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.

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.

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.