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.

Tip #1

Start a dialogue with your team about the use of technology during meetings:

Many work cultures have unconsciously normalized multitasking during meetings, making it easy to avoid direct communication. Ask your team what works about multitasking during meetings, and what are the costs? What guidelines does the team want to make for technology use during meetings?

Tip #2

Before every meeting, clarify the expectations for using technology while in the meeting:

Some sample requests:

• “This is a meeting where many will be taking notes on their laptops. Can we agree that we will only take notes and not perform other computer tasks during this meeting?”
• “Please put your phones on vibrate and refrain from e-mailing or texting during the meeting.”
• “Please be courteous and let team members know ahead of time if you have a really important call (e.g. sick child) that you need to take during today’s meeting.”

Tip #3

Set up specific Team Agreements or Guidelines about how to respond to intra-office e-mails, voicemails, IMs, texts, etc:

Some examples:

• “The Management Team agrees to reply to e-mails from fellow team members within 24 hours.”
• “Team members agree to check their work phone messages at least two times a day.”
• “Please make urgent requests with a directed phone call.”

Tip #4

Reward and celebrate it when your team follows the Team Agreements:

Some examples:

• Verbally acknowledge staff during weekly meetings.
• Give a “Communication Champion Award” each month, where the winner gets to proudly display a gold spray-painted, recycled cell phone on his/her desk.
• Consider implementing a “Caught You At Your Best” card to be exchanged between staff members right at the moment when agreements are upheld.

It’s no wonder that teams are struggling with communication issues in such a quickly changing environment. Our norms of how we communicate and when we communicate have yet to be established using many newer technologies. There’s no “one size fits all” fix for addressing appropriate use of technology in the workplace. However, a fresh perspective and curiosity about technology and your team will uncover the solutions that facilitate clear and effective communication.

In contrast, the virtual reality of borderless, wireless and largely unregulated communications creates more and more opportunities to disconnect, disengage and avoid conflict.

Red Flags for Technology of Avoidance:

• Have you ever returned a phone call, hoping against hope that you’ll be able to just leave a message instead of actually talking to the person?

• Are you using caller ID to screen out undesired incoming calls (think mother-in-law, not just telemarketers)?

• Do you prefer to give criticism to a colleague via e-mail as opposed to face-to-face?

• Does the number of “tweets,” IMs and texts you sent last week vastly outnumber the times you had a non-virtual interaction?

• Have you ever sent an urgent e-mail and suspected that the person who said, “I never got that e-mail” was really avoiding you?

• Have you ever received a critical e-mail that was inappropriately “cc’d” to other recipients?

• Have you ever attended a meeting where people text, check e-mails and even talk on the phone instead of giving full attention to the speaker(s)?

Ironically, as technology advances, our social maneuvers to avoid direct communication— especially around conflict—become increasingly complex.

Avoidance, or “stonewalling,” as coined by marriage researcher John Gottman, is one of four toxic behaviors that show up in our relationships at home and work. In person, stonewalling can have a physicality of crossed arms, turning away, speaking very little if at all, or a fixed “stone-face” expression. But when we add technology into the mix, such clear signals are harder to trace and therefore can go undetected for longer—creating an insidious erosion to the trust in the relationship.

Still, there is a great deal that leaders can do to minimize technology-related disruptions and maximize technology-driven benefits. In Part 2 of this topic, we will offer four tips to eliminate the “Technology of Avoidance” in your organization.

When you have low conflict, you often also have little trust. That doesn’t mean there’s no one within the organization who’s trustworthy. It just means no one has had the opportunity to earn or gain trust. With the organization described in Part 1 of this post, things had been so casual and conflict-free that they hadn’t struggled through tough decisions in a way that builds trust among team members. So, that’s part of what we did with leadership and staff: build trust. As a result of that work, their trust level for one another was ultimately much higher, which was much more healthy for the organization.

Sometimes all it takes is having a leadership dinner together or non-working lunches. Often companies place such high value on “producing” that they devalue relationship-building. Remember, just because things in the workplace are cordial doesn’t mean you know one another well, how you each think or what kinds of ideas you best bring to the table. In the vacuum of that actual solid information, people are left making a lot of assumptions about one another—many of which are inaccurate.

It’s important to take the time to hear each other’s stories—to hear where you’ve each had struggles and where you’ve each had triumphs. So we challenge groups to extend the timelines for their retreats and to make the lunch a full hour of sitting and talking and eating together. It’s often an incredible shift to do something so simple, but people are quick to really claim it. Soon they’ll expect to have dinner together in preparation for a big meeting. Soon they’ll expect to have time to just sit and connect with one another without an agenda.

It’s a real cultural shift, especially for extremely busy leaders. But these strong interpersonal relationships are necessary for sustainability because it’s through those conversations and free discussions that trust is instilled. That was certainly true in the case of the “conflict-free” organization described earlier.

We were able to bring them specific tools and insights about relational skills that really resonated such as deep democracy and humor. They were able to embody those values and skills and talk about their intentions. Moving forward, they’re able to use those skills in communicating with each other.

The true poignancy is that in their field, they give voices to those who have been marginalized and create new dialogues … yet those values had not showed up inside the organization itself. We were there to say, “Those values you have, let’s bring them in here.” Connecting the external to the internal worked immediately, but they needed a little outside help to see it that way.

When an organizational culture puts agreement and harmony above all else, there is a clear dampening effect on minority voices and divergent viewpoints. People want to be positive and productive so much that they keep their mouth shut to ensure they’re not a “downer” or “causing too much trouble.” That seems thoughtful, but it actually does the organization a serious disservice; the first idea isn’t always the best one. The practices in place are often outdated and in need of fresh interpretation. Team cohesiveness isn’t always as important as individual ingenuity (gasp!).

This is the shadow side of agreement. Respectful-yet-dissenting voices are essential to the healthy evolution of an organization. So, the people within that organization must feel comfortable speaking up, even if it does rock the boat. It’s up to those in leadership roles to create a system of permission that will best serve the organization.

In Summer 2007, Leading Spirit began to help a board of directors with team coaching and training. In addition, we also provided organizational development consulting in support of their transition from a fiscally sponsored entity to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

They looked to us to help formulate the organization’s trajectory and help them become more conscious of, and more aligned around, what the organization needed from them as leaders. They needed to clearly know what roles and responsibilities each of them would have moving forward, what kinds of conversations were necessary and worthwhile and how to deal with conflicts or differences of opinion.

We recognized their high positivity, productivity and hard work but showed them how their lack of conflict (and lack of skills around conflict) hurt them in the long run. This hadn’t been done in a conscious way before. No one really had clear permission to “step out of line” and express an individual viewpoint.

So, together we designed the organizational culture in an intentional way that would leave room for free expression and allow everyone to really know what’s going on when making decisions. They learned that what creates sustainability is the ability to speak the truth—that careful behavior actually erodes sustainability because you’re not having the conversations you need to have.

And through the course of our coaching together, they realized the importance of all their voices to informing the larger system. That now extends to the staff as well, as we’ve been able to facilitate retreats with the board and the staff all together. They’ve recognized the importance of those diverse opinions and voices in shaping and strengthening the organization as a whole. There was a level of carefulness that’s now been replaced by full trust and full permission to speak your mind, and they’re a much better organization for it.

A great deal has been lost in this wave of upheaval, and new opportunities will emerge as a result. But before leaders are ready to identify and embark on new endeavors, it’s essential to acknowledge that this process has been emotional. There have been lost assets, lost programs, lost staffers … and lost dreams of what businesses or organizations would become.

I think it’s natural to want to shove down all the emotion and pain and thoughts of what’s transpired. But how will you ever have the mental wherewithal to energetically and optimistically move forward without addressing those lingering feelings?

It’s helpful to come in with coaching as soon after “chaotic change” as possible. Coaching can help that grieving process happen more quickly, with less angst. The coach’s presence serves as a permission system to have emotion because those feelings actually contain important information that will help guide you from here to what’s next. The coaching and facilitation work we do can help people harness the power of that emotional experience.  You know, the term “emotional intelligence” was created for a reason.  There’s a lot of smarts in those feelings.

Leaders tend to struggle through without processing their feelings for two distinct reasons:

(1)  A lot of leaders don’t even necessarily realize how heavy-duty some of this chaotic change has been emotionally because they’re so busy right now. But once the conversations begin, it’s clear they do need to spend some time grieving in order to effectively advance.

(2)  Some leaders are afraid of getting “stuck” in negativity and stall out completely. There’s a cultural fear that if we go at all into grieving, we’ll wallow in it and never be productive again. The beauty of this work is it’s actually the opposite of getting bogged down. When you consciously and intentionally spend just a little bit of time there, it can dramatically speed up the shift. It’s more dangerous to “not go there,” because unprocessed feelings can slow you down and impact productivity-and impact your team’s productivity, as well.

With some expert support, that emotional processing can bring a great deal of relief without being the least bit ugly or messy. At Leading Spirit, we have some great tools and workshops to help people process emotion in a mature, skillful, professional way. Some people process emotion quickly, and others need more time. In either case, working with leaders is incredibly exciting. Together we begin to look for new opportunities. And when leaders begin to pursue new possibilities, they start to feel fully in charge of their destiny again.

So in Leading Spirit’s coaching and training sessions, you’re provided with a forum to look at the “how” of change, and not just the “what” of change: How do you implement change in a such a way that your organization has the best possible chance of coming out stronger, more agile and poised to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise?

Our wonderful leaders in the nonprofit world are being forced to do more with less, and they’re asking, “How?” Employees have been lost. Priorities have shifted. Long-term goals have been pushed aside in the face of immediate needs and crises. There’s a lot of anxiety in the air, and many people are understandably scared.

With better tools, more information and additional perspective, leaders can help “soothe” the system and help staff hear each other’s needs. We know from our work that there are valuable approaches and techniques leaders can take back and use with their staff and board and clients. They just often need a little support in times like these.

Coaching can also help leaders become more aware of the opportunities inherent in their challenges. Often during big and emotional changes, people dig their heels in deeper; they become even more entrenched in their current positions and mindset-just at the time it’s most important to be flexible and open. It’s easier to create necessary movement when you have a working framework and best practices from the best thinkers on the topic of organizational change.

What are the ground conditions you need to meet in order to help a system move through a change in a sustainable way? … What should you expect along the way? … What’s important for leadership to be modeling, so that the organization can be most stable?

Answers to questions like these provide a roadmap for leaders to use to build new strategies that reflect current circumstances. Through coaching and training sessions leaders get the “big picture view” of change because what’s often missing (among a million moving organizational parts) is a larger strategy for leading the change process: why they’re doing what they’re doing and how they’re unfolding change within their organization.

Right now, there are a lot of organizations scaling back in size or absorbing programs released by other organizations or contemplating mergers or shutting doors and looking for others to whom they can literally give their programs. They are laying off staff, and employees who are staying are being tasked with different or additional responsibilities.

All these events are tangible changes that can be examined and addressed. We are passionate about showing leaders how to utilize new ideas, tools and perspectives and apply them directly to your specific situation-capturing the strengths of your staff and organization in the process.