You can sign up to our LinkedIn newsletter here.

8 – Attitudes to Others

Your attitude to others, is probably one of the most powerful attitudes for success.

We are all leaders of some sort or other.  We don’t need to have a senior position be a leader.  We lead others positively or negative, simply by the way we are with other people.  Ultimately, it’s our attitude to those other people that will determine the leadership that we offer them.

Being a Hope Bringer

If leadership is influence then, the people with the most influence are the people with the most hope.  How often have you been in an organisation where the negativity of just a few people drags everybody down? How often have you been in an environment where the hope, the positivity, of one or two people shines as a beacon and makes you want to be around them.  Where does that positivity come from?  It comes from how you see the world and how you see other people.

My mother was somebody who always believed the best in everybody.  Even when they let her down.  Even when they disappointed her.  Even when they betrayed her trust, although she would recognise the betrayal, she would continue to find the positive in them.  This wasn’t naive, it was a foundational belief about human potential. 

It meant that she was enormously loved by those around her.  It meant that people couldn’t wait to help her, to assist her, to advise her.  It meant that she had a rich network of friends, supporters and helpers.  She could do things that, on her own, she could never have done.  Fundamentally that was because of her attitude to others.

Adopting an Expectation of Disappointment

If your attitude to others is underpinned by an expectation of disappointment, then you start to believe that everybody’s out to get you.  You expect people will let you down.  You just can’t wait until somebody fails.  You already carry disappointment in advance of the reality of what has happened.  Not only are you limiting, indeed cursing, the contributions of others, but you are carrying that negativity into your own attitudes to your own future.

The Power of Encouragement

I have been in environments where mutual encouragement is so embedded in the culture, that people are enabled to do things they could never believe they could do.  This culture, specifically looks for the treasure, the gems, the strengths, the wonderful aspects of the people in that environment and then focuses on encouraging those good things to be even better.  Often, you can see good in others, that they cannot see for themselves and as this culture reinforces with more and more positivity, extraordinary things start to happen.  If you are looking for success in your environment, whatever role you’ve got, you will find that the attitude of positivity and seeing the best in others, will enable extraordinary things to happen. It’ll also create a reinforcing effect where people will feed that back to you.  You will start to see things in you that you hadn’t realised were there.  You will start to see the best of who you are. Stepping more and more into your strengths will enable you to be more and more successful.

Conclusion

Your attitude to others ultimately reflects your ability to have a right attitude to yourself.  Hold the right attitude to others and it will reinforce a right attitude to yourself.  Get your attitude right and you will engage in a powerful, supportive, motivating and success generating environment.  The right attitude to others will create an attitude for success.

Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.