When you and your employees have access to effective personal development tools and coaching, you’ll all thrive. This in turn creates an organisational culture of well-being, innovation, high performance, and long-term success. If you’re looking for an opportunity to develop human-centric leadership and seek to achieve strong organisational wins in the process, then working on positive intelligence is a fundamental building block.

The principles of positive intelligence centre around each individual’s well-being and mental stamina. As a coach I have witnessed truly transformational results with clients that have increased their Positive Intelligence Quotient (PQ) and taken charge of their negative, self-limiting thoughts. Some have gone from merely surviving to thriving. And some have further upped their already good performance to even higher levels. Furthermore, I have personal experience in the continuum of optimal, average, and low PQ. And have found this App-enabled coaching and training framework developed by Shirzad Chamine as a great tool for my personal practice too!

So, what exactly is positive intelligence?

Positive intelligence can be defined as your mind’s ability to work in your favour. Positive intelligence quotient (PQ) is the measure of this mental effort and applies to how often the mind rallies for your progress as opposed to how much it limits your attempts to succeed at something.

Think of it as having two characters, each most dominant on opposite ends of a scale. The one on the higher end champions your success with a “you can do this” narrative, while the other on the lower end works to sabotage your forward movement at every turn. Higher PQ scores are associated with resilience, optimism, perseverance, and happiness, while lower PQ scores are linked to the dominance of a variety of internal saboteurs, each with its own unique attribute poised to hold you back in some way.

Knowing these saboteurs as well as the champion mindset is important because they both play critical roles in your ability to do the hard things and move forward when it matters. Somebody with a high PQ score may enjoy the benefits of a continuum of positive thoughts, positive emotions, wise actions, and better results. Those with lower scores may get caught in a pattern more like this: sabotaging thoughts, negative emotions, poor actions, and poor results.

Positive intelligence plays a massive role in modern performance development practices that support one’s ability to thrive and flourish in difficult situations, which is excellent news for organisations looking to progress and achieve their best results.

When employees thrive, organisations win!

The last few years have tested employees with a host of new challenges. Covid has brought complexities ranging from working remotely to overloading existing roles with additional functions, among many others. It’s been a tough road, and those with a less than optimal PQ score have had it even harder.

Strained or Covid-impacted environments are not the only spaces where PQ matters. For already high-performing leaders and teams that are looking to raise the bar even further, there are obstacles waiting. Hitting new sales records and increasing market share on a global scale means pushing personal performance to new limits, which can be incredibly stressful. An inability to cope with this kind of stress may cause you to fall short of your objectives.

Increasing PQ puts employees and organisations on track for success.

When it comes to PQ scores, people generally average around 50%, a figure that allows a sufficient level of performance, but it’s certainly not enough for one to reach their full potential. When one obtains higher scores of around 75% and more, the impact of the internal saboteurs is weakened, which opens the doorway to the development of emotional intelligence, mental stamina, innovative thinking, happiness at work, and general well-being. And when employees thrive in this way, they become valuable contributors to the success of their organisations.

As a leading provider with 25 years of experience coaching leaders in blue-chip companies and government, Change Partners is perfectly positioned to help you advance.

Pauliina Mapatha is an International Executive Coach at Change Partners with a wealth of experience in human-centric, inclusive leadership development. She is passionate about helping individuals, teams, and organisations achieve their full potential. Contact her at pauliinamapatha@change.co.za or on 072 215 8797 to help you take your own and your team’s performance to the next level.