<h2><b>Your behaviors are contagious. Choose carefully.</b></h2>
<b></b>Perhaps you are familiar with a <a href="http://youtu.be/L5ya8J-jyK4">popular insurance company TV ad</a> based on the concept of “paying it forward.”

A woman prevents a guy from stepping off the street corner into the path of an oncoming car.  The man who observes this from a restaurant window later helps a mother maneuver her baby carrier off the bus.  A man seeing this while waiting at the bus stop later helps a coworker lift a bowl from a high shelf.  You get the picture.  One good deed inspires another.  Just as importantly, the modeling of the good deed influences the observer.
<h2><b>As a leader, you influence your culture more than you even realize.</b></h2>
<b></b>Dr. Daniel Goleman and his tribe, known for their work on emotional intelligence, have also uncovered that a leader’s mood and behavior set off a powerful chain reaction among those around her or him.

I am often disappointed when I hear of a “leader’s” behavior sending the wrong message to an organization and setting a tone of fear or complacency.  You could cite the recent case of the employees at a leading car company not actively surfacing safety issues.  That doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  Goleman’s research supports that a leader’s emotional intelligence is so “contagious” it can be compared to carrying electricity through the wires of the organization. (Harvard Business Review article, “Primal Leadership,” December 2001.)
<h2><b>The value of “paying it forward” as a leader.</b></h2>
You could go so far as to say the level of a leader’s emotional maturity dictates the culture that develops in the organization.  I reveled in reading “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com.  I was inspired hearing how his thought process developed as he realized the importance of organization culture.  As he learned and grew, he put a lot of energy into creating a corporate culture that supported his vision, his business, customers and organization members.

Goleman and company’s work makes the case for what they call “emotional leadership” being a leader’s primal task to achieving business success, through others.

<i style="line-height: 1.5em;">What choices and decisions do you deliberately make to model the behavior and culture you want from those who look to you for leadership?</i>