Positive Leadership

This workbook is designed to help you build your capacity for positive leadership by cultivating virtuous relationships. These special connections will help you make ethical choices throughout your life; they will sustain you during difficult times; and they’re vital to your long-term well-being.

The Structured Ethical Reflection (SER) tool is a worksheet that people can use to help them think more intentionally about, and exhibit more nuance in, the ethical issues involved in their management practice. It is oriented primarily toward practicing managers, but it can be adapted for use by full-time students by having them apply the tool to case studies, having them interview practicing managers, or through other, similar applications.  A teaching note can be requested by emailing CPL@louisville.edu.

This toolkit offers a series of activities and frameworks to help managers and leaders enhance their ability to support their teams and organizations with a coaching mindset. It contains five tools to support effective practice.

The core stories exercise is a classroom activity designed to give students a visceral experience with empathy and storytelling, and to generate personal insights into relationships, group dynamics and leadership. It involves having small groups of students share personal stories from their lives, and then reflecting together, as a class, on the meaning of the experience of sharing these stories. In the courses in which the exercise is used, many students consider it to be the peak experience of the course. However, it is also a highly sensitive activity, and should only be undertaken with great care and authenticity on the part of the instructor, and usually only after earlier coursework has been done to prepare students for the experience.

This overall resource contains a variety of tools and guides that instructors can use to support teaching students about positive leadership.

There are incredible parallels between running a marathon and leadership. Like a marathon, leadership can be exhausting, but can also be highly rewarding. Race times vary widely in marathons, sometimes with hours between the first and last place runners. Similarly, there is often significant variance in leadership performance. Perhaps the most important parallel is that you cannot train for a marathon in a day and shortcuts will only come back to hurt you. The same is true for leadership – you certainly didn’t become a leader in a day, and it doesn’t happen by accident. Performance in a marathon depends in large part on the months that precede the actual race. Similarly, the attention you give to your development as a leader often determines your performance in the long term. In other words, training for a marathon and becoming a leader takes time, patience, and planning.

This book describes four mindsets that enable us to have a consistently positive influence. Accessible but rooted in the latest research in psychology and social science. Features engaging personal stories that bring key principles to life in business situations, at home, and in the community Just as the Wright Brothers combined science and practice to finally achieve the dream of flight, Ryan and Robert Quinn combine research and experience to demonstrate how we can elevate ourselves and the situations and people around us to greater heights of integrity, openness, and achievement—the psychological equivalent of aerodynamic lift.

This technical note provides us with valuable illustrations of organizational culture and the benefits and limits of management: Managers were able to come up with and direct others to engage in a set of behaviors that made their project successful but were unable to make positive changes last. In this note, we introduce the idea of positive leadership and examine its role in changing organizational culture in meaningful and ethical ways. To do this, we explain organizational culture and management in more detail. With these concepts as a background, we then introduce the ideas of leadership and positive leadership.

This tool is designed to help you elevate your presentation skills by incorporating effective storytelling, time-tested principles, and practical, easy-to-apply techniques to increase engagement and drive your influence!

Work and life are full of transitions, good and bad, chosen and unchosen. Often, we get overwhelmed by the complexity of these transitions. A great way to make transitions smoother while retaining what is meaningful is with a metaphor. Learn the metaphor of the Old Shore, the New Shore, and the Voyage in between.  You can use this metaphor to confront the instability, uncertainty, and emotions of transitions in productive ways and ensure that you complete transitions in a healthy way that leaves you and others better off.

In this exercise, students recall details from their lives about their experiences with five other-praising emotions, interview a partner about their own and their partners’ experiences, and then participate in a class discussion about how an understanding of other-praising emotions can help them improve their leadership. A teaching note can be requested by emailing CPL@lousiville.edu.

This case study describes abrupt changes in leadership at the University of Louisville and its Athletic Department.