I read with interest the results of a recent survey carried out on middle and senior managers from 100 of Australia's top 50 organizations.
Leadership is about having a vision and communicating that vision to every employee.
Optimism Martin Seligman in his book Learned Optimism reports on the level of optimism shown by USA presidential candidates between the years 1900 - 1984. People seem to want a vision of hope and opportunity, and respond well to those messages. However the vision needs to be well balanced between focusing on the opportunities and identifying potential problems. Leaders who focus on unattainable goals often demonstrate a form of naive optimism that everything will turn out alright in the end. Employees soon become disgruntled when they realize that the rhetoric is far from the reality.