Abundance Leaders

CHAPTER 4Improving Your Organization's Health

The first wealth is health.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It is not sufficient to be an admired leader. Results matter, and robust and resilient organizational health is critical for producing those results. My research showed that an optimistic or abundance mental model does matter in a leader. That mental model has a positive impact on individuals working for such a boss, and it makes for a healthier organization. A healthy organization is often more effective, whether measured in profitability or service delivery, and is often an asset to the larger community by creating more satisfied and productive staff.

According to the organizational health measure (OHM) I created during my doctoral research, a healthy organization has better communication, conflict resolution, teamwork, supervision, and other characteristics. The OHM provides a meaningful and useful tool for practitioners to measure the perceived health of an organization. It can be contrasted and enhanced with more quantitative measures such as data from balance sheets or income statements to see if perceived health and financial health coexist.

This provides a reason to care about abundance and scarcity behaviors. If the behaviors had no impact on the organization, why bother studying and practicing them? Given the direct correlation, bosses are well-served to determine their scarcity or abundance tendencies and to work on managing those toward a more abundance model.

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