Meaningful Work Matters Podcast

A series where we explore the complex world of meaningful work and its impact on people and the organizations they’re a part of.

Meaningful Work Matters Podcast

A series where we explore the complex world of meaningful work and its impact on people and the organizations they’re a part of.

Meaningful Work Matters Podcast

A series where we explore the complex world of meaningful work and its impact on people and the organizations they’re a part of.

November

2026

What Is Positive Leadership?

Markus Ebner on PERMA-Lead and Leading for Well-Being

Most managers spend their days on management: goals, processes, plans. Organizational psychologist Dr. Markus Ebner says that's only half the job. The other half is leadership, which is how you bring people along, and it's the half that usually gets dropped.

In this episode, Andrew Soren talks with Markus about PERMA-Lead, the positive leadership model he built on Martin Seligman's PERMA model of well-being (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment). Markus explains how he turned each of those five pieces into things a manager can actually do, like recognizing someone's contribution, explaining why a task matters, or stepping in when someone gets talked down to in a meeting. They talk about why Markus calls leadership "positive manipulation," why positive leadership matters most when things are hard, and what his research has found in hospitals, schools, supermarkets, and police services. Markus also shares a new randomized trial with police supervisors in Texas, and why he tells managers who ask for a recipe that he doesn't have one.

If you lead people, this conversation gives you a simple structure to work from: five things everyone needs, and the job of finding out what each of them looks like for the people on your team.

Andrew Soren and Dr. Markus Ebner have crossed paths at positive psychology events for years, and Andrew admits he always ends up sitting in Markus's sessions thinking how much he still has to learn. This conversation was a chance to dig into the work that keeps drawing him back: PERMA-Lead, Markus's model of positive leadership, and the research behind it.

Markus is a business and organizational psychologist based in Vienna. He teaches and does research at the University of Vienna and the University of Klagenfurt, and founded the PERMA-Lead model. He is the author of Positive Leadership: Leading successfully with PERMA-Lead, and he also works as a coach, trainer, and speaker with organizations including IKEA and Bosch. In 2021, the International Positive Psychology Association gave him its Research to Practice Award.

That award fits how Markus describes his own work. Asked what makes it meaningful, he says his life's passion is building bridges between science and practice. "Research gives answers, practice needs answers," and the two don't talk to each other nearly enough. Practitioners don't read scientific journals, so they often find answers that aren't based on science. Andrew calls him a true pracademic, and connects it to Two-Eyed Seeing, a concept from Mi'kmaw Elder Albert Marshall: looking through two lenses at once lets you see more than either one could alone.

From a Well-Being Model to a Leadership Model

PERMA comes from Martin Seligman, who popularized it in his 2011 book Flourish. It names five things that support well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

Around the same time that book was published, Markus heard Seligman speak about PERMA at a conference. He wasn't listening for a well-being model. He was listening as an organizational psychologist, and he saw a way to pull existing leadership approaches together. Transactional leadership focuses on goals, which maps onto accomplishment. Transformational leadership focuses on relationships and meaning.

A few months later, he heard one of Seligman’s graduate students, Alejandro Adler describe research in Bhutan showing that teaching well-being skills in schools improved students' well-being and their exam results. Markus's thought was simple: if teachers can raise their students' PERMA and get better results, maybe leaders can do the same for their teams. He connected with Peggy Kern, who at the time was working with Seligman on developing the PERMA-Profiler scale to measure PERMA in different populations.

There were already approaches to leadership that were embracing positive psychology, including Fred Luthans's work on psychological capital (PsyCap) and Kim Cameron's positive leadership. What Markus felt was missing was a model built on behaviour. So he translated each part of PERMA into something a leader does:

Positive emotion: recognizing someone's contribution.
Engagement: creating chances for people to use and develop their strengths.
Relationships: supporting respectful relationships on the team.
Meaning: explaining why a task matters.
Accomplishment: helping people notice progress, including giving feedback when something goes well, not only when it doesn't.

Because these are behaviours, managers could reflect on them, get feedback on them, and practise them.

Leadership Isn't the Same as Management

Andrew came to positive psychology while working in leadership development at BMO Financial Group. The model he was teaching treated managers as consequence providers, rewarding or punishing the behaviour they wanted. PERMA offered a different starting point: a person with potential, not a resource to get more out of.

Markus makes a related distinction from organizational psychology. Most people use leadership and management interchangeably. His field separates them by task, not job title. Management is about goals and structure: tasks, processes, strategy. Leadership is about people: their strengths, their potential, and the trust between them.

Both matter. But most supervisors spend most of their time on management. As Markus puts it, "you can have the perfect strategy when you lose the people on the way, you will not be successful." Positive leadership focuses on the leadership half of the job, and he doesn't see it as an extra.

"Nobody wants to be managed," Markus says. "People want to be recognized."

Positive Manipulation

Markus's book opens with the provocation that a manager's job is to manipulate people. He means it plainly. We influence each other all the time, usually without thinking about it, and every answer we give shapes what the other person says or does next. In his view, the word itself is neutral. "So we always manipulate, but we can do this in a more positive way." The goal is influence that helps people grow, done on purpose rather than by accident.

Andrew likes the honesty of the word. It admits that leaders hold power. The real question is what that power is for: performance alone, or a person's potential.

Positive Leadership When Things Are Hard

Positive leadership is sometimes mistaken for keeping everyone cheerful. Markus says some people think it means being the clown of the team. It doesn't. And it matters most when things are going badly, after layoffs or a failed project, when people feel unseen.

In those moments, it can be small. Telling someone you can see they're struggling, and thanking them for being there. Pointing out the small accomplishments inside a project that failed. Calling a five-minute coffee break in a tense meeting. His view is that there is always at least one of the five a leader can improve.

He also points out that a leader can't control how someone feels. What a leader controls is the conditions. If someone in a meeting dismisses a colleague's idea, the way the manager responds shows whether respectful relationships are a real expectation on that team.

What the Research Shows

Markus and his colleagues have studied PERMA-Lead in a range of settings. Some of the findings he shared:

In healthcare, burnout risk was more than 50% lower when employees rated their manager higher on PERMA-Lead behaviour.
In a study with more than 3,000 police employees in Germany, burnout risk was about half as high in teams with stronger PERMA-Lead managers, and affective commitment, job satisfaction, and work engagement were higher.
In supermarkets, hardware stores, and drug stores, customers spent more where employees rated their store manager higher. The study shows the link, not the reason. Practitioners told Markus they think friendlier staff, and staff who feel it's "my supermarket" rather than just a workplace, both play a part.
In research Markus presented with Kim Cameron, teams with stronger PERMA-Lead managers energized each other more. PERMA-Lead behaviour was also strongly linked to psychological safety and lower staff turnover.
In schools, a 2024 study in Teaching and Teacher Education found that teachers felt more joy and pride, and less boredom, anger, and anxiety, when their principals showed more PERMA-Lead behaviour. A follow-up study connected those same teacher emotions to student outcomes.

The next step is a randomized controlled trial with police supervisors in Austin, Texas: about 2,500 employees and 170 supervisors, measured every three months over a year. It began a few weeks before this conversation. Markus admits the result could be no effect at all. He'd rather know, and if it doesn't work, "we will try something else. That's how life is."

Meaning Is the Hardest Part

When Markus asks managers for ideas on positive emotion or engagement, they have plenty. When he asks about meaning, they get stuck. Part of the problem is that they reach for the mission statement, which rarely creates meaning for anyone.

"Meaning grows when people understand the connection between their daily work and the contribution that matters to them." (set into quote block)

Meaning is also personal. One person on your team may find it in helping others, another in mastering a craft. So the manager's job is to ask, listen, and accept that people are different.

Where to Start

For each person on your team, answer three questions Markus suggests: Who benefits from your work? What becomes possible because you did it well? What would be missing if it weren't done? Then tell them.
Don't guess what positive emotion, engagement, or relationships look like for someone. Ask, and listen. One person may want the radio on while they work. Another may not be able to focus with it.
In a hard stretch, pick one of the five and do one small thing. Sometimes a thank-you is enough.

No Recipe, Just Ingredients

Markus says he hates it when managers ask for a recipe, three tips they can use tomorrow. His answer is always that he doesn't know, because people are different. What PERMA gives you is a structure: everyone needs positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. What each of those looks like depends on the person, the team, and the culture.

Andrew put it in kitchen terms. We know the basic tastes, like sweet, sour, salty, and umami, and there are endless recipes that combine them. Markus added the important part: not every recipe works for everyone. Andrew's suggested motto for the show is the old line "one size fits none."

Markus ends where this podcast starts. With almost 2,000 certified PERMA-Lead consultants now working in companies, schools, hospitality, and police services, he sees a lot of reasons for hope. "I mean, meaningful work matters. Isn't that meaningful that we can make a difference?"

To learn more about Markus's work, including workshops in English and German, visit perma-lead.com.

Mentioned in This Episode