We have a crisis of trust in institutions. Can ‘positive leadership’ offer a solution?

When Kim Cameron gets off a flight, he’ll often hand a couple of his Delta frequent-flier certificates to airport employees. “I just thank them when they serve me,” he tells me. In turn, they will respond with a hug, sometimes tears. He shares this story to make a point that he’s embraced a mindset of looking for ways to recognize people and their good work.

In responding to my emails after our conversation, he signed off with: “You are terrific.” It didn’t matter whether the compliment was merited — the cheery line gave me a jolt of confidence.

But Cameron is not just a really nice guy. Being positive is also his day job.

For nearly 20 years, Cameron, a business professor at the University of Michigan, has studied how positivity transforms organizations and the people who work in them. A pioneer in the “positive leadership” movement, Cameron believes that focusing on what’s going right— or “the positively deviant” behavior, as he calls it — is more effective than concentrating on what’s going wrong.

And it’s not just about being nice or peddling the theatrical optimism of inspirational speakers. Nor is Cameron promoting a “Pollyanna-ish” idea of positivity, he told me. He’s got ample proof that once permeated in the culture of an organization, positivity has transformative power. In fact, he’s written 16 books on the subject. “What happens is you start unleashing people’s potential,” he told me.

In a time of plummeting trust in American institutions and diminished faith in effective and dignified leadership, the vision of positive leadership offers hope, Cameron believes. “We’re in a cynical, angry, kind of awful condition right now,” Cameron told me. Positive practices like generosity and forgiveness in the workplace, Cameron believes, can provide a connection between individuals who may not see eye to eye. “Everybody believes in kindness and gratitude,” he told me. “It’s the best of the human condition — and that’s the whole point.”

Finding the ‘superordinate’

Cameron is aware how superficial and unserious this all may sound — positivity as a business strategy, really? He’s encountered many skeptics over the years.

“I would meet people who tell me, ‘Frankly, this irritates me, because I’ve got stock price pressures, quality issues, customer satisfaction concerns, and you’re telling me just to be nice,’” said Cameron, who used be the dean of the business school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and has taught at Brigham Young University.

But Cameron has a broad collection of empirical studies and examples to support his contention. During our conversation, he rattles off one study after another to back up his points. One looked at journals of nearly 700 Catholic nuns and showed that those with positive accounts lived longer than those who recorded negative emotions. Another study about babies showed them gravitating toward puppets who were more helpful.

Another example in his 2012 book “Positive Leadership” tells a story about the closing of a nuclear weapons production facility in Denver, Colorado, in the 1980s. When CH2M HILL came in to clean up tons of nuclear waste and close a polluted site, the company faced antagonism and public grievances, but managed to complete the task 60 years ahead of schedule and $30 billion under budget and improved relationships with the community. “This company’s achievement far exceeded every knowledgeable expert’s predictions of performance, and it represents what I refer to as positive deviance,” Cameron wrote in the book. An executive from the U.S. Department of Energy once suggested the reason behind the company’s success: “They poured their corporate heart into what we were trying to do. They brought some fabulous positive leadership to the site.” Navigating crisis situations and opposing viewpoints inside organizations — both public and private — has never been more important, Cameron believes. And perhaps it’s never been harder.

A 2023 Gallup poll showed that Americans’ faith in institutions remains at historic lows. The lowest-rated institutions are the media, the criminal justice system, big business and Congress.

Per U.S. News & World Report, corporate America, too, is undergoing something of a leadership crisis — with increasing cynicism about business executives and their reluctance to pass the torch to younger generations, according to a 2023 poll. “So how do you manage two really conflicting, simultaneously opposite conditions?” Cameron asked.

The solution, he says, involves finding a “superordinate” — something more important to groups that disagree than the issue at hand. Leading with positivity and virtue can serve as that unifying principle. “We’re studying and identifying practical applications to help resolve all this antagonism, caustic complaining, griping and accusing kind of environment,” he told me.

It’s a lot like raising children, he continued: “You’re trying to teach them how to be wonderful human beings, you know?”

‘Light is life-giving’

Cameron got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Brigham Young University, where he later served as the associate dean of the Marriott business school (and where he famously dated Ann Davies, better known as Ann Romney today.) After graduating, he went on to teach sociology and social psychology at BYU-Idaho, formerly Ricks College. (During this time, Henry J. Eyring was the president and became Cameron’s mentor.) He later went on to earn another master’s degree and a Ph.D. at Yale University.

Cameron, who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, began studying positivity in a surprising way: by looking at organizations that were collapsing.

In the early 2000s, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, Cameron was researching teams that were downsizing and consolidating. While many organizations deteriorated after these changes, he found that some 10-15% bucked the trend. After taking a close look at these outliers, Cameron found that these organizations navigated business by implementing seemingly unbusinesslike qualities like compassion, forgiveness, gratitude and generosity — a set of qualities that Cameron says make up “virtuous leadership.” In 2001, along with two friends he met at Brigham Young University in his 20s, Cameron founded the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan.

Cameron’s concept of positive leadership, the term he had coined and developed, began getting traction around this time alongside the burgeoning field of the positive psychology movement, although the two movements developed separately. Soon after founding the center, Cameron met Martin Seligman, a pioneer in the field of positive psychology and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s a very symbiotic kind of relationship, and we learned a lot from each other,” Cameron told me.

Since then, positivity, applied in various domains, has gained more credibility as research has emerged on the emotional and physiological benefits of a positive mindset. For instance, employees are 13% more productive when they’re happy, according to a study by Oxford University’s Sa?d Business School. A study by Seligman showed that MetLife’s “optimistic” salespeople made 57% more sales than their “pessimistic” colleagues. Arthur Brooks, a business professor at Harvard University, found that leaders who encourage personal connections among employees help employees see meaning in their work. “When you’re rewarded by somebody who knows you as a person and builds you up, it’s not just a job anymore; it’s a bunch of relationships,” he said in an interview with Harvard Business School.

Cameron’s colleague Jane Dutton, co-founder of the Center for Positive Organizations, has studied resilience in organizations and founded a Compassion Lab following an outpouring of support for the student community in the aftermath of a fire on campus.

Cameron has brought his positive leadership philosophy to army generals, NBA coaches, and leaders at the CIA, FBI and other national intelligence agencies. There are now several hundred “positive organizational scholars” worldwide who study ideas Cameron pioneered.

“All I’m doing is proving, using academic scholarly terms, that light is life-giving,” Cameron told me. He’s got a term for this, too — the “heliotropic effect,” a tendency of all things to be drawn to light and positivity (which comes from the Greek word “helios,” which means the “sun”).

Making good people even better

In 2003, Jim Mallozzi was up against a seemingly impossible task. A former executive at Prudential, he had been asked to spearhead the merger of Prudential’s retirement division with another retirement company the company had acquired in Connecticut. “Smushing these two companies was literally like trying to merge the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees,” he told me. Around this time, Mallozzi’s colleagues had heard about Cameron’s ideas of positive leadership and suggested the two men connect. The encounter with Cameron, Mallozzi said, was among the most professionally and personally influential in his life.

The biggest reason most mergers fail is the inability to assimilate corporate cultures, Mallozzi told me. So instead of trying to blend the two cultures, Mallozzi, who has bought and sold dozens of companies, opted for creating a new culture that would blend the best aspects of both.

Drawing on Cameron’s positive leadership principles, he started identifying people in the organization who have a “positive bent to them” — Cameron calls them “energizers.”

Mallozzi focused on what people were already good at, and helping them to get even better. And the things that employees weren’t good at, he deemed “irrelevant.”

“So by studying what was right, we could also find those kernels to help us fix what was wrong,” Mallozzi told me. The merger became something of a test case for applying Cameron’s ideas, and as a result, the company’s earnings soared eight-fold and employee morale went up.

Can there be too much positivity?

Not everyone sees positivity in the same light that Cameron does; the word might conjure na?veté, a vision of the world that’s detached from a bleak reality. Articles about “toxic positivity” swarm the internet. One study from 2019 warned of “excessive” positivity, weak empirical studies and an oversimplified picture of corporate life.

Amie Devero, an executive coach and start-up advisor in New York City, told me that overemphasis on positivity may discourage criticism. And criticism can be important in revealing mistakes or flaws that may lay beyond the surface. “There are all kinds of information, opinions, insights that just simply are not positive but are important,” Devero told me. “It’s not bad to be sad or worried or acknowledge that things are going sideways.”

But positive leadership at its best doesn’t mean ignoring or dismissing problems and mistakes, Cameron told me. It’s all about the framing. “A crucial factor in delivering both positive and negative messages is their authenticity and sincerity,” Cameron said, adding, “with the best interests of the individuals and organization in mind.”

When I asked Cameron if it’s possible to overdo positivity, he cited John Gottman’s study that determined a “magic ratio” for successful relationships. He says it’s the secret behind successful teams, too: employing five positive inputs, like being helpful or encouraging, for every negative input, like being disparaging. Another tip is to use descriptive language, rather than making statements that evaluate or judge.

Cameron is technically retired — he doesn’t have an office on campus anymore — but he’s still teaching executives full time at the university. His kids — he’s got seven — tell him he should slow down, but Cameron can’t resist taking on a new project, occasionally conducting a study or leading a workshop. “That’s the goal,” he told me, “to try to continue to develop and learn.”

He recently trained a group of executive coaches and is soon heading off to Spain and Germany to teach about positive leadership.

“It’s a way to start addressing really difficult problems, to bring two opposing sides together, who just don’t see anything in common,” he said. “Everyone resonates with the positive, with virtuousness.”