Infectious Leadership – Harvard Business Online’s Michael Watkins

“For good or ill, the senior leadership of every organization is infectious. By this I mean that leaders’ behaviors tend to be transmitted to their direct reports, who pass them on to the next level, and so on down through their organizations. Over time, they permeate the organization from top to bottom, influencing activity at all levels. Eventually they become embodied in the organizational culture, influencing the types of people who get promoted and hired into the organization, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop — either positive or negative.”

Mr. Watkins makes some excellent points on how ‘infections’ a leader’s behavior is on others. And it’s not just at the top levels that this is true. For good or bad, each of us affects (or ‘infects’) the people around us. This also means that we are affected (infected) by the people around us.

Based on this, we not only need to BE the type of person that positively impacts others, but also need to work on SURROUNDING ourselves with those types of people.

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