There’s no denying that the deck these past two years has seemed stacked against employers in almost every industry. Between the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and the burnout crisis hitting numerous sectors, company leaders are scrambling to find meaningful solutions to problems of employee engagement and retention. While many will focus on tangible and important areas of concern, such as salary and benefits or work-life balance, company heads would do well to also remember the critical role of workplace culture and leadership in keeping employees present and motivated.

1. Celebrate Success

First and foremost, positive leadership involves acknowledging your team’s successes. When someone does something exceptional or accomplishes something they worked toward for a while, it’s crucial to dedicate time to call out that success—particularly in a public forum. Giving team members recognition for a job well done, particularly one in which they use individual creativity or problem-solving to overcome a challenge, makes everyone feel great. Moreover, it creates a culture that motivates all of us to follow suit.

2. Recognize That The Buck Stops Here

At the core, the reason we seek leadership roles is to be involved in something larger than ourselves. When something goes wrong, pointing fingers isn’t productive; ultimately the solutions are inherent to you. To that end, I spend a lot of time thinking about the tasks I’m going to accomplish with my team that day, my underlying strategies for whatever it is we need to accomplish long-term, and the things I know are going to help support my team members to get us where we need to go. When something doesn’t go the way I plan, I have therefore thought through the alternatives and am prepared to take responsibility and pivot.

3. Never Compromise On Self-Care

As a leader, you have to take care of yourself. There are always going to be challenges that come up in your personal life, and if you are consistently not in a good place emotionally it will impact your interactions with your team members. So whatever facilitates the best version of yourself—exercise, more sleep, spending time with family and friends, whatever makes you feel good and hopeful—you have to make time for. Prioritizing great self-care allows you to lead with genuine optimism and energy.

4. Honor The Need For Fun

One of the things I like to do with my teams is to start meetings with a question that is both personal and fun, such as, “What’s your favorite winter sport?” We recently opened a meeting with this question, and it turned out everyone likes skiing and snowboarding. As a result, we have now planned a team-building exercise to go skiing or snowboarding at a local mountain. (They’ve all promised not to get injured.) Incorporating fun into our work lives reminds all of us we are people first, and that work is just one part of who we are.

5. Model Authenticity And Vulnerability

Once, in a meeting, a physician on my team shared a story about how his father, a teacher, always made cookies during the holidays, and any time he had cookies he thought of him. It was a really nice, meaningful thing to share. As a leader, it’s important to be willing to share about yourself. Before I give a strategy update, I’ll share something small and personal—maybe my favorite dessert, my favorite sport, or my favorite holiday tradition growing up. Opening up in this way ensures our teams see us as accessible, relatable and most of all, human. It’s also important to spend time with team members in person whenever possible in the new remote work environment. The human to human interaction and social connections we make when innovating or celebrating together in the same room cannot be replaced.

6. Keep All Eyes On The Mission

As a leader, you have to be able to visualize, in HD, a positive future—and then you have to paint that picture for your team. It’s also about reminding people of the central core of the mission. In our case, that’s taking care of patients. So at the end of the day, when you consider our software engineers, for instance, they’re here at Kaiser Permanente and not another company because they truly believe in their role shaping a positive and healthy future for our patients —and in contributing to a larger purpose, that of advancing the quality of healthcare in our country.

Relentless optimism is an invaluable (and totally underrated) quality in leadership. Projecting that optimism earnestly, authentically and purposefully is the through-line in an overarching strategy of positive leadership. Let’s all strive to live and work each day in a way that naturally engages and inspires our teams in the pursuit of a shared mission.

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