Framing the successful mind: How a leader’s mentality fosters team success
It is no secret that a business is only as functional, forward-thinking, and innovative as its leader. Workplace leaders have significant influence over their workers by informing how they react to adversity, embrace opportunity, formulate creative solutions, bolster workplace culture, and ultimately contribute to long-term success.
A 2022 study of leadership’s behavioral influence perhaps best summarizes this notion:
“When leaders’ support for employees’ personal development is high, it can stimulate employees’ enthusiasm for work, thereby encouraging them to participate actively in the development of the enterprise, express practical innovation views and provide innovation experiences and innovation models for the innovation and development of the enterprise and enhancing the overall innovation atmosphere of the enterprise and employees’ innovation behavior.”
As a result, it is vital for leaders to constantly reflect an open, empathetic, and success-driven mentality to ensure the same for their teams at large.
SETTING A PROPER TONE
Along the way, leaders should remember to lead by example by embodying constructive workplace methods while upholding all expectations associated with each worker’s role.
In this sense, leadership success often boils down to a healthy balance of transformational and transactional approaches. The former method emphasizes charismatic employee development through regular empowerment, commitment, and purpose, while the latter focuses more on task- and reward-based systems heavily reliant on accountability, initiative, and autonomous motivation. Some leaders prefer one method over the other (which, depending on the setting, may be appropriate or inevitable), but incorporating elements of both can help set a productive yet progressive tone for workers of all experience levels.
ELIMINATING NEGATIVE HABITS
Every worker has bad days where positive emotions are hard to channel, but these feelings can quickly become harmful if left unchecked. Under improper, inconsistent leadership, it can be easy for workplaces to spawn unhealthy and negative habits and undercut their success.
Potential examples include negative groupthink, clique formation, and contagious toxic interpretations of everyday goals. Leaders can mitigate these pitfalls by forgoing such tendencies themselves and conveying the importance of positivity, constructive feedback, and solution-based ideology. This process is another key aspect of leading by example, as it will demonstrate and normalize a productive demeanor in the face of challenges.
Regardless of industry, a business leader holds countless important responsibilities in guiding their workplace forward. Therefore, it is a leader’s duty to frame a healthy, progressive, and ambitious working persona and to communicate such values to their teams. As more workplaces commit to this vision, the overarching business community will continue to innovate toward advanced new horizons.
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Originally published at https://www.fastcompany.com on July 8, 2024.
About Dylan Taylor
Dylan Taylor is a global business leader, commercial astronaut, thought leader and philanthropist. Currently, Dylan serves as Chairman & CEO of Voyager Space, a multi-national space exploration firm focused on building the next generation of space infrastructure for NASA and other global space agencies.
Dylan has been recognized by Harvard University, SpaceNews, the BBC, the Financial Times, Pitchbook,CNBC, CNN and others as having played a seminal role in the growth of the private space industry. As an early-stage investor in more than 50 emerging space ventures, including Axiom, Kepler, York, Astrobotic, LeoLabs, Relativity, and Planet, Dylan is widely considered the most active private space investor in the world.
Dylan’s technical background, global business experience and unbridled passion for space make him a unique figure within his industry. As a thought leader and futurist, he has written many popular pieces on the future of the space industry for Forbes, FastCompany, Newsweek, SpaceNews, The Space Review, and Space.com. As a speaker, Dylan has keynoted many of the major space conferences around the world and has appeared regularly on Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNBC.
Dylan has extensive global business experience as both a board director and CEO in several industries, including advanced electronics, finance and real estate. He previously served as a Director for UMB Bank, a Fortune 500 company based in Kansas City and as a mutual fund director for the Jackson Funds where he oversaw assets of $8B across 130 distinct funds. He has also served in the roles of CEO, President and Board Director for multinational companies like Prudential PLC, Honeywell, Colliers and Jones Lang LaSalle. Dylan was recognized as a Fortune 1000 CEO with P&L responsibility in excess of $3B and operations encompassing 15,000 employees in over 60 countries. In addition, Dylan has participated in 4 IPOs over the course of his career.
Dylan is a leading advocate of space manufacturing and the utilization of in-space resources to further space exploration and settlement. In 2017, he became the first private citizen to manufacture an item in space when the gravity meter he co-designed and commissioned was 3D printed on the International Space Station. The historic item is now housed in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Dylan is an explorer of note. On December 11th, 2021 Dylan became just the 606th human to go to space as part of the crew of Blue Origin’s NewShepard Mission 19. Accordingly, Dylan earned his commercial astronaut wings with the FAA and his universal astronaut wings from the Association of Space Explorers.
He is also one of only a handful of humans to have descended to the deepest part of the world’s oceans, Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench as part of the Limiting Factor Expedition in July of 2022. In that mission, Dylan descended with pilot Victor Vescovo to a depth in excess of 10,800 meters (35,500 feet) into an area of the Mariana Trench that had never been visited by humans. Dylan is the youngest human to have been to the deepest part of the world’s oceans and crossed the Karman line into Space. Dylan has been a member of the Explorers Club since 2014.
Dylan maintains an extensive philanthropic impact on the space industry. In 2017, Dylan founded the nonprofit and social movement, Space for Humanity, which seeks to democratize space exploration and develop solutions to global issues through the scope of human awareness to help solve the world’s most intractable problems. Space for Humanity has successfully sent two citizen astronauts to space via Blue Origin including both the first Mexican-born woman (Katya Echazareta), and first African-born woman (Sara Sabry). Building upon his passion and support for the space industry, Dylan serves as a strategic advisor for both the Archmission and the Human Spaceflight Program and is a co-founding patron of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, which promotes the growth of commercial space activity. Additionally, he is also a leading benefactor to the Brooke Owens Fellowship, Patti Grace Smith Fellowship and Mission: Astro Access.
Dylan is the founder and Chairman of Multiverse Media, an integrated global media company focused on science and technology, with an emphasis on space. Multiverse is the parent company of the popular space philosophy website 2211.world as well as the Ad Astra Dinners, a Jeffersonian-style dinner series featuring some of the world’s leading influencers discussing the future of humanity in space. Another subsidiary of Multiverse Media, Multiverse Publishing, publishes books by leading authors including Frank White, Isaac Asimov and Gerard K. O’Neill. Multiverse is also the executive producer of the documentary film, The High Frontier and the forthcoming film, Fortitude.
For his influence as a global leader and his commitment to creating a positive impact on the world, Dylan has been honored with numerous personal and professional accolades in recent years. The World Economic Forum recognized Dylan as a Young Global Leader in 2011 and a full member of the World Economic Forum in 2014. That same year he was named a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. In 2020, Dylan was recognized by the Commercial Spaceflight Federation with their top honor for business and finance, following in the footsteps of 2019’s inaugural winner, the late Paul Allen
and subsequent winners Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Dylan Taylor earned an MBA in Finance and Strategy from the Booth School of Business at University of Chicago and holds a BS in Engineering from the honors college at the University of Arizona, where he graduated Tau Beta Pi and in 2018 was named Alumnus of the year. He is also a graduate of the Global Leadership and Public Policy for the 21st Century program at Harvard University.
Dylan and his family reside in Denver, Colorado where he is active locally with Colorado Concern and theColorado Spaceport. In his spare time, Dylan enjoys hiking, competing in triathlons and spending time outdoors. As a weekend warrior athlete, Dylan has more than 25 top ten finishes and 25 age group wins to his credit, and he regularly interviews world class athletes whom have shown extraordinary resilience as the host of the Legendary Podcast. He is married to legal expert, consultant and author Gabrielle V. Taylor with whom he has two teenage daughters.
