Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
By 
March 18, 2021 at 11:51 AM
What You Need to Know
- Toxic positivity, which means being uncomfortable with negative emotions, can really hurt your business.
- Leaders need to listen and communicate around all types of emotions, and to be sure their team members do so, too.
- Take time to digest negative emotions from team members as a powerful way to diffuse conflicts.
Last week, I wrote about the effects of toxic positivity in an advisory firm’s workforce and how refusing to embrace the full spectrum of emotion can derail a company’s growth and demoralize its team members.
But how does a leader move past toxic positivity and develop a more open and honest company culture?
Let’s define toxic positivity as what happens whenever a leader is uncomfortable with negative emotions of other team members. Instead of listening to a team member’s concerns, a leader asks them to focus on the positives, and ignores the negatives.
While toxic positivity often begins with good intentions, it ends in bitterness and repressed feelings.
The solution? As a leader you have to understand and embrace communication to develop a better culture. This means listening and observing how you communicate. Then, work with your employees to create better communication.
How to Communicate Clearly
The first step in training for good communication, both in yourself and others, is to remove placating from a company’s culture. Placating is what you do when you say things to minimize another person’s negative emotions.
Here’s an example of placating to show bad communication: Imagine you have an associate advisor on your team who’s just finished a financial plan; they did a good job, but you noticed a misspelling or some other small error that bothered you.
You might go to them and start with a compliment, like “You did a good job on the financial plan.”
But in the next phrase, you move immediately to a put down: “Next time, can you please make sure you don’t make any errors?”
Following that, you placate to minimize the hurt feelings by saying something like, “But this is OK for now.”
Many leaders learn to placate because they don’t know how to communicate encouragement in a constructive way. Instead of learning to frame encouragement, they use this demoralizing three-part feedback “compliment-criticize-placate” pattern to double-down on poor communication practices.
Once aware of this communication style, leaders can change to encouragement, which is usually in the form of questions.
