28 November 2019
3 Leadership Emotions With A High ROI
The scene is all too familiar; some sort of workshop on the topic of ‘emotional leadership’ has been scheduled by your organisation, and as you shuffle through your tasks for the day – your eyes roll to the sight of your name on the invite list.
The truth is that, in more complex teams and organisations, many managers would sneer at the concept of leadership as an emotional activity. Emotions do not discover realistic sales cycles – facts and figures do; and if anything, gut feeling decisions can be the recipe for business disaster and even career disgrace.
In this logic and technology-driven atmosphere, ‘feel-good’ facilitators are seen as a compliance box to check; metrics micromanage marketing departments from the pixel count to the campaign colour scheme, and PowerPoints that fail to deliver the science are shown the office door.
But this ‘become a robot’ mentality completely misses the point: however convincingly-complex the organisation, the creativity that sparks new discoveries and intuitive leadership is the ingredient that fuels business complexity, to begin with.
Great leaders are human, not robots, and here are three emotions that you can use to unlock your leadership impact beginning today.
CULTIVATE TEAM ‘BUY-IN’ AS PRODUCTIVITY ROCKET FUEL
It’s a Thursday afternoon, and music mogul Richard Branson has already decided to hit the beach for the remainder of the working day: after twenty years of all-nighters and battles to simply keep his empire afloat, it is no surprise that the CEO has long left behind the nine-to-five for his team to take the lead.
However, what may surprise many aspiring business leaders is that his team are not back at the office – but with him in a team get-together, strategizing for the coming quarter: this marks a flavour of leadership that not only depends on the complex systems that coordinate the Virgin empire but also an emotional ‘buy-in’ that pushes the employee performance the extra mile.
On the one hand, this process of cultivating this ‘buy-in’ effect has long been suspected to be the ingredient behind teams and organisations at the forefront of their market; but may also indicate a much deeper set of psychological triggers: one study conducted to compare management performance across Malaysian organisations not only revealed that higher-performing managers instil a ‘tribe-like’ set of expectations when on-boarding new team members, but also in the form of planned collaboration-focused activities associated with quarterly performance targets (Kadir H, 2014).
For organisations most successful at unlocking employee performance, joining a team means joining a tribe.
EMPATHY MEANS CLARITY – AND A MASTERY OF YOUR ENVIRONMENT
Emotion-based decisions may appear alien in a well-organised private sector organisation, but this bias is amplified further among government executives: with every decision tied to vast sums of capital and a sea of rapidly-changing data, politicians cannot afford to risk the price of miscalculation – this means turning to formulas, not feelings.
Unlike a private-sector organisation, a nation-state faces a very different set of threats: responding to a natural disaster is not the same as handling a failed product launch, and this makes quantifying stakeholders emotionally a crucial form of data for making interventions that will work.
The 7 emotional states of transformational leadership (Hickmann, 2012).jpg
However, when exploring the impact of emotional intelligence on managerial performance among executives in the private sector, this tactical use of empathy may also provide politicians such as Jacinda Ardern a secret data collection advantage: this refers to the
‘circular effect’, whereby perceived agreeableness from upper-management can in-turn elicit a wider range of emotional responses from team members – and thus a richer pool of data that can be used to calibrate future actions (Hickmann, 2012)
Moreover, this leadership methodology not only improves the actions and interventions of the New Zealand Prime Minister when interfacing with members of the public – but may also enrich internal management procedures with a much more realistic view of how staff members react and operate at the behavioural level, and thus ensure that projects in detached government bodies remain efficient.
REAL-TIME INTUITION SETS THE SPEED LIMIT
‘’Here we go again’’ says the expression of the former PepsiCo CEO as she glances towards the interview teleprompter: the question on emotion and leadership is next, and Indra Nooyi is no exception. But rather than being irritated by the subliminal gender stereotype, this female executive is instead confused why emotion is seen as strange in the business world at all.
Today, the PepsiCo empire may stand as an example of smart systems and planning; but as with many organisations, the priority of sales at earlier growth stages may have placed more of priority on emotional intelligence that could act fast – and think later.
On the one hand, this shift in priority, without doubt, ensures an ability to pivot quickly in response to feedback at the genesis of an organisation; but according to recent studies exploring the impact of emotional intelligence on performance in sales and commercial agility, this advantage also appears to continue at later stages as an organisation navigates through the marketplace (Brown, 2014).
This increased frequency of decision-making enables managers to react more efficiently to highly qualitative environments and scenarios – but also sets a ‘speed limit’ for organisations that impose a rigid corporate structure that fails to take this dimension into account.
Actions to apply as a team leader:
In this CONQA article, we challenged the common misconception that effective management means ‘robotic’ management; and highlighted crucial ways in which emotional intelligence can unlock team performance. If you are a manager or business leader, consider applying the following tasks in-time for your next staff meeting:
Create a ‘team enrichment’ event calendar: This may seem simple, but a set of planned team events focused on collective and ‘team-focused’ activities could be the simplest way to foster the ‘tribe’ effect that is proven to fuel creativity in large organisations. Create a ‘team enrichment’ calendar that includes planned activities between now and the end of 2020 and consider how the behaviours of your team members during these events will filter back into their productivity when back in the office environment.
Create behavioural KPIs for your team: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) may play a crucial role in defining and measuring the outcomes for each team project, but digging deeper into the shifts in behaviour among team members that impact productivity may enable you to form separate ‘behavioural’ KPIs that enable you to react of behavioural cues more objectively and rapidly – and ultimately keep project targets on track.