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.

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.

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.