46 pages • 1 hour read
Jon GordonThe Power Of Positive Leadership: How and Why Positive Leaders Transform Teams and Organizations and Change the World
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Positive Leaders Lead With Purpose”
Gordon acknowledges that there are times when leaders struggle with positivity. Having a greater purpose is the answer. He compares this to having a series of gas stations from which the leader can refuel and keep moving forward.
Gordon argues that hard work itself doesn’t make a person tired. Rather, a lack of purpose does: “We get burned out because we forget why we do it” (152). Happiness doesn’t come from work itself but from the meaning and purpose that a leader brings to work. Alan Mulally transformed Ford because he gave his employees a greater purpose, drawing on Henry Ford’s vision to “open the highways to all mankind” (152). Mulally was also aware that by saving Ford, he would be saving thousands of jobs and contributing to both the US and global economies.
Leaders must think about why they do what they do, and they don’t have to look further than where they already are to live with purpose. Gordon gives the example of a mortgage broker who believes that her job is to save marriages, recognizing that when people lose their homes, their marriages often fall apart.
Gordon discusses the need for leaders to have and share both a vision (where they are going) and a purpose (why they are going there). He again compares vision to the north star and says that purpose is the fuel that allows one to follow it. Sharing the purpose must inspire purpose in others. For instance, Organic Valley milk measures sales but is more focused on giving a living to farmers and providing healthy dairy products. These are “intrinsic” goals, like a military school graduate’s goal of serving the country rather than rising through the ranks. While it is fine to have measurable goals, one also must have the energy to achieve them.
Some leaders pick one word to guide them throughout the year. An organization can collect the team’s words and put them on T-shirts or walls. A “Life Word” is somewhat different: the word one would want on a tombstone. Gordon’s word would be “positive.”
Gordon encourages leaders to consider what legacy they want to leave behind. For instance, Heisman winner Tim Tebow wants to be known for his foundation that provides education, medicine, and other necessary items for orphans in several countries. Another person’s legacy might come in the form of stories that people tell about how the leader changed their lives.
Gordon describes a near-death experience on a plane that had a mechanical failure and made an emergency landing. Afterward, he was inspired to live his purpose and leave a legacy.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Positive Leaders Have Grit”
Angela Duckworth identifies “grit” as the main predictor of success in her 2016 bestseller Grit. Grit is the ability to commit to a long-term goal and in spite of adversity. Positive leaders have grit and are thus able to overcome various obstacles. One of the examples that Gordon offers is Sara Blakely, the owner of Spanx, who visited hundreds of manufacturers until she found one willing to make her lingerie products.
Gordon describes grit as a combination of a marathon, a series of sprints, and a boxing match in which a person is both running and getting hit along the way. It starts with knowing what one wants. This means having a vision, but the vision must be greater than all the negativity that the person is likely to encounter. Gordon calls this knowing one’s “why”; for instance, his father, a police officer, worked to make their city a safer place.
Grit also involves loving what you do because love is more powerful than fear. The more success people have, the more fear they have because they have more to lose. The answer, Gordon says, is to get back to loving the process.
Everyone fails at some point, but failure doesn’t define or stop a leader. Rather, it builds character. Gordon points out that George Washington lost two thirds of all the battles he fought yet won the Revolutionary War. Likewise, many coaches built great teams by focusing on the process rather than the numbers.
Leadership brings scrutiny, criticism, and attacks as well as praise, but positive leaders have the grit to overcome criticism. Social media amplifies both praise and criticism. Neither defines one’s identity, which involves showing up and doing the work.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Lead the Way Forward”
Gordon finds hope in the new leaders he meets each week. He speaks of a baseball manager whose career highlight was telling one of his Minor League players that he was going to the Majors.
Being a positive leader might involve changing careers, as a principal did in order to create a worldwide program for schools based on Gordon’s book The Energy Bus. As another example, a nightclub promoter created a charity to help African villages have clean drinking water. Personal change can help a leader change and inspire others.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
In the last chapters of the book, Gordon considers challenges that leaders face personally and offers solutions for them, looking at a sense of purpose in Chapter 10 and the concept of grit in Chapter 11.
In doing so, Gordon broadens the book’s applicability by defining leadership broadly. To discuss “intrinsic” goals that provide one with purpose, he again uses Alan Mulally as an example, pointing out that the CEO reached all the way back to the company’s founding by Henry Ford in 1903 to find a slogan that would inspire his employees. However, he then shows that one need not be a CEO to have a sense of purpose; one of his examples is a mortgage broker who approaches her work as a way of saving marriages, while another is a janitor sweeping the floors at NASA who finds purpose in believing that he helped put a man on the moon. Neither of these people are “leaders” in the traditional sense, but Gordon implies that their ability to find meaning in their work embodies the positivity that is at the heart of strong leadership. Indeed, the author returns to the image of the root and the fruit to make this point, urging readers to count the fruit (the measurable results) but “know that it’s just a byproduct of how well [they] are nurturing the root” (158). Since Gordon previously used the root metaphor in connection with Establishing a Positive Culture, his association of it here with purpose implies that the two are closely related.
The Power of Positive Leadership often uses ideas from Gordon’s general work in the field of positivity, some of which appear in his previous books—like the concepts of energy vampires and feeding the positive dog. For instance, his suggestions about using words as touchstones feature in two books that Gordon wrote with his friends Dan Britton and Jimmy Page: One Word That Will Change Your Life (2013) is about choosing a yearly word to help one live more intentionally, while Life Word (2016) is about finding the word that encapsulates the legacy that one wants to leave behind. The cohesiveness of Gordon’s messaging across his body of work indirectly supports his claims about the importance of purpose and vision, which, for Gordon, are closely intertwined with his project of promoting positivity.
The author also continues to draw on other works in the self-help/leadership field to support his ideas. Chapter 11 draws heavily on the research of Angela Duckworth, author of Grit. Gordon integrates her definition of “grit” with his own claims, showing how grit can motivate by referencing a number of anecdotes about people who persevered despite years of toiling in obscurity and facing rejection or—in the case of sports figures such as Dabo Swinney—multiple losses. Gordon contextualizes this within his broader argument, arguing that grit alone is not enough: Rather, it provides the drive to fulfill a vision and powers the leader’s purpose. Meanwhile, both vision and purpose are related to love, which powers grit. This cyclicality underscores Gordon’s framing of the text not simply as a list of suggestions and tips but rather as an integrative framework with mutually reinforcing component parts.
The parallels that recur throughout the text also contribute to this effect. For instance, Gordon’s discussion of love being more powerful than fear in Chapter 11 recalls his portrayal of belief’s power over fear. The language that he uses to convey this idea—“love casts out fear” (172)—alludes to John 4:18: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Once again, however, this biblical reference is not an endorsement of religion per se; rather, Gordon deliberately echoes a familiar statement in an effort to make his argument more compelling. Rather than a higher power in the traditional sense, Gordon is discussing “love of [the] work, craft, and competition” and setting it in opposition to fear of failure (172). His ultimate goal is to show that fear is irrational, as failure is simply an opportunity for growth and character building for Gordon. As he says at the end of Chapter 11, “Just keep showing up, doing the work, and leading the way” (176).
In Chapter 12, the author circles back to the first point he made in Chapter 1: A positive person changes the lives of others. Having offered numerous examples from his study of leadership, Gordon now frames the point in terms of leadership: Positive leaders make everyone around them better.
