Emotions constitute as a powerful tool. If leaders focus on this key skill of emotional intelligence and enhance it, they can create an invaluable roadmap for self-transformation and people development.
No.1 Q – How do we help leaders shift their mindsets that your people and you have emotions and how to best leverage them?
Diversity isn’t just people, but the capacity to accommodate what’s inside people - their emotions and sentiments.
This hardwiring belief that emotions need to be ‘left at the door’ before coming to office and they are an excess baggage, must be eliminated from the thought and lexicon of every leader and employee too.
Leaders need to understand that emotion is a universal language that binds us all. We speak about dei it doesn’t matter from which part of the world you are operating your teams; we all need to embrace and speak a common language if we want to see our people happy and thrive in the company’s culture.
Emotions have many layers and today the biggest unlearning for leaders is - dissolve the myth of being stoic & unfazed. You can’t just be adding more gloom and doom with this level-headed approach.
As leaders you need not be their cushion and armrest, the issue with being less emotionally intelligent is that a culture of dependency and inertia is created when leaders just shoot out answers instead of helping their people understand and regulate their emotions.
This is where the leader as coach works because the this facilitates to accept & regulate their emotions with vulnerability, compassion, and perceived empathy.
We need to be educated on one critical aspect - emotions don’t work like a regulator knob of a fan that you can reduce, increase, switch-off or switch-on. They are always with us because they are a part of our neuro-physical process.
I think it's important that leaders check in with your employees to see how they're feeling, you need not be an ‘emotional therapist’, but their emotions have an impact on the performance.
EI is a mental skill that needs to be taught at grassroot level, and if not, then it needs to be mandated because if you can’t take charge of your mindset, body, emotions and life energies, it is a waste of human potential.
Leaders need to show their people that "you are bigger than your emotions and that your emotion is not you, but it is your teacher trying to teach you something."
Education system globally & corporates need to ingrain EI as a part of their academic and workplace education so that they can understand, accept, manage, and use their emotions and their mental faculties as instruments of function, and take charge of their lives and well-being.
Our job as leaders is to make people better version of themselves. Being open to viewing and listening to difficult emotions generates values-aligned responses.
How do leaders in your organizations teach their people to own their emotions?
Author: Zavahir Dastoor
Executive Coach and Senior Consultant - Leadership Effectiveness | Talent & Organizational Development | I partner with business leaders to impact and transform their unique individual personal potential.
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