Let’s stay positive here. There’s no need for negative comments. Have you ever asked your team to remain positive when faced with challenges? Or better yet, have you ever been told to project positivity to reinforce positive thinking on your team? I’ve seen this pattern countless times. Something bad happens, and the leader immediately goes into positivity mode, believing that the simple act of thinking and behaving positively will help improve morale and motivate their team. Some of you may even think that’s how leaders should behave. I thought that for a while too, at least for most situations. I always leaned toward positivity. I was known as the person who couldn’t be rattled. Someone who would always remain positive in any situation.

I’ve been moving further and further away from this view as I’ve studied emotional intelligence and authentic leadership more in the past six months. Suppressing emotions or faking them is never good, especially as a leader. Not only that, but forcing someone to feel or think a certain way is even worse. Asking someone to think positively when they are overwhelmed and stressed doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. I decided to do some research and found a tremendous article that helps us understand what happens when we force positivity on our teams.

The article by Ali et al. (2026) looked at the impact forced positivity had when negative situations arose compared to similar situations with leaders who used humility-aspiration signaling. The downsides of forced positivity were crystal clear in the research. Forced positivity leads to higher suppression, which leads to greater emotional exhaustion and higher unethical pro-self behavior (Ali et al., 2026). Put simply, forced positivity makes employees suppress their feelings, which leads to poorer decisions (and most likely performance too). Leaders have a lot of power to act and change situations as they occur. In fact, the right signal at the right time can make all the difference. Here’s what that signal could look like.

The deadline for a project your team has been working on just changed. They now have to learn a new system and deploy a new internal product in less time than expected. Typically, leaders are taught to say something like this:

“Let’s try to stay positive here. We can push through this deadline; we’ve done it before, and we can do it again. Let’s just attack it one day at a time and keep pushing.”

But a humility-aspirational approach would look much different:

“I know this seems impossible. I don’t know how I’m going to learn the new system myself in this amount of time, but we have to try for the business. I’m going to map out a plan that helps us use our time wisely to try and learn the new system and meet our business goals.”

One is overwhelmingly positive. One is realistic and authentic.

The research even says that the second approach is more likely to lead to higher meaning making, lower suppression, lower emotional exhaustion, and reduced unethical pro-self behavior (Ali et al., 2026). Authentic leadership beats performative leadership. If you’re feeling nervous or a little apprehensive about an ambitious goal, it’s best to share that with your team instead of giving them positive, motivational statements that hide your concerns.

Until next time,

Rick

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