Using the Positive to Obtain Extraordinary Performance

Shawn E. Quinn

Why Does Positive Organizing and Leadership Matter?

In working with executives and organizations you begin to find that there’s a small percentagethat seem to see what is happening around them differently than others. They have high levels of impact not only on business outcomes but in the environment and culture they create. There are many theories and ideas that help people begin to understand these leaders and organizations and this was the inspiration for a research center at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. This center, The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship, begins to give a different perspective about what these leaders are seeing.

The research center focuses on Positive Organizing and Leadership. More specifically the center looks at“the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster resiliency in individuals, make possible healing and restoration, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance (Cameron, Dutton & Quinn, 2003).” Drawing on some past and current organizational and social science research they’ve begun to gain understanding on ways to unleash more potential from people inside organizations which leads to higher levels of sustainable performance.

Areas of Focus to Create Extraordinary Performance

Research studies in psychology, sociology, medicine and organizations have looked at poor mental or physical health, societal dysfunction or things that are not working in organizations and tried to determine how to fix these problems. The focus has primarily been on fixing negative forms of deviance. Around 12 years ago Martin Seligman began a movement called Positive Psychology in which the research started to focus on positive mental states and how to help people achieve them more often. A few years later the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) formed and the focus was on studying organizations that are positively deviant or understanding how to help more organizations achieve positively deviant states.Positive Deviance is the first of three general areas of focus in The Center for POS.

In his book called “Positive Leadership” Cameron defines positive deviance as, “successful performance that dramatically exceeds the norm in a positive direction (Cameron, 2008).” He goes on to mention an organizational example in which a nuclear weapons production facility is cleaned up and closed (Cameron & Lavine, 2006). “The company receiving the contract to dismantle and clean up the Rocky Flats Nuclear Arsenal completed the assignment 60 years ahead of schedule, $30 billion under budget, and 13 times cleaner than required. This company’s achievement far exceeded every knowledgeable expert’s predictions of performance (Cameron, 2008).”

The following is one leader’s experience with positive deviance. This executive(we will call Fred) was frustrated that the Division’s President regularly talked about the desire for new revenue streams, but his behavior and the culture of the organization was so short-term focused that it killed most innovation. Fred presented a proposal to the President which he believed had the potential to create new revenue for the company but was toldnot to waste any more time on the idea. He decided after attending our positive leadership course that his idea was worth the risk of frustrating the President and the culture; otherwise the company would decline when growth was needed.

Fred went to a financial institution and created a picture of what a partnership that leveraged his company’s brand and technologymight look like. He got approval from the bank to move forwardand put together a broader picture for the President. Fred presented the plan to the President who was better able to see the value in the idea and gave permission to move forward with the partnership.In a recent press release from this company it states, “More customers are now coming to us for products like mobile broadband...as well as new services such as (product discussed above) in the UK. The results mean that (Fred’s company) is the only European telco to report revenue growth in the past two days.”

Positive Deviance takes all kinds of forms and many people who are being deviant can mistakenly believe they’re doing so in a positive manner. There is always risk associated with leaving the norm but every organization needs leaders who believe enough in doing the right thing for the business that they will recognize when to be positively deviant and will then act. Leaders need to be very clear on their purpose, values, strengths and what gives them energy to be comfortable enough to push through the inevitable difficulty of acting in ways that will frustrate the system, culture and norms of the organization.POS begins to clarify what causes organizations to reach extraordinary levels of performance or why individuals act in positive ways outside of what is considered acceptable in the organization.

The second general area of focus in POS is on virtuousness which Cameron defines as “A focus on the best of the human condition and that which human beings consider to be inherently good (Cameron, 2003).” In a study of the airline industry after 9-11, Gittell, Cameron and Lim found that Southwest Airlines, which managed the resulting economic downturn virtuously and refused to lay off employees, dramatically outperformed other American carriers between September 2001 and September 2002. In this and other related studies Cameron and colleagues show that improvement on their Positive Practices assessment has a connection to improvement in specific financial measures.

During the recent economic recession a company decided to change their debt collections department into a debt assistance department. They retrained their front line employees to listen to customer’s stories and difficulties and to restructure their payment plan to be more reasonable for each of their situations. In some cases when it was clear that their customer could not pay the debt owed, the company decided to forgive the debt. A number of other practices were implemented which they considered as the“right thing to do” for customers. The interesting thing is that the amount being collected by debt assistance was up by 50% compared to the same time the year before. Employees began to see meaning in what they were accomplishing at work and the business was much better off financially.

The third general area of focus in POS is aroundAffirmative bias, or “an orientation toward, for example, strengths rather than weaknesses, optimism rather than pessimism, supportive rather than critical communication (Cameron, 2003).” There are a number of areas of focus for this area of research but there are two specific areas that have gained a lot of momentum. Both of these successes have been in groups that are not connected to the research center but the work fits into these general areas of focus within POS. The first of these is Appreciative Inquiry.

David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University developed an organizational development practice called Appreciative Inquiry (AI). AI is defined in many slightly varying ways. One of Cooperrider’s definitions is “thecooperative search for the best in people, their organizations, and the world around them. It involves systematic discover of what gives a system ‘life’ when it is most effective and capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to heighten positive potential. It mobilizes inquiry through crafting an “unconditional positive question’ often involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people (Cooperrider, D.L. & Whitney, D., “Appreciative Inquiry: A positive revolution in change.” In P. Holman & T. Devane (eds.), The Change Handbook, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., pages 245-263).”

An executive I worked with told me a story from his personal life about the power of focusing on positive questions. His partner was staying home with their two kids at the time when they were trying to fix up and sell their home. When coming home exhausted from work one night, his partner said she was tired of dealing with all the moving and fix-up problems and had decided that she no longer wanted to move. The executive invited his partner and children to get in the car and to drive with him to the home they were going to buy. He asked his partner about what she was going to do with the garden. She began to describe all the wonderful possibilities in glowing terms. She then mentioned how the back yard had a fence and she could just put the children out back to play without worrying about them. Her energy increased and she was willing to keep moving forward with the moving process. The problems were not gone but in this case, remembering what she was trying to create in the future gave her the energy to continue toward that purpose.

The second area of success that falls under Affirmative Bias is the “Strengths Based” approach that has been driven by the Gallup organization and more specifically Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. They wrote a book Now Discover Your Strengths in which they introduce 34 signature strengths that they discovered while interviewing and studying 1.7 million employees around the world. They provide an assessment tool that allows you to discover your top five signature strengths.

At the Center for POS a number of the core faculty developed a process that does a similar kind of work around determining what a person looks like when they are at their best. The process requires you to reach out to 20-30 people from all aspects of your life and asks them to share 3 paragraphs describing specific examples of times when they saw you at your best. The themes and understanding that come from these examples is another way to help people understand where they bring unique abilities that can be leveraged to create extraordinary performance. The same kind of process can be done for a team, a unit or an organization. Clarifying what a group looks like when it is at its best gives a picture of what we can work toward more often to bring about even better results.

An executive we will call Bill said he left a course in which he experienced the Reflected Best Self process feeling frustrated. Bill said he always wanted to be good at “skiing” but everyone kept telling him he was good at another aspect of his work which he labeled “football.” He decided to try handing off most of the “skiing” to a good performer on his team because this individual had natural “skiing” talent. This direct report of Bill’s started to perform at such a high level that Bill gave only his second 1 (1 representing high level of performance and 5 the lowest level) in all his years at the company using the performance management system. For years Bill had been waiting for someone to earn a 1 and he realized he was actually blocking this person from ever getting a 1 by not allowing him to do more of the things he was capable of doing at the highest level.

What we are not saying is that sometimes there are things that you do well that don’t give you energy but you should spend all of your time doing them anyway. We are also not saying that you should not stretch people or give them new challenges. However, there are ways of stretching that build and expand people while there are ways of stretching that tear them down or are less helpful. Sometimes you are in a job that you can’t change, but you can craft your job (Wrzesniewski, Berg, Dutton, Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want, Harvard Business Review, June 2010) in ways to use your strengths more often and find greater meaning in what you do. Ignoring weaknesses is not the argument but focusing mostly on them, which is pretty common practice, may not be as helpful to creating higher levels of performance.

Resources for Moving Forward

These core areas of focus within POS are generating a lot of interesting tools, concepts, and strategies that explain and help you create the extraordinary levels of performance occurring in the organizations and executives being studied. There are many ways to take advantage of these. Here is a list to help you get started:

  • The University of Michigan Executive Education offers a course on Leading Positive Change (
  • LIFT Consulting offers a number of assessments, workshops, teambuilding exercises, speaking engagements and organizational development consulting from a POS lens (
  • The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship has a website that gives helpful information for researchers, provides tools for practitioners and offers other resources (
  • There is a POS blog that weekly post a story, related POS research and why it matters (
  • The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship is forming a HR Consortium for HR Directors around enhancing culture and HR practices (Please see contact info below if you have interest in learning more).

For more information or to set up a time to talk to Shawn Quinn please contact Rebecca Rangel-Mullin r by call at (734) 320-6277.

© LIFT Consulting, 2010