Smiley faces, can-do attitudes, happy bunnies – can positive psychology raise performance and give everyone a ‘great day’? Annie Hayes reports.

The ‘what’ and ‘why’

A mad professor wearing a white lab coat with a cheeky grin – the imagery is just too tempting. But beyond the starch and perky exterior is there any substance to the positive psychology approach and what do we actually mean by it? Alex Linley, founder of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology, explains: “Research and practice discipline concerned with positive topics and positive appreciative and affirmative questions. It’s as much about the questions we ask as the topics we study.” Any clearer? I thought not.

Delve a little further and what we are talking about is a way of management that plays to workers’ strengths. A ‘what they can do’ rather than ‘what they can’t do’ philosophy. So why use it?

Sandra Buckley, principle consultant for Berkshire consultancy, says: “A strengths-based approach will work if you are trying to encourage diversity, which may be more difficult in a more traditional environment. This approach focuses on what employees have rather than what they haven’t.”

Buckley goes on to explain that the key is having managers with the skill and will to succeed in this approach: “By encouraging diversity and giving positive feedback on a range of behaviours. They should be more strategic on how they put teams together, instead of just basing decisions on performance output. Managers should start with the individual, looking at what they can offer and what they can bring or how they can help to do things differently. They should be less controlling and less predictable.”

Smiley faces

According to Linley, it’s a practice that is taking off with powerhouses such as BA and Unilever finding there is merit to working to people’s strengths.

Conceptually it works, after all what could be simpler than embracing the skills people excel in and nurturing them for success. Buckley says:

“Ultimately focusing on the positive will impact productivity and the bottom line. By helping people to be themselves at work, with an ‘it’s ok to be me’ culture, this builds self esteem and encourages people to bring the whole of themselves to the workplace. Of course there will be personality traits to consider here but if people are experiencing positive emotions at work, there will be more cooperation and more creativity.”

Linley says the heart of the concept is about challenging the traditional view of competencies where everyone has to do everything: “We’re simply not built like that. You have to work from the basis that you either improve on the things you’re not good at or focus on what your fantastic at.” It all sounds rather delightful, so where’s the snag?

The come down

Dave Millner, consulting director in the European office of Kenexa, an HR services outfit tells me that the difficulty with this approach, in his opinion, is that people’s jobs don’t always correlate with what they’re good at.

Millner offers the example of a senior leader; they might not be any good at team work, which might not be an immediate problem, but if it is left unaddressed it may weaken their chances of building key skills for their role such as collaborative and strategic weaponry. It certainly seems like a loophole in the positive psychology approach. Ignorance, after all, is bliss but not always a good thing.

A better approach, suggests Millner, is to use strengths more effectively: “If someone’s strength is problem-solving, and team-working is their area for development, then you need to show that person how to use their skills in problem-solving to improve their aptitude for team working”.

Another issue, suggests Millner, is whether the strengths approach can ever be fair and consistent and if we ignore people’s weaknesses whether that plays out for the greater good for UK plc as a whole. It’s a big question.

But Buckley says it’s not about allowing people to do as they like: “Managers also need to understand performance issues. That it is not about people getting away with bad performance, just looking at different ways to address the issues.”

Linley adds that the approach also must take account of “legal parameters, organisation values, pragmatic restraints and team working” to name just a few obstacles and points to some hard examples showcasing success.

He points to insurance giant, Norwich Union: “The challenge was to reduce first year attrition. We halved that using this approach”.

Yet Millner is still sceptical and says that organisations have to weigh up the validity of ignoring someone’s development needs. A further symptom of the positive psychology approach can be the temptation for colleagues to compensate for their friends’ weaknesses which can result in a whole raft of issues further down the line, he says.

Clearly there are two sides of the coin when it comes to positive psychology. There are those that whole-heartedly believe companies should play to people’s strengths and there are those that spot the dangers in this approach, namely patching over people’s weaknesses and ignoring problems that could surface in the future as well as placing the burden on others for failures in colleagues.

As a difficult-to-measure and with no hard or fast rules it seems set to give management and academics plenty of material to debate over for the future. So whether the smiley faces will always stick remains to be seen.