The Danger of "Everything’s Good": How to Lead Without Toxic Positivity

Toxic positivity is thinking everything's good or telling everybody everything's good. You know, it's sort of, I guess, the equivalent of giving everybody, giving everybody a trophy. Right? And it's the unwillingness to ever.

Give difficult feedback. Now, the question is, have you learned the technique to give difficult feedback so that people will hear it rather than be defensive and angry?

And so one of the ways you can judge is it, Is it excessively positive? Are you actually creating psychological safety? Is ask.

The people on a regular basis, do you feel safe to admit a mistake? Do you feel safe to ask for help? Do you feel safe to say, I don't know, and see what people say at the same time, you'll see it in the product. You'll generally see if you have psychologically safety, you'll generally see the number of people quitting go down. You'll generally see innovation go up. You'll generally see over the more consistent performance. But you'll see it also just as the leader of the group is. You'll see your team teaming together, you'll see your team relying on each other. And the more that you step back, like, I. I made an executive sort of decision the other day, and I was sort of a little. Not very clear about what the decision was. You know, I was like, we need to do this right? We're not telling anybody to do anything. And somebody said, well, what's the decision? And I said, I want each of the team leaders to go back, do experiments with their team, and then tell me which is the best solution. The more you push out the opportunity to try and experiment, you'll get the benefit of all of that and you'll have a sense of it. But there's multiple data points that you'll need, some of them formal, some of them informal.