Yes, you want to delegate decision-making power to your employees.

You want to create conditions that encourage your employees to think for themselves.

Yes, you want to have your employees cooperating together on teams, when team activity is the most productive approach.

And, you want to encourage your employees to be cheerful, to smile, to tackle problems by using positive initiatives.

But don't get trapped into striving for the positive all the time.

Encourage some negative thinking, too.

Donald G. Smith, the advocate of the negative, who lives in Santa Maria, CA, thinks, "...all human happiness is somehow interlaced with that wonderful word No."

Smith, who spent 20 years as an editor and editorial supervisor in the aerospace industry, is author of How to Cure Yourself of Positive Thinking and The Joy of Negative Thinking. He is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal.

Employers complain about employees with "negative attitudes." But Smith doesn't focus on "attitude."

Smith says, "Put your focus on getting the job done." But even more than that, he says, "Get the right job done."

"I've had people who smile at me, and not get the job done," he explains. "I'd rather have a grumbler who gets the job done."

One of Smith's favorite stories is how one company wasted untold thousands of dollars on unnecessary overtime, over a period of nearly 20 years, because no one said "No" to management. Everyone adopted a positive attitude and "silently watched untold dollars being flushed down the toilet."

In your role as a boss, you don't need only "yes men" around you. You want some people working with you who will honestly speak their minds. And say "No" when "No" is what you need to hear.

Smith says, "I was in that position, a supervisor. I surrounded myself with people who would tell me their opinions."

Smith makes the point that being positive about a bad idea -- or being positive while doing wasteful things -- "is like standing on the wrong street and waiting for a bus that never comes." You can be as positive as you like while standing there...but it won't get you to where you need to go!

Smith has a negative attitude about the emphasis on "team play" and having a "positive attitude" at work. He says: Urging subordinates to have a "good, positive attitude" sounds better than ordering an intelligent person to support a bad idea."

Team play, Smith says, doesn't belong in the workplace. (He makes a distinction between working on teams and engaging in team play. "When I talk of 'team play'" he says, "I'm talking about the team play attitude.")

Instead of pushing the team play attitude, Smith says: "Put the best people in charge and let them run. The best employees I had were not team players."

He makes this point: "If your people aren't doing the right things at the right time, then all the teamwork in the world won't mean anything."

And he adds: "...performance counts for much more than attitude."

Smith puts a lot of emphasis on doing the right things.

An employee's job isn't to be positive all the time. The employee's job is to do the right job, and to do the job right. And sometimes employees have to disagree and say "No" to the boss, so that the right job is done.

What's Smith's advice to the employer, the manager and the supervisor? Don't demand agreement all the time. Listen to those who disagree. "Bad decisions come from surrounding yourself with yes men."

Often, says Smith, "the greatest thing you can accomplish in a given day is to kill a bad idea."

One other point: To benefit from the negative input from your associates and employees...you have to take the time to listen to them. Before you can kill a bad idea, you have to hear someone tell you the idea stinks.

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