Most of us have been trained to hide our true feelings and do things in spite of them for fear of appearing unprofessional. There’s certainly a need to manage our emotions so that we can be professional. But there’s also a need to experience and be conscious of our feelings so that we can be skillful, intuitive, effective leaders.

Emotions are extremely important for leaders, and there’s a learning curve to effectively harnessing one’s emotions. That process is very personal, but once a client gets a few major pieces integrated, their effectiveness as a leader can skyrocket. It’s a delight as their coach to watch that happen.

The goal isn’t to improve or change your emotions, but to learn from them from a place of awareness: What’s the emotion that’s occurring? What is this feeling telling me? And once you’ve gleaned the information you’re trying to tell yourself, only then is it time for action.

Emotion is one of the ways our mind communicates with us. It can guide us about whether a decision is sound, whether there’s a need for action and even whether other people are being honest with us. We can notice the behavior of others and ask: “Do those emotional signals match the content of their communication?”

The intensity of emotion tends to correspond with the intensity of the disappointment or challenge being faced, and there’s an obvious need to ground those “big” emotions and learn from them. But it’s equally important to become aware of more nuanced emotions. They often provide guidance that helps a leader fine tune their strategy.

Subtle uneasiness after a decision could be a signal that there’s a need to go revisit it. Uneasiness in a personal relationship may tell you there’s something necessary to communicate that may be challenging for your partner to hear. Uneasiness in your partner’s communication toward you may be a sign to pay attention to where they’re at and what they’re thinking because there’s an incongruity somewhere.

Emotional Intelligence on an Organizational Scale

When working with a board of directors or an executive team or a management team—especially through times of change—you want to be able to harvest the wisdom of the team. Smart leaders expect, even welcome, some degree of disagreement. People will have different emotional responses to the same event, and people will have different convictions about what’s important and what needs to be done. There’s something of value in each point of view.  In order for a team to fully engage, each person on that team must be able to state their own position with passion and conviction … and also listen to others with openness and a willingness to be influenced by their positions. Out of that experience of fully speaking each person’s truth (as well as listening and looking for the wisdom in everyone else), comes the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

It takes great emotional maturity to passionately believe one thing yet be able to set that aside and still listen to someone else’s passion. And from there, we move into Engaging Systems Intelligence, the topic of the next post. So, listen to what your emotions are communicating, and check back soon for details on Step 2.

For an overview, please read The Leading Spirit Success Cycle – Which Step Are You On?

There’s no single entry point into this circle, and no two clients start in exactly the same place. It’s up to me as a coach to listen and up to the client to articulate their situation and feelings in order to properly place them inside one of the six steps. Once they’re placed, off we go …

The key is understanding it’s a continuous creative process for most leaders. They need to know where they are and what they need to move forward.

See if you can take a step back, view yourself inside your current situation and place yourself on one of the following Leading Spirit Success Cycle steps. Subsequent posts will go into each step in great detail, so you’ll know what to do once your “location” is identified.

1. Engage emotional intelligence – It’s time to access and use emotional intelligence, grieve disappointment, learn from emotions and ventilate anger. My clients use the power of emotions to motivate change and help staff deal with the emotional impact of recent events. That’s the job of a leader.

2. Engage systems intelligence – Become aware of all the systemic parts: human, programmatic, procedural, structural. Step back and consider the “bigger picture” over distance, time and populations. When leaders see how all the parts fit together, they can see the possibilities. There is opportunity in every situation. What is it in this one?

3. Vision – Which new possibility has the most potential for success? What does the ideal outcome look like in the greatest detail imaginable? Courageous leaders are willing to suspend disbelief and engage all their senses in this exploratory pursuit.

4. Plan – I help my clients take that vision—their desired end result—and work backward to “now” with milestones in mind that will lead to the desired result. And to those milestones, we attach a concrete time frame, action plan, budget and other necessary details.

5. Execution — It’s time to put plans into action, and I hold my client accountable to their plans. Modifications will be needed along the way, in response to changing circumstances. Leaders build relationships with allies and involve others who will play key roles.

6. The Cycle – I help leaders to engage their intuition to instinctively know it’s time to look for that next change that’s wanting to happen … or to look at the change that’s already happening whether they like it or not. This could be at home, work, with friends, in community or some combination of them all. Change is a continual process, so leaders must become flexible and skillful with change in order to work with it and influence the outcome. Once a leader recognizes what that “next change” is, it’s time to return and Engage Emotional Intelligence (Step 1).

That’s the process in a nutshell. Where are you? Think about it so you can fully benefit from the posts that follow.

As coaches and trainers, our job is to help organizations develop healthy, synergistic teams that produce skyrocketing results.  To do this, we bring tools that show team members what their “team culture” really looks like (from all sides) and how they’re all experiencing it. From there, we assist in making that culture healthier, stronger and more creative so those workers are better able to get the results they want.

To accomplish all this, we utilize a tool called the Leadership Circle Culture Survey. This tool moves beyond individual scapegoating to the team’s culture and dynamic. Rather than have outside consultants evaluate the team, the team evaluates itself. Using this tool, the team defines itself as Creative or Reactive. It identifies what’s getting in the way and also points out the pathway to success. We help everyone see their role in the dysfunctional dynamic—and what they can do to move the team out of it.

This approach is so much more effective because there’s no one from the outside to tell them what’s “right and “wrong” and reinterpret how things work. Everything is self-reported, so team members assess what needs improvement but also get a chance to identify the ways they’re creative and strong together.

Then as a coach and team together, we can look more deeply into those strengths and how to leverage them in a way that “unhooks” the team from reactive tendencies and unwanted culture dynamics.

In essence, a positive work atmosphere leads directly to high productivity. And this tool is designed to quickly fast-forward a team into a culture they can enjoy and in which they can be creative and successful.

This cultural shift is put to work pursuing a vision for the future: What do you all want to create … and how do you work together and collaborate as a team to make that happen? We enjoy bringing great assessment tools to the table that facilitate that shift and help that vision for the future take clear shape.

Leading Spirit is certified in an assessment tool called the “Leadership Circle Profile,” which measures leadership effectiveness. It empowers an individual to take a hard and honest look at what’s really going on. It works because it’s not just measuring you against yourself; it rates your performance against the very best leaders in the world. Those examples make it much easier to distinguish a highly effective leader from one who is just doing “okay.” That creates the awareness necessary to prime breakthroughs. The assessment even corrects for the answers leaders feel “expected” to give and cuts through to the truth … and its inherent opportunities.

It’s natural that all of us have blind spots in the places we need to change. In fact, the data proves that, too. We tend to critique other people’s behavior and justify our own. But an unbiased and comprehensive tool such as the Leadership Circle Profile shows you to what degree you’re operating as a creative leader and to what extent you’re operating in a reactive, kneejerk manner.

The goal is creative leadership because that means you are actively creating desired outcomes. A reactive leader could be highly skilled and successful at “putting out fires,” but that mode of problem solving fails to advance an organizational agenda or enhance return on investment.

So, the question becomes, “As a leader, are you creating success, or are you protecting yourself from damage and harm?” The leaders who achieve outstanding results—the ones who score off the chart on the Leadership Circle Profile—are those operating in a highly creative fashion.

It’s possible for leaders to not just understand how they get in their own way, but also what they need to do differently in order to create the outcomes they want. The beauty is leaders don’t need to correct weaknesses; they just need to better understand how to leverage their strengths to be highly effective. And that’s what Leading Spirit helps people do.

In agreement-based organizations, creativity is stifled and fear of “breaking the rules” or “rocking the boat” runs rampant. Staffers play it safe around conflict, which can be just as damaging as tearing each other’s eyes out. Teams, departments and staffers don’t work together well, and the organization as a whole suffers greatly.

The choice seems pretty obvious, so how do you create and sustain an alignment-based organization?

Often when there’s conflict within teams (or whole organizations), it’s because people with strongly held positions are trying to force one another to agree with them—to get the opposition to drop that position, “see the light” and adopt a new opinion. That’s a difficult feat to pull off, and it usually results in resentment among both parties and the losing party “shutting down.”

So the key in team coaching is to move away from the opinions and positions of “agreement” into the shared interests and shared intentions of “alignment.” That’s how teams get unstuck and on the same page.

People will tend to agree with each other about what’s important while disagreeing with each other about what to do about it. So, what alignment is all about is focusing on the underlying values, purpose and mission that team members have in common.

Say, for example, I think we should put out a monthly newsletter, while my colleague feels strongly it should be a quarterly offering. We simply don’t agree, and we’re not even very close to consensus. But if you look underneath the surface to why we hold our positions, my colleague feels it’s important, in this economy, to control overhead costs and send out marketing materials of the highest quality. Meanwhile, I think it’s important we stay in touch with our members frequently and sustain and regularly reinforce that message.

So if you work at that level underneath the positions, you start to see that it’s ALL important. We can both get on the same page that it’s important to honor our budget and have well-written materials, while it’s also important to be in frequent enough contact with our members that they remember who we are and what we stand for.

At its essence, we both just want what’s best for the organization and can work on a solution that honors all those key points at once. It doesn’t have to be one way or the other; we can try to plan our newsletter in a way that will be timely, high quality and within budget restrictions.

When people are at loggerheads, if you go beneath the surface to the intention behind the desired course of action, there tends to be a lot more in alignment than they think. When that’s uncovered, it’s possible to construct avenues from which to proceed where both parties are satisfied and the organization is best served. It aligns both behind a common purpose, where rather than a problem in between them, they can stand shoulder-to-shoulder looking at the problem and explore options and answers.

Utilizing Coaching to Achieve Alignment

One of the most powerful times to use team training, coaching and facilitation is at the start of a new project or program. That way, you have help to ensure all the planning begins from a place of alignment. What happens more frequently, though, is we get called in when a team is in conflict or has “gone flat” and is lacking in productivity. In these cases, it’s more like an intervention. You might also consider using a team-building retreat or workshop as an opportunity to shift your organization’s culture.

And once people become familiar and comfortable with the alignment-based concept, they start to ask very different questions of one another. They start to naturally look beneath the surface for that common purpose or common values so they can join forces. They literally hear one another differently in the search for shared intentions.

So, the next time you hear someone within your organization say, “No, I’m right …”, you know there’s room for an alignment-based shift. If you’re not clear where your organization lies on the scale, we have diagnostic tools that measure alignment (among many other things), within your system. Just know if you need support or guidance, we’re here to help.