Kashbox Coach Note: Leadership Development
Leaders face a variety of pressures and expectations in today’s corporate environment. Their responses to these pressures vary, as do the personalities behind them. Leaders who respond to trials in detrimental ways can result in ineffective or (worse) toxic cultures. Consistently effective management requires high inner stability, making emotional health one of the most critical attributes a leader can have to keep an organization running well.
Studies and statistics tell us the woes of employees dealing with leaders who make life difficult. The rates of disengagement and turnover attest, in part, to how leaders can make work an undesirable experience. Leaders who cause cultures low morale, disunity, or distrust are likely to have deficient emotional health. Often, this condition stresses everyone’s emotional health.
If you were to take a step back, would you be able to sense any emotionally difficult aspects of your leadership role? Would you say they inhibit your performance or the performance of those reporting to you? If so, you may need to address your emotional health.
1. Being Self-Aware
Anyone can allow emotions to override discernment or rational thinking. When this happens to a leader, decision-making and solution generation are compromised. Emotions can get the best of a leader, and unfortunate things happen. Those who can find the proper balance of thought and feeling have the greatest advantage for managing well.
Emotional balance requires knowing your tendencies. Leaders must recognize their emotional inclinations to address and correct shortcomings. This is one of the most challenging areas of leadership. In addition to technical skills and people skills, emotional skills require deep self-discovery. They require accurate self-awareness that often calls for honest feedback from others. No one is the best judge of their own emotional state.
Self-awareness is a subset of emotional intelligence (EI), the ability to understand and manage emotions to maximize the effectiveness of relationships, behavior, and decision-making.
Although emotions can range from positive to negative, negative emotions—including anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness—typically interfere with effective leadership and cause unfortunate aftereffects.
To assess your emotional tendencies, note and identify emotions, primarily during moments of stress or trial. Make a habit of stepping back to identify the emotion of the moment. Patterns may appear.
Do you find yourself easily angered or openly frustrated? Do fears or anxieties tend to make you hesitate or become unable to make tough decisions? Are your relationships suffering from resentments or pessimism you can’t seem to break? How is this impacting your culture? Identify these emotions, thoughts, or actions that precede them, or use a leadership development coach or program to help.
While we can’t control how others behave, we can control our responses. Are your responses healthy? In other words, are they adding value? Are they justified? These are all aspects of the emotional assessment required to be self-aware.
Avoidance, intimidation, denial, and over-delegating are defense mechanisms that result from an emotional inability to manage situations healthily. If you repeatedly resort to these tactics, you will benefit from evaluating why you struggle with stress. Consider working with a trusted mentor or executive coach for objective feedback and support in identifying and working through issues. Make a plan to begin an improvement process.
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2. Enduring Under Stress
Every leadership position faces stress. It comes with the territory. The key is not letting it get the best of you; emotions worsen stressful moments. Leaders can’t be optimally effective when emotions interfere with their discernment or decision-making.
Once damaging emotions can be identified, their effect on your leadership role becomes clearer. For example, anxiety not only inhibits decisions but also shows your people an unreliable trait that loses their trust. Who will they count on to lead them through stormy seas? Anger causes resentment, distrust, and withdrawal in your people. Their productivity suffers under these conditions, which feeds more anger, replaying a vicious cycle.
A key to enduring stress is evaluating situations objectively, stepping back to grasp the need for rational responses, and maintaining a strong, reliable composure. Emotions are important for a leader but must be balanced in healthy proportions with other traits. In Emotional Health & Leadership, the Global Leadership Foundation asserts that positive emotions, rational thought, and gut feeling have a place in discernment and decision-making. Find the best ratios for each instance.
Filtering out stress and negative emotions becomes easier when trials are treated as situations requiring calm rather than reflex. The key is improving thoughtful, constructive responses rather than automatic reactions. Taking responsibility for your responses requires forethought and conditioning to step back and think— before acting. These are all behaviors worth practicing and perfecting.
Leaders who rely on their proven abilities and strengths respond to trials with more confidence. They trust their skills and are not overly concerned about how others judge them. Do you worry more about your reputation than fixing your organization’s problems? You might be under-confident, anticipating the worst, or taking the trial as a personal incrimination. Enduring under stress is enhanced by focusing less on your personal welfare and more on the company’s. A leadership development coach works one-on-one to aid leaders in evolving their soft skills.
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3. Thinking Positively
Do you see assignments as opportunities or burdens? Are you typically optimistic or cynical? Do you forgive people or hold onto grudges? Do you spend your time seeking solutions or blame? The detrimental side of these questions is prompted by unhealthy emotions caused by a negative mindset.
Develop a more positive outlook. Making unjustified assumptions or judgments leads to unfortunate decisions. Leaders who rely more on facts and past experiences find healthier solutions. A positive outlook is the key to the most positive results. It also inspires positivity in others.
Learning to filter negative emotions brings forth more positive, helpful ones. This creates a more inviting and engaging culture where people and their perspectives are valued. Become an expert in your emotional state. An emotionally healthy leader has the most opportunity to head a healthy organization. Leadership development coaches can aid with reshaping your frame of mind, but if there is a great struggle to think positively, a therapist could help push through personal issues.
Creator of the KASHBOX: Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, Habits
Helping You Realize Your Potential
I help people discover their potential, expand and develop the skills and attitudes necessary to achieve a higher degree of personal and professional success and create a plan that enables them to balance the profit motives of their business with the personal motives of their lives.
