Are you having trouble coming-up with a New Year’s Resolution? One idea is to work on improving how you manage your emotions. Why? Because as a leader your emotions matter – they impact everyone around you.
I think it is healthy for each of us to look at both a situation that went well and one that did not and how our emotions contributed to the outcome. John Maxwell, in his book Developing the Leader Within You, writes about this sign he saw in an office, “If you could kick the person responsible for most of your troubles, you wouldn’t be able to sit down for weeks.”
When we think about how our emotions impact others, I think it is good to remember what the people we are leading want most. According to research published by McKinsey & Company in their report Decoding Leadership: What Really Matters, there are four significant leadership behaviors that account for 89 percent of leadership effectiveness. Our teams want us to:
- Solve problems effectively.
- Operate with a strong results orientation.
- Seek different perspectives.
- Support others.
For you to get insight into a resolution this year, look at how you performed last year. It might be helpful to look at these four areas and select a situation or two when your emotions impacted the result. Then go to the end of this article and try the four practices described.
Emotional Agility. One of the more useful articles I have read about understanding our emotions is called Emotional Agility by Susan David and Christina Congleton published in Harvard Business Review. (I strongly recommend you click on the link and read it because I cannot give it proper justice in this summary.)
David and Congleton point out that most of the words that go through our brain in a given day are unspoken. These thoughts, most of which are not facts at all, are “evaluations and judgments entwined with emotions – some positive and helpful, others negative and less so.” And it is these thoughts that contribute greatly to our emotional state and, ultimately, our behavior.
I think the lesson here is for us is to become better assessors of our thoughts and then not letting these thoughts become “facts” that ignite and magnify our negative emotions.
Here is an example that might make sense. Let’s say you have someone who reports to you who is very difficult to deal with and who is disrupting the workplace and upsetting co-workers. You might think, “This same thing happened with another team member last year and the situation really blew-up. I didn’t handle that conflict right and I am not good with conflict.” If you do not stop and assess this thought it might actually “hook” you and become “fact”
in your mind. Once it does, your stress level likely increases and your emotions take over. Then you might decide to avoid the behavior, or you might lose your temper and fire them, or you might displace your frustration by pressuring someone else, an innocent party, about something trivial. In all these cases the outcome is not good.
Exercise. Using a situation from last year, perhaps one that emerged as you read an earlier paragraph, try these four steps recommended by David and Congleton.
- Recognize your patterns. This is the most important step. The objective of this practice is to know when you have converted a thought into a fact. When in a situation, playback in your mind your thoughts. David and Congleton suggest you ask yourself:
- “To what extent do I avoid this thought, trying to make it go away?” A lot, somewhat, not at all?
- “To what extent do I buy into it, letting it overwhelm me?”
- “What feeling does this evoke. Is it anger, sadness, fear, shame, disgust, or something else?”
- “To what extent do I avoid or try to ignore this feeling?”
- “To what extent do I buy into it?”
- Label your thoughts and emotions. If you become aware of your thoughts, you can label them. This step allows you to begin to separate from unwanted emotions. One easy way to label is to use the word “thought” and emotional terms like “angry, sadness, fear…” as you restate the thought. Say, “I’m having the thought that I am not good with conflict” or “This team member is really making me angry.”
- Accept your thought and emotions. The authors remind us that “the opposite of control is acceptance – not acting on every thought or resigning yourself to negativity but responding to your ideas and emotions with an open attitude.” At stressful moments, break away, take some breaths and examine how you feel and try to grasp why you feel this way. Think about a productive strategy; perhaps involve others who are less invested.
- Act on your values. Each of us has values that drive our own behaviors and when you use those values in stressful situations you are more likely to have a positive outcome because these values ground you. In the article 52 values are given as examples. Try narrowing this list to three to five values that resonate with you, and then use them in framing how you proceed with the situation.
Whether or not you want a 2016 Resolution to better manage your emotions, I might suggest you explore more deeply how your emotions impact your leadership behavior – it could make all the difference!
