Are you making use of your emotions, or do they feel like an obstacle to healthy team management? If you feel like you have emotions driving your leadership, here are some healthier ways to interact with your team. By developing your own emotional intelligence and adopting a leadership style that makes positive use of your emotions, you can foster a genuine connection with your team and improve productivity and workplace culture.
Stoicism Isn’t Helping Your Leadership Style
Old school leadership models emphasize managers’ need to control their emotions. It is certainly true that uncontrolled expressions of emotion, particularly anger and frustration, can create a hostile working environment where employees are unwilling to take risks or express their concerns. But many leaders take their emotional control too far, to stoicism.
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Stoicism is the idea that a person should be able to “keep a stiff upper lip,” enduring setbacks, hardships, and even pain without complaint or any emotional reaction at all. Its history dates all the way back to ancient Grecian philosopher Zeno of Citium. It remains an important part of British culture an certain sections of Christian morality.
But when taken to extremes, it can interfere with making valuable emotional connections with your team. For more than 20 years, researchers have known that the suppression of unpleasant emotions at work decreases job satisfaction – in employees and managers alike – and increases the desire to quit.
The Value of Emotions in Leadership
No matter what your industry is, emotions play an important part in doing business. That is because everyone, everywhere, in every kind of business, works with people. From coworkers to managers to customers, emotional intelligence affects every interpersonal reaction that happens in your day-to-day working environment.
Emotions are especially valuable in leadership. That same study showed that amplifying positive emotions can increase job satisfaction. As a leader, you can use your team’s positive emotions to your company’s advantage, encouraging them when things are going well, and making space for team members to lift one another up. Workplace leaders can bolster their team’s productivity and employment satisfaction by leaning into their team’s positive emotions while recognizing, honoring, and responding to negative emotions when they arise.
Avoiding Amplifying Employees’ Negative Emotions
While promoting your employee’s positive emotions can help motivate your team, you need to be careful to avoid amplifying employees’ negative emotions or drawing unnecessary attention to your own emotions or concerns. It is important to allow your employees a safe space to express their concerns, but openly expressing high levels of worry or stress can trigger similar emotions in your team members. When high stress circumstances break through a leader’s coping mechanisms, it can create an echo chamber of stress where your team experiences more distress because the people around them are stressed as well. That’s why, as a leader, it is important that you engage in self-regulation as well as empathy, ensuring that you acknowledge your team’s stressors and concerns without allowing them to take control of your working environment.
Using Emotional Intelligence to Lead Your Team
If balancing the need to encourage your employees’ positive emotions while regulating your own negative feelings feels like a lot, you may need to develop your emotional intelligence skills. Emotional intelligence isn’t the same as stoicism. Rather than teaching you to suppress or restrain your emotional expression, it teaches you how to use emotional expression, understanding, and communication to develop a healthy relationship with the people around you – including your direct reports. Emotional intelligence can help you evaluate new hires’ fit with your existing team, resolve workplace conflict between team members, and avoid creating high-stress environments yourself.
The best way to improve your emotional intelligence is working with a leadership coach to evaluate your current emotional quotient (EQ) and areas of improvement. Then you can develop new emotionally based leadership techniques and work with your coach to practice your communication and emotional intelligence skills. Your coach can also help you brainstorm solutions to complex employee dynamics and develop strategies to encourage trust and emotional honesty among your team.
David Stanislaw is a leadership and executive coach with over 30 years’ experience helping managers and leaders understand their employees and manage teams effectively. Contact us to meet with David and bring on a thought partner for your business goals today.
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