Read time: 4.20 mins
Emotional Intelligence for Leaders: Setting the Emotional Tone
As a leader in the workplace, it’s important to be conscious of how your emotions impact the productivity and creativity of your teams. Instead of acting as a thermometer that simply gauges the emotional temperature of individuals and reacts accordingly, leaders should serve as thermostats and set the emotional tone that is best suited to the purpose of the meeting.
Transcript
I want you to think back to a professional situation where a manager, a mentor, or a leader brought in a set of emotions to an interaction or to a project that were very productive for everybody involved. It may be that everybody was really stressed out about a situation, and then the manager came in and said some things and behaved in some ways that really helped everybody calm down.
I also want you to think about the opposite. Think about a previous professional situation where a mentor or a manager brought in a set of emotions into an interaction or a project that made things much worse for everybody. Maybe everybody was doing kind of okay, but then the manager came in with a lot of stress and it just made everybody completely freak out.
So, think about these two types of scenarios: one in which a manager or a leader brought in a set of positive emotions that really helped everybody, and a situation where the opposite happened.
Now, let’s do a little bit of a thought experiment: has it ever happened to you that you’re driving in your car or you’re walking around and then somebody either cuts you off, or does something that startles you or surprises you. And let’s imagine that that intervention, maybe merited a two on the emotional scale, in terms of a response. Has it ever happened to you that even though the stimulus merits a two, you actually responded with an eight. Where is that extra six coming from? We can tell ourselves a story that we are responding with an eight because this idiot did this one thing. But if we’re truly honest with ourselves, we are bringing an extra six to the table.
And the question is, how aware are we of how often we’re bringing that extra six – where that extra six is coming from? Is it even associated with this thing? Or is this something that I’m carrying from a previous interaction, or another set of things that I’m carrying with me all the time? What is it that we bring to the table that is an extra set of emotions that are not really part of what’s actually happening? It’s just something that we are adding to the mix. Your emotional states, what you bring to the table, are going to determine the emotional tone for the people around you. You have no choice about that. What you do get to choose is how aware, how mindful, how purposeful you want to be on which emotions you want to bring to the table.
So, one way to think about this is, as a leader, do you want to be a thermometer or a thermostat? Well, obviously its difference is that a thermometer will just measure the temperature that’s around us. And that will include all the emotions that everybody’s bringing to the table, including yours. And you can be a thermometer and you can react to that. And you can just say like, well, things are really heated up here. Or you can be a thermostat, where we use the thermostat to regulate the temperature, to create the emotional tone that is most productive and best suited for what we want to do as a team right now. Your ability to be a thermostat, rather than simply a thermometer, requires you to first be completely aware on what it is that you’re actually bringing to the table. Second, have the ability to sense what is happening around you. How are people feeling? And how aligned is it with what we actually want to accomplish together, so that you can then decide to intervene and move the emotional tone of the group in one direction or the other.