VIEW FROM THE C-SUITE: Why Does Self-Management Matter For Leaders?

View from the C-Suite with Joyce Grillo

Recently I witnessed a leader lash out at his staff in an outburst of frustration and anger. Needless to say, this did not have a positive effect on his team’s motivation and productivity. The business world is going through tough economic times. As pressure increases for leaders to navigate through on-going complexity, volatility and risk so does their level of anxiety. Leaders are unaware of how their mood and its resultant behaviors create a toxic environment that ultimately affects performance.

What is needed now more than ever are leaders who are self-aware and good at self-management – the ability to regulate their emotions. We need leaders who do not impulsively act on their disruptive feelings and emotions but who finds ways to channel bad moods and direct them in more constructive ways. Effective leaders choose their words carefully, avoid hasty judgments and step back to consider mitigating factors and ramifications. It is human nature to be in a bad mood. We all have those moments. However, emotionally intelligent leaders don’t let bad moods control them. They control their bad moods.

Why does self-management matter so much for leaders? People who are in touch with and can control their emotions create a climate of trust. Employees who work for such a person realize that they work for someone they can count on and whose behavior is consistent. This has a cascading effect to all employees. Calmness at the top means calmness at all levels leading to lower anxiety and higher productivity.

Needless to say, controlling disruptive impulses is essential to one’s ability to effectively lead others. So, how do leaders stay calm, think clearly and not be overwhelmed by anxiety? They do so by being aware of what triggers their emotions. One way to do this is by keeping a journal. This helps us to monitor our emotional upsets so we can prepare for them and not be caught unaware. I always recommend to clients that they spend a minimum of 15 minutes a day writing down their deepest feelings and emotions and understanding the consequences of acting on them. In other words, recall a situation when you lost control and then ask yourself: What or who was the trigger? What was the outcome? What could I do differently in the future?

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Another way is by receiving feedback from superiors, colleagues and direct reports. I had a client who received feedback from her staff that she was always in a bad mood on Monday mornings so they avoided her at that time. She literally bit their heads off if they came anywhere near her. She was unaware of her disruptive behavior until she received the feedback. The trigger for her was the end of the weekend. The outcome was alienating her staff and by being aware and modifying her behavior - do differently - she became more approachable. Ultimately, the more aware you are, the more in control you are.

Keeping a journal and receiving and acting on feedback work but requires reflective time built into each day. This isn’t always doable when you work 24/7. Companies are doing more with less and expecting their employees to continue to produce high quality results. Without building reflective time into your day you are at risk of not being in control of your own state of mind. A leader’s ability to regulate their moods is contagious and goes a long way to improving performance. If you can’t manage your emotions, it is likely that you can’t effectively manage for business results.

This is second in a series of articles on Emotional Intelligence. Stay tuned for next month’s article on Leadership and Motivation.

For more information contact me at Joyce@GrilloLeadership.com or visit my Web site www.GrilloLeadership.com.

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VIEW FROM THE C-SUITE: Why Does Self-Management Matter For Leaders?

THE STRESS OF SUCCESS: What's Stopping You?

The Stress of Success with Cifu Cinda Hocking

When you know what you are supposed to do for your business and think it should be done, yet it doesn’t get done, what is going on?

The number one reason we don’t do things is Low Desire. You may have great passion for the big picture mission of your business. You can envision it and see it in operation. However some of the day-to-day necessary, practical, and repetitive steps that are taken to get you there are decidedly not your passion. You may understand that these daily increments are important factors in building and maintaining business, but understanding alone does not make them happen. If you don’t like the activities and don’t want to do them, it is very easy to find reasons not to. Without motivation, it is easier to procrastinate, creatively avoid them and generally try to find ways to do everything else but give time and attention to daily maintenance and operations tasks.

In order to move forward and integrate these tasks into your business, you need to drill down to the essence of WHY you don’t like to do them. We all have loads of excuses, and we all have our share of laziness, but the core issue most often is that we don’t like doing something because it either make us uncomfortable or we find it boring. If you sit for a moment honestly looking at feelings of discomfort or boredom, what do you find? We don’t tend to do things unless we believe they are important AND we feel we have the ability to do (or learn to do) them. So, if the thought of a task makes you feel heavy, weighted down, or anxious – these are clues that you don’t find them important enough or don’t feel confident enough in your ability to perform them adequately.

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Not Sure It Is Important – when we think a business task isn’t important this can be because we are experiencing conflicting priorities. We see there is so much to do, so we take the most urgent and emergent and save the daily tasks…until they become urgent and emergent! Also, very creative or idea-based business owners can lose sight of the importance of operations and maintenance tasks because they often have more global and fewer linear/sequential skills.

Lack of Confidence in Skills – when we are better at the other tasks in our business, or doing the other tasks provides more immediate feedback/results that boost our self-esteem, that’s where we are going to focus our energy. If we are not sure we really understand the daily tasks, we may have a hard time asking for help, or feel that we should know how - and the fact that we don’t is embarrassing.

In order to truly get a handle on our business, we need to step away from rebelling against, withdrawing from or getting out of control towards the things that make us uncomfortable or bored. Instead, we need to spend time face-to-face with the feelings that the tasks bring up in us. This is challenging because we would rather not feel them! There may be better methods and formats to complete the dreaded tasks, better times of day for us, and better skills we could develop to tackle them. However, we won’t truly be able to embrace those unless we examine our true reasons for not doing the tasks in the first place.

Cinda Hocking, LMSW
Internal Energy Plus Consultant and Lifestyle Counselor
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THE STRESS OF SUCCESS: What's Stopping You?

VIEW FROM THE C-SUITE: Leadership and Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

View from the C-Suite with Joyce Grillo

We often hear people say, “Joe must be high in EQ.” Or, “ Mary’s low in EQ.”

But what do we really know about emotional intelligence (EQ)? Why is it important to a leader’s effectiveness and can it be learned? This article is the first in a series of articles that will explore these questions as well as the connection between EQ and leadership. We will begin by focusing on one of the core components of EQ – self-awareness.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

EQ is the social equivalent of IQ. According to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence, there are five components of EQ. The first three components of EQ are all about managing oneself. The last two are about managing relationships with others.

Self-Awareness – the ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, and drives, as well as their effect on others.

Self-Regulation – the ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods.

Motivation – a passion to work for reasons that go beyond money or status.

Empathy – the ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people.

Social Skill - the proficiency in being persuasive and managing relationships and building networks.

What Is The Connection Between Leadership and EQ?

In my work as a leadership consultant and coach to executives for the last 20 years, I have seen first hand how EQ has played a critical role in what makes some successful and others derail. As you go up the corporate ladder, your technical skills – what you were initially hired for – become less important and your EQ becomes more important. This poses a challenge for those leaders who rely only on their “smarts” to get to the C-suite.

Why do technical skills become less important over time? In order to be truly effective a leader must know who they are and how to stay calm in a crisis. Their agenda is not personal and because they are self-aware they understand what makes people tick and use that to inspire and motivate people to change. All of these are components of EQ.

In one study conducted by Goleman of highly effective leaders, intellect, cognitive skills and IQ were rated important but emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important for jobs at all levels. We know that effective leaders usually vary their style to fit the situation at hand. There is, however, one thing effective leaders have in common and that is that they all have a high degree of emotional intelligence.

Developing Self-Awareness

There is a reason that self-awareness is the first component of emotional intelligence. As Socrates said thousand of years ago, “know thyself.” Unless you first understand who you are or what I refer to as one’s “default style” it is difficult to understand others and score highly on the other four components of emotional intelligence.

Self-aware leaders are confident because self knowledge acts as an anchor to how they relate to the outside world. They are centered and honest with themselves being neither cynical nor unrealistic. Further, they know and accept their strengths, weaknesses, needs, drives, values and emotions. They know how their feelings affect them and others. For example, one leader I coached realized that the colleague he had the most difficulty relating to displayed behaviors similar to those of his father with whom he had a strained relationship. Knowing this enabled him to understand the impact this person had on his emotions and he was able to objectively step back and neutralize his frustration.

Can You Recognize EQ in Yourself?

The challenge for many is how can you recognize it in yourself? It’s difficult to measure your own EQ. There are ways of finding out where you are on the EQ scale. The least effective is through a self-assessment alone for obvious reasons. Over the years, I have been amazed at the number of people in mid-life who were lacking in self-awareness and the impact their behaviors had on others.

The most effective way is by combining a self-assessment and a 360-degree evaluation process where you get feedback on various components of EQ from your boss, colleagues and direct reports. When this is done and debriefed by someone independent such as a leadership coach, it assures a higher level of accuracy, which helps you develop in those areas where you are weak. If the company you work for does not offer 360 evaluations, then select some colleagues and friends who know you well and ask them to rate you on the components of EQ.

Can EQ Be Learned?

The goods news is EQ can be learned. Scientific and psychological and developmental research suggests that some people are born with certain amounts of EQ and that nurture also plays a role. What we do know is that it can be learned but not in a one day training program.

First you need to be aware of your behaviors and the impact you have on others and then be motivated to change. It is then that you are ready to begin breaking old behavioral habits and replacing them with new ones. This process of doing and reflecting takes time. Malcomb Gladwell in his new book, Outliers, makes the case that it takes 10,000 hours to reach a level of mastery at something. Trying these new behaviors at the outset may not be the most comfortable so you need to hang in there and not give up. It is only in experimentation and repetition that lasing behavioral change occurs.

It is important to keep in mind that building one’s EQ is not an event but a process that occurs over time. Although it may be painful, discovering how you rate on EQ is important if you want to be a good leader. I have also seen many situations where getting fired for a lack of EQ is a “wake-up” call for many to go on a journey of self-discovery. Don’t wait for that to happen. Given the right amount of motivation and the skills to change, most leaders can learn the emotional intelligence capabilities necessary to be successful.

Stay tuned for next month’s article on Leadership and Self-Regulation.

For more information contact me at joyce@grilloleadership.com.

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VIEW FROM THE C-SUITE: Leadership and Emotional Intelligence (EQ)