What Is Positive Leadership? An Employer’s Guide

Key takeaways

Positive leadership draws on positive psychology and focuses on positive behavior and inclusive practices to encourage, support, and lead.

• Four types of positive leadership are transformational, authentic, coaching, and charismatic leadership. 

• Positive leaders tend to be caring, supportive, empowering, passionate, authentic, and confident.

• You can use conflict resolution skills to enhance your positive leadership style.

Learn about the types of positive leadership, when this style of leadership is beneficial, and the traits of a positive leader, as well as steps to implement positive leadership. Then, discover how you can partner with Coursera for Business to help your organization build in-demand skills to fuel growth, engage and retain talent across teams, and boost employee productivity.

Empower teams with access to world-class content from 350+ top companies and universities

Learn more

What is positive leadership?

Positive leadership is a management style that borrows ideas from positive psychology. It focuses on positive behavior and inclusive techniques to encourage, support, and lead. While some leadership styles focus on authoritative methods or control to manage people, positive leadership, by contrast, emphasizes empowerment and has been shown to boost morale, job satisfaction, engagement, and confidence.

Types of positive leadership styles

Positive leadership encompasses many leadership styles, such as transformational and authentic leadership. These styles generally focus on encouraging and inspiring rather than what not to do. When you adopt a positive leadership style, you encourage others through positive emotions. This includes modeling positive behavior and using techniques to enhance positivity to bring about self-awareness, optimism, motivation, and change. 

Transformational leadership

Transformational leaders are inspiring and motivating. With this leadership style, you strive to motivate others to work toward a goal by creating a strong, exciting vision that people buy into and collectively achieve. If this is your style, you are empowering, with a talent for sharing the bigger picture and encouraging others through modeling trust, commitment, and a strong work ethic. Transformational leaders may also display traits such as self-awareness, adaptability, proactivity, creativity, ethics, and humility.

Authentic leadership

An authentic leader is open, honest, and true to themselves. This type of leader inspires others by developing relationships built on trust, focusing on inclusivity, being transparent, and genuinely taking an interest in the strengths and preferences of their team. Authentic leadership is about embracing mistakes, learning from them, modeling learning, and establishing a safe, supportive environment with honest, constructive feedback and encouragement.

Coaching leadership

Coaching leadership leverages your ability to help team members achieve their goals through encouragement, positive reinforcement, and a careful balance of praise and highlighting where improvement is needed. It is about setting goals, challenging direct reports, and expecting accountability in a trusting, supportive, and encouraging manner.

Charismatic leadership

If you are a charismatic leader, you are excellent at engaging with people and persuading them to work toward your vision. You are inspiring and motivating, and have a personality people want to collaborate with and be around. Your enthusiasm and passion are contagious. Additional characteristics associated with a charismatic leader include being forward-thinking, articulate, open to taking risks, having a clear vision, acting as a role model, and displaying empathy.

Positive leadership qualities

Positive leadership comes with certain traits, such as being supportive and authentic, that define the style and put people at the center. Uncover more about the traits of a positive leader.

Care and support

As a positive leader, you advocate for your team. They know you support them, are open to assisting them, and genuinely care about their well-being. Look for root causes and support your team with any challenges they face when results fall short.

Empowerment

Empowering your employees is an essential part of positive leadership. It’s not just about supporting your team but inspiring and motivating them to achieve their potential. You do this by creating a supportive environment where people can solve problems, learn from mistakes, and use their strengths.

Passion

Part of positive leadership is having passion and commitment to your vision and leading by example. Passion and dedication inspire others and encourage people to want to contribute to and achieve the vision you’ve mapped out.

Authenticity

Your authentic self is vital in positive leadership. It involves being open, transparent, and someone your team can relate to and feel safe with. Being authentic also means crediting others where credit is due and recognizing the individual contributions others make to the team.

Confidence

As a good leader, you are confident in yourself, your approach, and your team's abilities and contributions. Your decisions inspire confidence in others, who, in turn, can trust you as their leader.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is important for a positive leader. It allows you to quickly identify your strengths and weaknesses, address them, ask for feedback, and use it to improve.

Leaders at 4,300+ companies develop their talent with Coursera

Learn more

Who uses positive leadership?

Positive leadership is a style anyone can use, regardless of where they are. Leadership styles are a preference, and positive leaders are everywhere. Anyone can employ the techniques and traits needed to become a positive leader.

The power of positive leadership: Pros and cons

As with any leadership style, you’ll find it has both advantages and disadvantages. Leadership styles are a matter of personal preference, and what works for one person may not work for another.

Pros of positive leadership

Positive leadership has many benefits. Putting people first creates a caring, supportive environment where people feel comfortable sharing ideas, putting themselves forward, and problem-solving, even if they make mistakes. It has been linked to high job satisfaction, enhanced performance, and boosted morale.

Cons of positive leadership

Positive leadership also has downsides. When employers unquestioningly trust their employees, managers may ask fewer questions and believe everything is going well. This can lead to difficulties in addressing issues later on or failure to bring people in line who need closer management.

Read more: Company Culture: Why It Matters

How to get started with positive leadership

If positive leadership is the right leadership style for you, you can take several steps, such as empowering your team and leading by example, to adopt this approach. Explore these steps in more detail:

Change your language.

Positive leadership focuses on encouraging positive behavior, so positive language is important. Rather than focusing on what not to do, use language that inspires, motivates, and builds confidence.

Empower your team.

Empowering your team is critical with this type of leadership. Work with your team to achieve a goal, but give them the space, tools, and resources to solve problems and develop their own innovations rather than micromanaging.

Lead by example.

Be the leader your team looks up to by modeling what you want from them and encouraging them to do as you do. Being supportive, getting to know your team and their strengths, allowing yourself to make mistakes, and learning from them are great ways to build a team that promotes positive leadership from the top down.

Promote peace.

Positive leadership is about creating a supportive, empowering environment where people can grow and thrive. You can use conflict resolution skills to establish and maintain this peaceful environment. Several of the abilities that can assist you with conflict resolution are active listening, negotiation, assertiveness, empathy, composure, and problem-solving.

Take a course.

Part of positive leadership is encouraging and supporting your team's development, and you must model this behavior. A great way to do this is to bolster your leadership skills through a course or Professional Certificate.

Explore our free leadership resources

With Coursera for Business, your employees will gain access to content from 350+ leading universities and industry partners, where they can build real-world experience with innovative skills, tools, and technologies while earning globally recognized credentials. Our customizable, scalable learning solutions balance workplace and technical skills training in diverse formats, from video clips to Guided Projects and Professional Certificates.

• Subscribe to The Learning Curve, our LinkedIn newsletter, for information about a variety of business-related issues.

• Learn about Success Stories from Coursera’s partners.

• Read our Global Skills Report to discover the critical skills people need in today’s jobs.

Train teams across your organization in the skills that matter most in today’s digital economy with Coursera.