Tag: emotional self-awareness

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The Lasting Benefits of a Retreat or Pilgrimage

Fancy adverts for retreats offering yoga by oceans or a fine wine often grace the pages of magazines on mindfulness and wellness. Then there are the less advertised retreats, those done in silence or without the luxuries of a 5-star restaurant or indoor plumbing.

Regardless of our preferences or current goals, time away from our “regular” lives is meant to help us reset and renew in some manner. In a world that doesn’t stop moving, our brains are constantly under fire, and as we now know, chronic stressors can have long-term implications on the way our brains function, our emotional balance, and our capacity to maintain healthy relationships. While some retreats allow participants to delve deeper into self-reflection, and others are meant more for pleasure, they all help us press the pause button and find space.

Retreats may provide us with physical refuge, but they can also serve as liminal spaces. Liminal, from the Latin root limen meaning “threshold,” refers to the notion of the in-between, a place of transition, the after-the-before and before-the-next. Liminal spaces generally refer to those places and even states of mind in which we feel uncomfortable. The sense of uncomfortableness often stems from a place of uncertainty. For many of us, uncertainty can give us great anxiety. For many obvious reasons, we find security in knowing what we’ll be doing, who we’ll be with, and where we’ll be living. We are creatures of habit and often squirm when we have to endure upheavals, whether big – a job loss, divorce, relocation, or small – ever get upset because your regular coffee shop runs out of your preferred roast? However, these transitional times require us to sit in the discomfort because, well, we have no other option. And it is often during this discomfort and in these spaces that we find growth.

“While some retreats allow participants to delve deeper into self-reflection, and others are meant more for pleasure, they all help us press the pause button and find space.”

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People have sought out such spaces for thousands of years in search of meaning and purpose. One such liminal space is the famous Camino de Santiago, the Way of St. James. Rare would be one who has walked this Catholic pilgrimage who was not changed in some capacity. While there are many paths to Santiago, the most popular is the Camino Frances, an 800-km walk from St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in southern France to Santiago in western Spain. Several years ago, I spent 30 days walking the Way, carrying with me everything I needed, food notwithstanding. For 30 days, I woke up at 4:30am and walked until I was tired. For 30 days, I kept my cell phone in my pocket for emergencies and occasional check-ins. For 30 days, I met pilgrims from all over the world walking for different reasons: honoring religion, recovering from divorce, celebrating beating cancer, sightseeing, adventure. Whatever the reason, each pilgrim entered a physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual liminal space of their own.

Such liminal spaces force us to confront ourselves, our thoughts, and our emotions and to remove the façade many of us carry. One conversation I will never forget was with a young Dane, who was a good foot taller than me. As we walked, he said to me, “you’re only the second American I have met who truly seems happy.” He articulated his observation that as a generalization, he found Europeans more willing to be upfront about their struggles, and the Camino was a way for them to confront their transitional discomfort. On the other hand, he found Americans were generally eager to express a mirage of happiness and upbeat engagement that crumbled as the Camino became not the escape they hoped for, but a journey that required them be naked with themselves.

The Camino, like many liminal spaces, can leave its pilgrims feeling unsettled, whether because we wished we paid more attention in Spanish class, or that we didn’t have ten pairs of shoes to choose from, or that we weren’t really sure where we’d be sleeping that night until we stopped for the day. Much of this journey is done in silence for hours, and for some, its entirety. During this time, we are alone with nature and our thoughts and for many, it is the first time to be so, and it can be uncomfortable.

Pilgrimages and retreats can be extremely challenging for those of us with an underlying mental condition and even those who do not have a regular practice in mindfulness. For example, there are reports every year of tourists to Jerusalem, a rather powerful liminal space, who exhibit symptoms of the Jerusalem Syndrome, a disorder whereby individuals who had no previous signs of psychosis suffer from an acute episode when there. On the Camino, while not common, it was not unheard of for pilgrims to seek refuge in a bottle after a few days because the discomfort of silence and the space was overwhelming. Sadly, there is an increasing number of pilgrims who bring their iPhones to drown out their inner voices with other people’s noises.

“Liminal spaces force us to confront ourselves, our thoughts, and our emotions and to remove the façade many of us carry.”

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Fortunately, mindfulness and emotional intelligence can help us to seek out liminal experiences for their capacity to help us grow and transform. When we are able to bring a greater awareness of our emotional states, we become more willing to step into physical and mental places of discomfort. We are less susceptible to external and internal triggers, we ruminate less, and we worry less about the unknown. Mindfulness and emotional balance allows us sit in presence because we are less preoccupied with what happened or what will happen. By expanding our awareness – and awareness of awareness – we can be more readily available to act with wisdom and discernment and to listen to our inner voices with kindness, without being swept away by their cacophony.

When we build our emotional intelligence, particularly though mindfulness meditation, we build our capacity for resilience and balance, allowing us to better manage the subtle and the tumultuous disruptions of life. As Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson wrote on the impact of meditation in Altered Traits, “the after is the before for the next during.” In other words, after we meditate, we can make long-lasting internal changes, which alters how we were before the meditation, setting a new baseline before the next practice. With repeated practice, we find strength in stillness and courage in balance.

This practice doesn’t require us to go on a 30-day pilgrimage or a mountain retreat. While those can be valuable and transformative experiences, we can also sit in our bedrooms to enter liminal spaces with awareness and a beginner’s mind, enhancing our ability to embrace life’s constant uncertainties with curiosity and presence.

“Mindfulness and emotional intelligence can help us to seek out liminal experiences for their capacity to help us grow and transform.”

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Recommended Resources:

Altered Traits audio cover

Interested in learning more about mindfulness and the science behind it? Listen to Daniel Goleman read his book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, written in collaboration with neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson. This audiobook, available as a download or on a reusable USB drive, is the perfect accompaniment to your commute or workout.

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What is Emotional Balance? (And How to Cultivate It)

Emotional Balance, also referred to as Emotional Self-Control, is a competency under the Self-Management domain. People with strengths in Emotional Balance find ways to manage their impulses and emotions, even in stressful situations.

Developing Emotional Balance begins with a solid foundation of Self-Awareness, the heart of Emotional Intelligence. Self-Awareness enables us to recognize our emotions as they occur and the ways in which our emotions impact all aspects of our lives. Without Self-Awareness, we remain on autopilot and fall back on unquestioned behavioral responses and routines. In order to affect behavioral change, we must first become attuned to our emotions, and the ways in which they positively and negatively inform our lives.

Focus, a foundational skill for Emotional Intelligence, is intrinsic to a range of competencies, including Self-Awareness and Emotional Balance. In the workplace, leaders with strengths in Emotional Self-Awareness cultivate focused teams that are engaged and motivated. While there are several types of focus, including the ability to focus on others, which requires Empathy, and big picture focus, which is related to Organizational Awareness, inner focus is the most essential to the development of Emotional Balance.

“In order to affect behavioral change, we must first become attuned to our emotions, and the ways in which they positively and negatively inform our lives.”

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Mindfulness or presence of mind, like inner focus, is condition of Emotional Balance. Mindfulness is that aspect of mind that acts as an inner rudder, alerting us to when we’ve deviated from our path in the moment. For example, if we are aware of a bad habit we have, like interrupting others, it is our presence of mind that catches us on the spot before we interrupt someone, sending us a subtle reminder or cue not to interrupt. Practices like meditation with focus, body scan, and self-reflection enable us to strengthen our concentration and awareness. By routinely tuning-in to our emotions and utilizing practices that familiarize ourselves with patterns in our reactions, we can cultivate Emotional Balance.

In this way, self-awareness, focus, and mindfulness serve as the three, interconnected skills that enable us to exercise Emotional Balance. While it may seem intimidating to develop each of these skills, their interdependence makes it easier to turn progress in one area into positive development across all three. Similarly, just as Self-Awareness and Emotional Balance are foundational to Emotional Intelligence, they can open doors to strengthening our Emotional Intelligence across the suite of twelve EI competencies.

“Self-awareness, focus, and mindfulness serve as the three, interconnected skills that enable us to exercise Emotional Balance.”

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Recommended Resources:

If you would like to learn more about the fundamentals of Emotional Intelligence, our series of primers focuses on the twelve Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competencies, which include Emotional Self-Awareness, Emotional Self-Control, and Empathy. The primers are written by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, co-creators of the Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competency Model, along with a range of colleagues, thought-leaders, researchers, and leaders with expertise in the various competencies. Explore the full list of primers by topic, or get the complete collection!

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How to Build Self-Management to Change Deeply Ingrained Behaviors

Several years ago I decided that I had enough personal baggage getting in my way to merit going to therapy.  It was a wonderful and challenging experience, therapy.  I had some major epiphanies about where some of my “less functional” behaviors come from. One of these behaviors—being over-critical of and micro-managing my kids—was one that I felt real motivation to change.  Unfortunately, despite what felt like life-changing new awareness about my parenting behavior, I struggled to self-manage when they didn’t clear their breakfast dishes or borrowed my clothes without asking.

Therapy is just one path that leads to epiphanies about ourselves in our lives, and if we are present and aware we see these moments as real gifts. Unfortunately, those gifts often fade into the background of our lives once the sessions are over.  Therein lies the hard truth about self-awareness and self-management:  building new self-awareness (even rock-your-world self-awareness) does not in itself change our behavior.

It takes deliberate focus and supported skill building, informed by self-awareness, to shift ingrained, routinized, emotionally-laden behaviors.  

This is the work of self-management: building the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral muscles to modulate our thoughts, emotions, and reactions to the triggers that lead to ingrained behaviors.   This change doesn’t happen overnight after our big epiphanies.  To truly change our behavior we must self-manage in our trigger moments, over and over and over, until we replace old, ingrained habits with new, ingrained habits.  Self-management is a long-distance race.  And the race is winnable!

“Self-management is the work of building intellectual, emotional, and behavioral muscles to modulate triggers that lead to ingrained behaviors.”

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Five Ways to Develop Self-Management

1. Do the pre-requisite self-awareness work

My coaching colleague Michele Nevarez wisely says that, “we arrive at where we aim.”  Before we can effectively go after our self-limiting behaviors, we have to understand where it is we are actually aiming, or what we are really trying to self-manage.  This is because emotional self-management is more about managing what causes our behaviors than the behaviors themselves.  Doing self-awareness work means uncovering the triggers, emotions, and self-limiting thoughts that lead to our behaviors.  Our target is to self manage at the point of trigger; before the behavior itself.  We want to head off our emotional chain reaction that leads to the behavior.  Some of us who are naturally self-reflective can do this work independently if we ask the right questions.  Most of us will need the help of a thoughtful friend, coach, or therapist to bring these triggers, emotions, and thoughts to the surface.

2. Plan for it

Once we know what our trigger is, we can plan for it.  If I know that my adolescent son will yell at his sister every time she is remotely critical of his outfit, I can plan for how I react.  I can plan my response, verbatim.  I can plan a logical and fair series of interventions if they escalate.  I can even plan to leave the room and put on my headphones.  If I can be aware enough in the moment and remember to follow my plan, then that may sometimes be enough to shift a pattern of unproductive behavior.

3. Access your power

I believe that we all have the power inside of us to not only manage our triggers but become resonant leaders in our own right.  This power comes from our values and our deeply-held beliefs.  We can learn how to access this power in the micro moment of our triggers to block our self-limiting emotional chain reactions and create the space for a productive path.  Questions we can ask ourselves to discover that power include:

  • Why do I care about this behavior or situation?
  • What do I believe about what is right and true about this?

Once we identify our deeply held belief that connects to our triggering context, we can articulate a phrase or a mantra that we can access in the moment—such as “my kids will build character and social skills if I let them work this out on their own.”  It will help us to practice accessing our beliefs with a partner in a simulated moment of trigger to build this muscle.

self-management emotional intelligence

4. Cultivate your inner coach (the angel on your shoulder)

Remember the cartoons of our youth, in which a devil and an angel would appear on a character’s shoulder at a key decision-making moment?  With our ingrained habits, we have an oversized devil and undersized angel on our shoulders.  Cultivating our inner coach is essentially building up that angel.  What can this coach say to you at your moment of trigger to remind you how you plan to manage your emotions and story?  How can that coach help you remember why you care about this behavior, and what you aspire to become?  If you can answer these questions in meaningful ways to yourself, and practice, then your angel/coach will likely be there for you in that split second of need.

5. Create structures for reflection and support to sustain practice over time

Again, changing ingrained emotional reactions, stories, and behaviors is a long-distance race.  We have to practice over and over to rewire our brains, literally growing new neural highways and building new behavioral muscles.  If we do not build structures and supports around this practice, we will likely lose focus amidst the other urgent day-to-day demands of our work and our lives.  Coaches are great supports because we not only keep your eye on the ball, but help you to continue to build new awareness and self-management strategies over time.  Peer coaches or “change partners” can be effective if you both truly commit to a long-term relationship and stick to an effective system of reflection, revision, recommitment, and practice.  Those of us who are particularly reflective and disciplined can even do this work on our own, but even this group will need some external structures (like scheduled, sacred self-meetings) to make it happen.

With the right skill-building, supports, and self-discipline, we can build new awareness and change deeply ingrained self-limiting behaviors over time.  In other words, we can become more emotionally intelligent. I can think of no better reward for a long distance race.

“Cultivate your inner coach and create structures for self-reflection in order to better self-manage in work and life.” 

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Recommended Reading:

Our new series of primers focuses on the 12 Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competencies, including Emotional Self-Awareness, Adaptability, Emotional Self-Control, Teamwork, and Inspirational Leadership.

The primers are written by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis, co-creators of the Emotional and Social Intelligence Leadership Competency Model, along with a range of colleagues, thought-leaders, researchers, and leaders with expertise in the various competencies—including the author of this article, Matthew Taylor. See the full list of primers by topic, or get the complete collection!

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How Meditation Fuels Emotionally Intelligent Leaders

meditation and emotional intelligence

Not many of my readers know this, but long before I started writing about emotional intelligence and leadership effectiveness, I studied meditation. I started back in my college days, and found daily meditation calmed my undergraduate jitters and helped me focus better. To get a scientific look at what I had experienced, I did my doctoral research in psychology at Harvard University on how meditation might help us be less reactive to stress.

Back then, there were but two scientific studies of meditation I could point to. Today, there are more than 6,000. This past year or so, working with my friend since grad school, Professor Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we used rigorous standards to review all that research. We share the strongest findings in our book, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body. While 99 percent of the studies failed to meet these standards, about 60 – one percent – were first-rate. They make a convincing case for the positive, lasting effects of meditation.

Meditation and Emotional Intelligence

While continuing my interest in meditation, over the past 20+ years, of course, I’ve studied and written about emotional intelligence and its powerful role in high performance and leadership. My colleague, Richard Boyatzis of Case Western Reserve University, and I developed a model of emotional and social intelligence that centers around twelve learned and learnable competencies. Now when people ask me how to develop those competencies, my response often includes the power of meditation to strengthen emotional intelligence.

It’s not that meditation makes you expert in all twelve emotional intelligence competencies. Not at all. Exhibiting these at a high level takes specific learning, particular to each competence. But meditation has some general impacts that can help upgrade several of these leadership skills.

“Meditation helps elevate emotional intelligence competencies, which in turn elevates leadership ability.”

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For example:

Emotional Self-Awareness supports development of all of the emotional intelligence competencies, simply because it allows us a way to monitor and evaluate what we do and how we think and feel. Mindfulness meditation cultivates emotional self-awareness, helping us develop the mental ability to pause and notice feelings and thoughts rather than immediately reacting. Seeing our thoughts as just thoughts, and feelings as just feelings gives us a platform for choosing more skillfully how we react, or to change for the better what we habitually do.

Emotional Self-Control means that you are in charge of your disruptive reactions, rather than your feelings controlling what you do. I’ve written extensively about the executive centers of our brain (the prefrontal cortex) and the fight-or-flight emotional centers (and their trigger, the amygdala). Research now shows that regular practice of mindfulness meditation builds the pathways between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex so that the calming, thoughtful influence of the prefrontal cortex can curb the knee-jerk reactions of the amygdala.

Empathy – tuning into and reading accurately how others feel – helps us manage our relationships. While emotional self-awareness helps you know yourself, empathy means being able to understand the thoughts and feelings of the people around you. My new book Altered Traits reviews several studies that show certain kinds of meditation enhance empathy – for example, just eight hours of a form of meditation known as loving-kindness or compassion meditation has been shown to strengthen our mental brain’s circuitry for empathy.

Conflict Management
Conflicts big and small are inevitable in work and in life. Being able to understand different perspectives and effectively work toward finding common ground is an essential skill for leaders at all levels of organizations. The building blocks of skillful conflict management include the other three competencies I mention above. Before we can manage conflict effectively, we need to recognize our own disruptive feelings and manage them. We also need to understand the feelings and perspectives of others. Just as mindfulness meditation supports development of the skills for knowing our own feelings and controlling them, those skills enhance our ability to manage conflict.

“Emotionally intelligent leaders have self-awareness, self-control, empathy, and can manage conflict.”

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Emotional intelligence means being skilled at a variety of competencies. Meditation alone will not make you excel in these skill sets, but it can help. To become adept at the competencies, get a strong foundation by first learning to become aware, to focus, to interact with others in a constructive and meaningful way. These abilities are exactly what meditation helps to cultivate.

Recommended Reading:

Altered Traits audio coverAltered Traits is the newest book by bestselling author Daniel Goleman and neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson. Through thoughtful analysis of countless studies, the authors offer the truth about what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it. At the heart of what Goleman and Davidson aim to impress upon readers and listeners is that beyond the pleasant states mental exercises can produce, the real payoffs are the lasting personality traits that can result.

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Influence: A Cornerstone for Effective Leadership

influence-leadership-emotional-intelligence

Influence is one of the competencies in the Emotional and Social Intelligence (ESI) model developed by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis. Not surprisingly, it has been empirically linked to increased leadership performance, but understanding exactly how to wield this capability is far less obvious.

Leaders who have developed the Influence competency are effective at using multiple approaches to produce outcomes, such as:

  • Appealing to the self-interest of others
  • Cultivating alliances with key people
  • Engaging in discussion that leads to support
  • Building consensus

Influential leaders also possess a stronger ability to capture the attention of others, and both anticipate and adapt to responses or objections.

How Influence Contributes to Leadership Effectiveness

Influence interrelates with empathy and other ESI competencies, and also requires strength in the ESI domains of self-awareness, self-management and social awareness. To be effective, a leader needs the capabilities and insights provided by these strengths, since without them they will struggle with identifying how to be of service to others. They will also be ineffective at determining whether or not their attempts at communication are being received as intended.

“Before you can influence others, develop empathy and self-awareness for quality leadership.”

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Successful leaders realize that influence is critical to their effectiveness. For example, those who have studied leadership know that influence forms the basis for an academic definition for leadership recognized by many scholars: “Leadership is the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives” (Gary Yukl, Leadership in Organizations (5th ed.) (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002), 8.).

The leaders I interviewed in my 2016 study – on leadership, mindfulness, and emotional intelligence – linked influence to developing the ability to accurately identify the needs and motivations of others. An example includes the HR head for a leading global manufacturing firm who developed a working understanding of how influence relates to workplace results, saying “…when you really relate to another person, you’re able to gather a lot more information about how to influence the situation, or influence the outcome,” and “…you can connect with them on different levels and therefore influence them better.”

Effective leaders also realize that subordinates and peers are more productive and loyal when they act out of their own choice rather than being ordered or pressured. As a result, they focus on developing their ability to identify opportunities for mutually beneficial working arrangements, which also excludes behavior that may be perceived as self-serving, or manipulative. On the contrary, discussion of the way in which mindfulness contributed to influence indicated participants’ realization that sincere interest in fulfilling others’ needs was an effective basis for becoming more influential.

“Sincere interest in fulfilling others’ needs is an effective basis for becoming more influential.” 

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How to Become More Influential

Keep in mind that coworkers are typically worried about being left in bad situations by those they depend on. This means that the trust-based aspect of influence must be developed over time. It is built upon a foundation of quality interpersonal interactions, and consistent delivery of mutual value. Therefore, authentic, timely, and highly professional follow-through on commitments are a cornerstone of the Influence competency.

When considering ways to strengthen your ability to influence others it’s also important to focus on the point that leadership effectiveness requires the participation of others. From that standpoint it helps to monitor your interpersonal interactions to ensure that you are demonstrating professional competence and integrity. This includes understanding the individual and organizational values that others base their judgements upon, which I explore in my article How to Tune In to the Unspoken Rules of an Organization.

With this as a starting point there are some simple questions you can consistently ask yourself to help you stay focused on becoming influential:

  • Why might others think you are insincere and how can this be addressed?
  • Do you always follow-up on your commitments and fulfill your promises completely?
  • What skills, experiences and attributes can you demonstrate that are important to others?
  • How can you regularly evaluate your answers to the above through impartial feedback?

You should also spend time reflecting on past outcomes that were unsatisfactory. You can use the previous questions to learn from these experiences and identify opportunities to become more influential should similar circumstances arise in the future.

If you are intent on improving your ability to influence others, you must remain aware of the fact that influence often only exists when others have confidence in you. The cooperative nature of this equation makes the quality of interpersonal relationships even more significant. For this reason, developing influence will be aided by additional attention to empathy, emotional self-control, organizational awareness, conflict management, and adaptability.

“You can only influence others, when they have trust and confidence in your leadership.”

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Recommended Reading:

In Influence: A Primer, Daniel Goleman, Peter Senge and colleagues introduce Emotional Intelligence and dive deep into the Influence competency. In a relatively short read, the authors illustrate the valuable skills needed to guide others in realizing the value of your ideas and point of view – not for the sake of exerting blind command, but to collaborate towards a positive vision with empathy and awareness.

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Leader’s Perspective: What Separates The Best from the Rest in Leadership

 

What inspires us to be better leaders? Was it a particular boss, a powerful article or a significant experience? For me, the answer is relatively simple. Taking time to reflect on people I have worked for and with as well as countless other experiences as both a manager and a parent, I can single out the most important lesson I have learned about leadership.

I was ten years old and my paternal grandfather shared a lesson with me from his time in the U.S. Marine Corps. What he shared was simple, easy to understand and has stuck with me throughout my career in leadership. The lesson was that to lead a group of people, one only needed to know four things. He said that if I got these four things right, whoever I was leading would “follow me into the jaws of Hell!” This painted a vivid picture for a ten-year-old and is probably why I’ve not only remembered it all these years, but have put them to practice and have come to know first hand that he was right.

My Grandfather’s 4 leadership musts:

  1. Make sure my team has dry socks
  2. Make sure they have full bellies
  3. Treat them with Respect
  4. Above all, treat them as Equals

This may be sound advice for a team of Marines on the move, but for business?

Dry socks and full bellies

Let’s break it down. Ensuring your team has “dry socks” and “full bellies” is an easy concept to translate to the world of business. Let’s assume dry socks and full bellies are surrogates for basic needs, safety, comfort, etc. This may take different forms in different business environments, but essentially we are making sure people get paid sufficiently, have a decent environment to work in, etc. It is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in practical terms. In my experience most businesses are able to address these basic human needs, but by themselves these aren’t enough.

Respect

The third item the Colonel instructed was “treat them with respect”. What does this mean? In many hierarchical structures it is often those at the top of the hierarchy who demand “respect” from those at the bottom. They may develop a sort of begrudging politeness and respect for their position but not the depth of respect that is the hallmark of good leadership.

What we are talking about here is the difference between “treating someone with respect” due to their position in the hierarchy and “having respect for someone” because they are fellow humans.

On the surface this sounds self evident, but in my experience fewer leaders/managers are able to embrace this step than the first two. Why is that? I don’t believe that it is because these managers don’t care about their employees. I think they care, but maybe about the wrong things. Often they see the team as “their” employees, and co-workers are often seen as tools to get the jobs done. Ironically, most managers have been the employee at some point and quickly upon assuming the mantle of management they forget what it was like to be in the shoes they just vacated. Additionally, some managers try to keep a distance from their employees knowing that they may have to discipline them in the future. They may also worry that these employees might one day decide to leave the organization and move on in search of brighter pastures.

The mantra becomes “don’t get too close, keep it professional” and is achieved by maintaining your distance by not connecting. I don’t think that’s what the old Marine was getting at. He’d lost plenty of soldiers to combat, reassignment, the end of their enlistment, or post-war reductions in force. I think he was getting at this essential idea””treating your team with respect requires two conditions to be present: self-awareness and connection.

“As a leader, treating your team with respect requires self-awareness and connection.”

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Developing self-awareness of what motivates you, what triggers you, and a clear sense of your emotional and physical boundaries is critical. If you know what’s yours, you won’t be inclined to take on another’s baggage. If you are self-aware, you are likely cognizant of personal work you need to do and similarly are accepting if not comfortable with some of your vulnerabilities or shortcomings. This makes it possible for you to lead with confidence, identifying the qualities you need on your team and allowing those with skills you may not have to step up and participate fully. You don’t need to have all the answers””as long as you are aware of this and don’t see it as a flaw, but rather the way it is.

When you are able to know and respect yourself, you can respect others as individuals. This is an essential quality in good managers and leaders alike. It’s not something you are born with but something you have to work to develop. It necessitates stepping away from the ego-centered label of who you are and where you fit in the hierarchy and into the reality of who you are. As Steve Miller sang, “The question to everyone’s answer is usually asked from within.”

Equality, Even In Hierarchy

In the context of the qualities of leadership outlined by the Colonel, connection is just what it sounds like: knowing the people you work with and letting them know you. Caring about them as more than simply tools to accomplish the task, but as whole people with hopes and dreams, imperfections, joys and sorrows. You need to have enough confidence to show them who you are, sharing that you are more than just the boss, you are a human being who also has hopes and dreams, even imperfections.

In a business hierarchy this can be a challenge. As you open up and show your vulnerability, your caring, and your humanity, you will start to notice little things. You learn about people’s lives, and yes, this makes it all the more difficult if one day you have to lay them off or fire them. This is the whole point of connection! People matter and when you have to let someone go, it makes sense that you would feel some loss. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t let them go, but in feeling that grief you know that they are important to you as people, not just as tools. When you find yourself grieving the person, not necessarily the job they were doing, you have arrived at the fourth stage. You experience equality with them, not in the hierarchical sense but in the true sense of being equal as a human being. This in no way undermines the authority of the hierarchy, but it cements a personal connection that can be every bit as valuable in terms of your leadership as your position in the organizational structure.

When you show up with self-awareness and connect, people will gladly follow your leadership. It may not happen immediately: your very position in the hierarchy makes you someone to fear. You have the power to hire and fire. You can misuse your authority. I think the last piece of this is something the Colonel didn’t specifically state, but is implicit in treating our teams with respect and as equals, and that is trust.

Your job won’t make you trustworthy. There is no mantle of trust that will be conferred upon you based on your position in the hierarchy.

This is something you have to earn through your own self-awareness and willingness to connect authentically with your team. You are going to have to show your team and prove to them that you are self-aware, willing to connect and can be trusted. When this happens, you will have formed a team that will have your back, as you have theirs. A team that is not only capable of, but a team that will perform great things and in so doing with metaphorically “follow you into the jaws of Hell”.

“Leadership advice from a Colonel: dry socks, full bellies, respect, and equality.”

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Recommended Reading:

Learn more about the intersection between leadership and emotional intelligence in our new Primer series, featuring Daniel Goleman, Richard Davidson, Peter Senge, and other thoughtful contributors. Primers available are:

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Coaching Leaders to Value and Manage Their Organizational Webs

 

DeLea is like a spider, aware of even the most subtle vibrations across her web.   She is able to predict how emotional energy will travel across her organizational web of stakeholders when she makes a leadership decision.

When one of her senior managers denies her proposal to implement a progressive reading practice in her school, she positively engages her powerful allies across her web to build support for the new practice.  Meanwhile, she re-engages her manager at the level of values and beliefs that she knows they both hold dear.  As a result, the no turns into an enthusiastic yes in weeks.  On her own team, DeLea meets individually with key influencers about the new practice to hear their point of view and subtly appeal to what they value.  When it comes time to formally make her pitch to her team, many strong voices in the room voice their enthusiastic support.   Weeks later when DeLea hears secondhand about a veteran teacher voicing frustration about the practice in the staff lounge, she knows exactly which teachers, support staff, and parents to engage to head off a potential setback. She also engages the teacher in question with the just-right blend of affirmation and high-candor feedback to begin shifting his resistance.

Isabel, a leader at another school, is like a fly caught in a web.  She skillfully builds the schedule and transition protocols for her school’s extended day program makeover.  However, it never occurs to her to question how people will feel about the new program.  She never asks anyone for feedback or shares any details about the plan until unveiling it in a Friday staff meeting. On Monday she is surprised to hear gossip about how she treats people and how arrogant she is to just “take over” the extended day program.   Hurt and disoriented, Isabel just didn’t see this coming, and she feels like she’s been ambushed.   Isabel has a new appreciation for those who say that leadership is a lonely path.

What separates DeLea and Isabel is organizational awareness. 

DeLea values her team’s emotional energy.  She reads people, trusts her gut, and actively seeks information about people’s beliefs before she acts.   Isabel doesn’t value her team’s emotional energy and so does none of the things that DeLea does to guide her actions.

How do you teach Isabel to be like DeLea?

“The most respected and effective leaders develop a sense of organizational awareness.”

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The first step is to build Isabel’s awareness that the web exists, and that her success depends on her understanding how it works.  Expect resistance!  Leaders who aren’t aware of the web and don’t value it tend to believe that small interactions don’t matter, and that people won’t find out about what they say behind closed doors.

Some take a values stand against caring about the web.  They won’t stoop to paying attention to gossip.  People should just be adults and get over their own emotional reactions.   These leaders need help seeing the impact of the web on their ability to meet their goals.  Coaches can help leaders to unpack their webs by digging deep into a current or past challenge.  Isabel and I drew a web of relationships on a big piece of butcher paper on her wall.  We named the key players and interest groups on her team, and how they connected to each other.  We thought about each person or group individually in terms of what they valued, their relationships, and their power to either support or challenge progress toward Isabel’s goal.  As we worked, Isabel began to see how her actions created dissonance for her people, and how their reactions were actually consistent with what they valued. Isabel’s biggest a-ha: their actions are predictable!  Her resistance melted away as she began to see the power in predicting her team’s reactions and proactively engaging to avoid being ambushed.

Isabel and I then applied the web to moving forward towards her goal.  We began by identifying her supporters.  She was unpleasantly surprised to realize how few she had.  From there we identified which people or groups were most likely to become supporters with some effective engagement from Isabel.

The key to getting that engagement was Isabel’s ability to figure out what these people valued, and what they needed from her. 

“The key to organizational ability is to figure out what people value, and what they need. “

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One person valued his standing on the team.  He needed an apology, and to be consulted on the new model.   Another group worried about the impact of the new approach on families.  They needed Isabel to affirm this worry and collaborate with them to find a solution.  Isabel had no idea what several people or groups needed, and realized that she needed to go find out.

Next, we focused on the people in the web who were actively resisting the new system.  I supported Isabel to build some empathy for these people–to see the noble story they were likely telling themselves that justified their actions.  Then I helped her understand the tactics these folks were using to influence other stakeholders across the web.  Again, Isabel had to figure out what these people needed from her to move from resistance to motivation, or at least compliance.

As she brainstormed, Isabel was building new appreciation for the range of influencing strategies she needed to embrace to get her organizational web behind her initiative.

By the time we were done, Isabel had created a complex visual representation of her stakeholders and their values, power, and relationships.  While this was all done in the context of her after-school system, Isabel realized that she could apply most of this map–reactively or proactively–to other leadership challenges.  We continued to use this map, or create new ones, over time as Isabel continued to build her organizational awareness.   Happily, she is no longer the fly caught in her web, and is on her way to becoming the spider.

“Yes, you can coach leaders to develop organizational awareness and use it wisely.”

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Recommended reading:

Organizational awareness primerOur new primer series is written by Daniel Goleman, George Pitagorsky, and fellow thought leaders in the field of Emotional Intelligence and research. See our latest release: Organizational Awareness: A Primer for more insights on how this applies in leadership.

Additional primers include: