Hi, I'm Sébastien Page. I'm the author of The Psychology of Leadership. To me, good leadership involves three different things. And let me give you an example. When I joined in my current role, I set a big goal for my team. I sat down with them and let them ask questions. And one of the questions was, where can we take this business over the next 5 years? And I immediately said, I think we can double the size of our business. Immediately I got a lot of questions from team members. So the three things that are essential to leadership, of course, the number one is to set long-term goals. As a leader, that's your number one job to have a long-term vision for the business. I was doing that but I was missing out on the second important component of leadership which is to have a plan to execute on your goals. Now, a lot of leaders like to make big pronouncements and have long-term goals, but not a lot of them have the plan to go along with those goals. So, it's very important to have that second part. And then, of course, the third part of effective leadership is the ability to bring people along. So, it's really simple when you think about it. You need to have long-term goals for your organization and communicate them as much as you can. You need to have a plan to go along with those. Now, the plan might change over time, but it's important to have a plan and milestones to execute along the way. And third is the ability to bring people along to that vision and to that long-term plan.
To me, the field of psychology is an untapped gold mine for leadership wisdom and for the practice of leadership. I've become interested in psychology simply to become a better leader in my day job. And I've discovered three aspects, three fields of psychology that can provide a lot of wisdom and principles for leadership. Number one, positive psychology. What makes people thrive in the long run? In the book, I talk about a famous model called the PERMA model. PERMA, we all look for positive emotions. That's the P. But what makes people thrive in the long run is the ERMA part of that model. Engagement, positive relationships, having meaning in what we do, and seeking long-term accomplishments. So positive psychology is remarkably applicable to leadership even though it hasn't been so far. The second field within psychology that is part of that gold mine of wisdom is sports psychology. Now here we learn to deal with stress. Athletes know that they cannot eliminate stress. When it's a critical point in the game, whatever sport you're playing, you're going to be stressed. But there are ways for organizations and for individuals to learn to deal with stress and find the optimal level. Zero is not the optimal level because your organization gets complacent. People get bored. But too much stress is bad for people, for your health and for your organization. So how do you find the optimal level? Sports psychology teaches that. It also teaches you to learn from losing. In a sense, sports psychology is about losing, not winning. It's about how you adapt following a loss, what you learn from it, and how you move forward. That's the same for business leadership. So, fascinating links between the world of sports psychology and business leadership. Third, the field of personality psychology is making its way into business practice. Most business leaders recognize that in their teams they have introverts and they have extroverts. Books have been written, for example, about the power of introverts and the untapped potential that you have from introverts, but personality psychology is way broader than this. We talk about traits like conscientiousness and what it means in the workplace. We talk about neuroticism, agreeableness and other traits that help us understand what makes people tick. Personality psychology helps us put together teams that have cognitive diversity that complement each other for maximum performance. So these are the three fields within psychology that have direct applications to leadership that I think have been underappreciated in the leadership literature. Positive psychology, what makes people thrive. Sports psychology, for example, how you handle and optimize stress levels for people and organizations. And thirdly, personality psychology. Personality is incredibly important in the workplace. We have to be careful not to extrapolate too much from personality, but it helps leaders understand how the team will work together. It helps leaders understand people with more empathy because as leaders sometimes we have to make tough decisions and understanding personality psychology will help us manage the communication around those tough decisions better. Ultimately, we're all people working together with a tremendous amount of stress and emotions at work. There's no way to avoid this. Learning personality psychology will help leaders in all dimensions. Resolving conflicts between people, putting together cognitively diverse teams with people that think differently where the collision of ideas gives you something that's greater than the sum of the parts, and inspiring people to achieve more than they might think they can achieve themselves.
I think the best way to handle a stressed out team member is first to listen. Listening is a superpower of leadership. It's very much underrated. We have this view of the leader as the inspirational figure who talks a lot. But really, when someone is stressed out, often times it helps them just to be listened to, to know that someone is there to hear them out and then reflect. As a leader, you don't necessarily have to react. It's better actually sometimes not to react, but rather to simply respond with empathy. That is the number one piece of advice I would give to deal with a stressed out individual is to listen first and then reflect back with empathy and then come up with a plan. I will always in my role as a leader give people space to decompress and I will offer them time to go home. I think ultimately if you want a productive team people need to rest. They can't burn out. And also you need to, I think without overstepping as a leader, be able to talk about things like health and fitness and destigmatize mental health and stress and burnout but also talk about the importance of sleep, the importance of nutrition. I think in business we bring unhealthy snacks. They taste good, but really why not talk a little bit about the importance of nutrition, the importance of physical exercise. And what I tell people sometimes is you actually need those three things to work together. You can't just take one out. So you need the sleep, you need decent nutrition, and you need exercise. And if you do all three, then you have reinforcement between these three legs of the stool. So I think politely, gently, in a way that's respectful, encouraging people to take care of themselves is a good thing to do.
I handle stress by being mindful of my state of mind, by practicing some meditation every day if I can. By always trying to get enough sleep, by taking care of being mindful of what I eat and exercising every day. Different people handle stress in different ways but for me it really works to exercise every day and take a pause during the day. Just take a 20 minute pause to breathe. You might not be into meditation. Go for a walk. Just pause and reflect and try to give yourself some time to collect your thoughts. I think that's crucial.
When I was researching this book, I got really interested in different fields of psychology. I think a lot of those fields have a lot of incredibly useful insights for leadership that have not really been used in practice yet. So, that was sort of the big surprise is how much psychology has to offer to business leadership. Things like how sports psychology essentially teaches you to lose and to win over time as opposed to every single game. So it teaches you to handle defeats which in business no matter what you're going to have setbacks and learning to deal with those setbacks through the lens of how athletes do it is really really interesting and I think is kind of a new way to look at leadership and team management. So lots of things that I found from psychology I think are underutilized in business management. So my three tips for business leaders are first of all you need to have a long-term goal, an inspirational goal for your organization. Where do you want this organization to go three, five, 10 years down the road? Second, have a plan to execute against that vision. But third, be flexible because you're not playing tennis against the wall. You're playing against a competitor. You're playing against competitors. It's a dynamic world. So, you need to be able to adapt. It's really simple. Leadership is not that complicated when you think about it. Set a long-term goal, have a plan to execute that goal, bring people along, and ultimately be able to adapt as you go along. I'm really excited to bring this book to market. I think that psychology has a lot to offer to leadership that's been underestimated. And I really hope this book will help a lot of people. Thank you for watching.
