will create the proper climate for success.
RBLP Staff in the Building Resilient Teams Newsletter
To constructively deal with disappointment, we need to first understand what has happened. Some instances of disappointment are predictable and preventable. But there are others that are unavoidable and beyond our control. To manage disappointment, we need to differentiate between situations that fall within our control and factors that are beyond it. Being able to recognize the difference will help us to deal with our frustrations more appropriately.
Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries in Harvard Business Review
Prevent Burnout by Making Compassion a Habit
Why is stress on the rise? A lot of it has to do with uncertainty in the world and constant changes in our organizations. Many people are overworking, putting in more hours than ever before. The lines between work and home have blurred or disappeared…Under these circumstances, our performance and well-being suffer. Work feels like a burden. Burnout is just around the corner…Here’s the good news: Some people don’t get burned out. They continue to thrive despite the difficult conditions in their workplace. Why? The answer lies in part with empathy, an emotional intelligence competency packed with potent stress-taming powers.
Annie McKee and Kandi Wiens in Harvard Business Review
Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity
Many of us simply hire employees with diverse backgrounds – then await the payoff. We don’t enable employees’ differences to transform how our organization does work. When employees use their differences to shape new goals, processes, leadership approaches, and teams, they bring more of themselves to work. They feel more committed to their jobs – and their companies grow.
David A. Thomas and Robin J. Ely in Harvard Business Review
The Secret to Leading Organizational Change Is Empathy
Studies on organizational change show that leaders across the board agree: if you want to lead a successful transformation, communicating empathetically is critical. But the truth is that most leaders don’t actually know how to do it. In fact, at Duarte, the communication consultancy where I’m Chief Strategy Officer, we conducted a survey of over 200 leading company executives and found that 69% of respondents said that they were planning to launch or are currently conducting a change effort. Unfortunately, 50% of these same execs said they hadn’t fully considered their team’s sentiment about the change. Worse, about half said they were just approaching the change “going on gut.”
Patti Sanchez in Harvard Business Review