That said, how do you do it?

Let's take a team of people who work in, say, Customer Service in your company. On any given day, you might get an earful of complaints from them about, for example, the Marketing team. The complaints might go like this: "They launched the XYZ Campaign online and on billboards and never even asked us whether our customers want that! What were they thinking?!"  

After enough complaints the Head of Customer Service goes to tell the head of Marketing to stop doing that kind of thing. They have a semi-polite conversation, promises are made, eyes are secretly rolled, and three months later the Marketing team does it again.

Or take the person you've observed ridiculing your CEO in front of other employees. It would be tempting to say, "That's unprofessional. I don't want to see you doing that ever again." A semi-polite conversation ensues, promises are made, eyes are secretly rolled, and three weeks later, the person does it again.

These are numbingly familiar situations for most people-and not just at work. But does it really have to be this way? What if, instead, you use a dose of positive psychology: focus on what you WANT, rather than what you DON'T WANT.